The Florida Legislature this week approved a new congressional map after just over 24 hours in a special session.
The new GOP-friendly districts would yield Republican advantages in 85% of the state’s 28 seats ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
But expected legal challenges over constitutional questions and burdens on voters leave little certainty about the state’s political landscape this year.
Burdens of execution
The new congressional districts bring a host of complications for candidates, voters and election officials.
Voters and candidates in Central Florida won’t necessarily be in the same districts as they were in 2024. Many districts, including the Central Florida seat held by Democratic Rep. Darren Soto, are expanded in the new map to include new counties with new constituents.
That means incumbent representatives, including Soto, will have to get to know the issues animating new counties, communities and voters. Voters, too, will need to relearn who they’ll see on their ballots on election day.
County election officials have said that they will have little time to understand those changes and to help keep their voters informed.
And new maps could force them to move polling precincts. In Florida, voters must cast Election Day ballots only at their designated precinct.
All that work will cost counties money and extra staff hours.
Those complications will result in lawsuits, Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell said on Wednesday.
“Undoubtedly there will be litigation,” she explained. “It won't be my caucus filing it, but I know that there are several third party partners and organizations who take an interest in this and who will surely file litigation swiftly.”
Constitutional questions
The use of partisan data in the maps could be another sticking point, Driskell said.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision on Wednesday weakened Florida’s constitutional protection for minority voting representation.
In 2010, Floridians voted to amend the state constitution to protect majority-minority districts, mimicking similar protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Fair Districts Amendments also added protections against gerrymandering that favors one party over another.
The decision handed down by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a Louisiana map that created a majority Black district was unconstitutional because it relied on race.
That opinion limits a key section in the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the same section from which the Florida amendments derived their own minority voting protection.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is asserting that the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais not only negates the racial protections in the Fair Districts Amendments, it also nullifies their ban on partisan gerrymandering, an assumption built into the new map.
But that’s not settled yet. Driskell says resolving that question — which could overturn the new map — will almost certainly require a judge to weigh in.
"[P]artisan data was admittedly used to draw this map, every district on this map,” Driskell said. “And so on that basis, I'm optimistic, or at least hopeful, that a court could still look at it and find it unconstitutional."
Legal limbo
A judge reviewing a map lawsuit could uphold the new districts or overturn them as unconstitutional.
Experts note that the practical constraints of running an election with new maps would be both hard to ignore and legally defensible. A judge could decide that it is simply too close to the election to use the new maps, reverting to the existing map for this year's midterms.
That wouldn’t recover any money already spent or undo any confusion created for voters and candidates.
But nobody knows how those lawsuits will play out. DeSantis has filled nearly every seat on the Florida Supreme Court with conservative justices who have been sympathetic to many of his highest-profile cases.
Last year, the court upheld a new congressional map that the governor championed in 2022. It was challenged for allegedly violating majority-minority protections in the Fair Districts Amendments.
