The S.C. Senate and House approved a redistricting plan that will grant Horry County an additional House seat, following substantial population growth in the region.
The 2020 Census found that Horry County had added over 80,000 residents since 2010. The county will now have 11 seats.
South Carolina鈥檚 redistricting plan was bound to include major changes, since the state added about half a million people over the past decade.
But reapportionment, in which state legislatures redraw districts every 10 years to reflect Census totals, is a politically fraught process that critics say allows for partisan gerrymandering 鈥 a process by which districts are drawn to favor a political party.
Princeton University鈥檚 predicts that only 6 of 124 state House districts will be competitive under the redistricting plan, and that Democrats will lose two seats, cementing the Republican supermajority.
鈥淭here is clear evidence of gerrymandering,鈥 said聽Cedric Blain-Spain, state executive committeeman for the Horry County Democratic Party.聽鈥淭he elected officials are choosing their voters instead of the voters choosing the elected officials.鈥
State Rep. Case Brittain, R-Myrtle Beach, said districts were redrawn to fit a certain population size.
鈥淲hen the Census came out, it gave us a certain amount of people that a certain rep should represent,鈥 he said. 鈥淭hat was around 42,000 people.鈥
鈥淎t the last Census, (my district) was around 38,000 people,鈥 he continued, explaining that his district had shifted. 鈥淭his time I was at 49,000.鈥
Asked about the potential for gerrymandering, Brittain said the chair of the redistricting committee, State Rep. Jay Jordan, R-Florence, had toured the previous districts to seek community input 鈥 though he couldn鈥檛 describe what questions Jordan had asked or the feedback he received.
Jordan could not be immediately reached for comment.
Brittain added that he had not heard any concerns from constituents or local groups, and that he had not seen the Princeton report.
Blain-Spain said that in virtual and in-person meetings about redistricting, he and others raised concerns about the maps.
"We were asking for competitive districts," he said.
Gerrymandering is difficult to challenge legally, and it is subject to little federal oversight.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could not determine if partisan gerrymandering violated the constitution.
Unlike race and sex, political affiliation is not a federally protected class. And while the federal government exercises some regulatory powers, elections are largely run at the state and local level.
Racial gerrymandering remains illegal, but in 2013 the Supreme Court struck down section five of the Voting Rights Act, ending federal preclearance requirements for voting maps drawn by the states.
“I don’t think that the Voting Rights Act really does anything right now," Drew Kurlowski, an associate professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University, told earlier this year. “The VRA, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist.”
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