Weekly Primer: Voting Rights Advocates Win Victories In Lower Courts As SCOTUS Deals A Defeat

The Supreme Court dealt voting rights advocates another setback Monday in a decision that mainly sided with Texas in the latest battle in a years-long war over the state’s legislative maps. The Court mostly overturned a finding by a lower court that many of the districts — which Texas adopted based on an interim map approved by that court in 2012 as a temporary fix — were still impermissible gerrymanders. It also overturned the lower court’s finding that Texas hadn’t wiped away a discriminatory intent finding by adopting the interim map. The Supreme Court also on Monday sent back to a lower court a North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case. That means that the high court will not have another opportunity to hear arguments on partisan gerrymandering for several more months. Last week, however, voting rights advocates secured a high-profile victory in their challenge to Kansas Secretary of State’s Kris Kobach’s proof-of-citizenship voter-registration requirement when a district judge handed down her…