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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday threw out a lower court's interim maps for voting districts in Texas, saying the judges should have been guided more by the maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature.The high court sent the closely watched Texas voting-rights case back to the judges in San Antonio for further proceedings. The unsigned opinion, issued just 11 days after oral arguments, appeared to be a compromise among the justices as the Texas primary elections neared.Their decision stressed that judges drawing new voting districts must take their lead from a state legislature yet "take care not to incorporate into any interim plan any legal defects in the state plan." Advocates for Latino and African-American voters had sued the state, saying the Legislature's voting districts discriminated against minorities and would dilute their power at the polls.Friday's ruling lays out standards for new voting districts and also acknowledges that a separate hearing underway in Washington, D.C., on the Texas maps would likely impact the maps to be used in the state's upcoming primary elections.Texas is one of nine mostly Southern states covered by a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires places with a history of discrimination to show in advance that election-law changes would not hurt minorities. A panel in Washington is now engaged in that pre-clearance process.Friday's case was not a constitutional challenge to the pre-clearance provision but arose against a backdrop of such challenges by other states and localities in lower courts.The justices' opinion Friday did not offer any clear signals on how they would ultimately rule on the part of the landmark Voting Rights Act known as Section 5.Friday's dispute traced to a surge in Texas' population, particularly among Latinos, between 2000 and 2010. The population growth will give the state four more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives this year, for a total 36.The state Legislature drew new voting-district maps for the state Senate and House and for the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet, despite the growth in minority population, the Legislature's new maps reduced so-called minority opportunity districts, leading the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and other minority-rights groups to sue state officials in federal court.
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