The Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision that found that South Carolina Republicans improperly used race to gerrymander the states 1st Congressional District in a Thursday decision.

A three-judge federal district court panel ruled in 2023 that the lines drawn in the states 1st Congressional District were an illegal racial gerrymander. The legislatures movement of Black voters out and white voters in amounted to a bleaching of the district, the district court said in a ruling that Republicans in the state legislature later appealed to the Supreme Court.

But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court disagreed in a 6-3 opinion that reversed and remanded the lower court decision. The majority opinion , written by Justice Samuel Alito, argued that the complaint brought by the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP relied on circumstantial evidence that the state legislature used race when it drew the 1st Districts lines. Instead, the majority sided with South Carolinas argument that the states movement of Black voters in and white voters out of the district was merely a side effect of their attempt at partisan gerrymandering.

A circumstantial-evidence-only case is especially difficult when the State raises a partisan-gerrymandering defense, Alito wrote in the opinion, noting that the majority of Black voters in South Carolina voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. When partisanship and race correlate, it naturally follows that a map that has been gerrymandered to achieve a partisan end can look very similar to a racially gerrymandered map.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion, while the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined in a dissent.