Next year, voters across the country will head to polls to cast their ballots for congressional and state representatives. The choices we’ll have before us as voters are dictated by what district we live in — lines that are redrawn every 10 years. This critical process, called redistricting, is intended to ensure each district accurately reflects the people who live there. But in practice, some states have strayed from that ideal and instead drawn district lines that dilute the power of voters of color, particularly Black voters, in an effort to manipulate election results.

This manipulation undermines our democracy. Voters should pick their politicians; not the other way around. Ensuring district maps are drawn equitably is key to fair and effective representation for all voters, reconciling decades of power imbalances, and systemic equality. Here are three notable cases in which the ACLU is advocating for fair maps.

This month, we celebrated a win in our challenge to the congressional map enacted by Louisiana Legislators following the 2020 census. Louisiana’s congressional map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by failing to provide Black voters an equal opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in a second district, thereby diluting their voting power. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the map was discriminatory, and likely violated the VRA.

Black voters from the two largest and majority-Black cities in Louisiana have long been packed into a single congressional district, weakening their political influence and ability to advocate for their concerns within the halls of congress. The Legislature is required by the court to draw a new map by May 2024. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this process to ensure the next map accurately reflects Louisiana voters in time for the upcoming election season.

In 2022, South Carolina adopted a racially-gerrymandered map that moved hundreds of thousands of voters to different congressional districts, carefully calibrating the districts’ Black populations in all but one district to a low enough level to deny Black voters the equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Alongside our partners, we challenged the map’s constitutionality in court on behalf of the South Carolina NAACP and affected voters. After a two-week trial, a panel of three federal judges unanimously concluded that South Carolina’s congressional map is unconstitutional, and the state appealed to the Supreme Court.

The court heard oral arguments in October, and we await their decision.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.

In October, a district court in Alabama once again ordered the state to adopt a congressional map with two districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice. This win followed two years of litigation by the ACLU and our partners on behalf of four individual voters, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and the NAACP of Alabama. We challenged Alabama’s congressional district boundaries as racially discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. In Alabama, voting is racially polarized, and white and Black voters largely support different candidates. Despite having seven congressional districts and a Black voting-age population of over 27 percent, Alabama only allowed Black voters an opportunity to elect a representative in one district, or 14 percent of the state’s delegation.

The district court’s ruling followed a historic win for voting rights at the Supreme Court in 2022, reaffirming the need for Section 2 to protect Black political power, when the court ruled in our favor.

Picture this: A 12-year-old girl is raped and impregnated, and because there are no abortion providers within 4,000 miles of where she lives, she must carry the pregnancy to term.

It doesn’t sound like something that could happen in the United States, right? But for the people of Guåhan, what is more commonly known as the U.S. unincorporated territory of Guam, this was the reality in 2019, even when Roe v. Wade was still law. That year, the only abortion provider on the island retired — and it was this story that sparked the creation of Famalao’an Rights, a reproductive justice initiative fighting for access to reproductive care for everyone on the island.

The fight for abortion access has always been an uphill battle in Guåhan. The first Christian missionaries in Micronesia arrived in Guåhan in the 1500s alongside Spanish colonization, bringing a Catholic religion that heavily influenced CHamoru culture and spirituality. Today, the island’s total population is about 70 percent Roman Catholic, a force that has undoubtedly contributed to harsh anti-choice local government policies for decades.

In 1990, the Guam Legislature passed the strictest anti-abortion law in the United States at the time, making it illegal to even speak about where to get abortions. This law was eventually deemed unconstitutional and unenforceable due to Roe. With the 2022 decision to overturn Roe, however, there were attempts to revive the 1990 anti-abortion law. These efforts were eventually shot down by the Supreme Court of Guam earlier this year after it held the ban was null and void.

The dominance of Catholic religion in Guåhan has also cultivated social and cultural stigma surrounding reproductive health care, particularly abortion. The immense pressure of Catholic, pro-life advocates discouraged medical abortion providers from providing care on the island.

Since 2019, Famalao’an Rights has been at the forefront of safeguarding reproductive health care and bodily autonomy. In the beginning, we were mostly an informational social media campaign, posting infographics and short podcasts on the issue of abortion and its history and importance for the island on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.

Then, as the government attempted to limit abortion access further, we became community organizers. In 2021, the Guam Legislature proposed legislation that sought to ban abortions after five weeks of pregnancy. The proposed law mirrored similar abortion bans enacted in states like Georgia and Texas. The Guam Legislature eventually passed the ban, to which Governor Lourdes Leon Guerrero, i Maga’hågan Guåhan (the first elected woman governor of Guam) replied with a harshly-worded veto. The Legislature failed to override the governor’s veto, and with that, the ban failed.

During the 2021 attempt to ban abortions, Famalao’an Rights rallied the community together to send over 1,000 testimonies in opposition of the bill to the Guam Legislature. Dozens of people stood with us during multiple protests in front of the Guam Congress Building, and our movement has only grown since then.

It is now 2023, and Famalao’an Rights has accomplished much for the advancement of reproductive justice in Guåhan. Our team of Indigenous (CHamoru and Pohnpeian) and Filipino women leaders have secured the organization’s nonprofit status to support urgent reproductive justice initiatives, donated to local communities in crises during the recent supertyphoon Mawar, advocated for the status and delivery of menstrual products to the island’s schools, and more. We also plan to provide monetary support for those who seek medication abortion via the Hawaii Clinic. Monetary support will vary on a case by case basis, and will be available until all funds allotted are expended. Further, Famalao’an Rights has worked diligently with the ACLU to ensure telemedicine access for medication abortion remains available in Guåhan.

In 2019, having pathways to abortion access was only a dream for us. Of course, there is still a long way to go. But one way or another, we believe that Guam will be a place where every person has safe and timely access to reproductive health care, and a place where everyone can have full bodily autonomy.

Recently, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) — the research arm of the Department of Justice — put out a call for researchers to participate in what they called the “Recidivism Forecasting Challenge.” The challenge was designed to use information about people on parole in Georgia to “improve the ability to forecast recidivism using person-and place-based variables,” encourage “non-criminal justice forecasting researchers to compete against more ‘traditional’ criminal justice researchers,” and provide “critical information to community corrections departments.” Challenge contestants were awarded a collective total of $723,000 for their submitted models.

While heralded by the NIJ as a successful effort that “demonstrate[d] the value of open data and open competition,” in reality, the challenge was marked by serious and fundamental flaws. One of the winning papers encapsulated the issues with the challenge best when they said, “We are hesitant to accept any insights gained from submitted models and question the reliability of their performance. We would also discourage the use of any submitted models in live environments.” Six of the other 25 winning papers also expressed their concerns about the use of models created for the challenge in real-world environments.

So, what contributed to the challenge’s failures?

We argue in a new research study critiquing the challenge that a failure to engage impacted communities (those whose data was used for the challenge) as well as public defenders and other advocates for impacted communities contributed in part to some of the failures of this project. The standard going forward for developing predictive tools should draw on recent resources from the federal government to inform decision-making around whether to develop predictive tools. These efforts should center around developing strong protections for the people whose data is used to build automated systems and the people who may ultimately be evaluated by those systems if they are deployed.

So, why does this matter?

The NIJ has a lot of power, given its position within the Department of Justice, to shape the way that local community corrections departments think about recidivism. We submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOJ to try to better understand how the results of the challenge have been or will be used but have not yet received a response to our request. While it is not fully clear yet how the results of the challenge will be used by the DOJ, the NIJ has already signaled that these types of tools are important to it by spending close to $1 million creating and executing the challenge. Furthermore, the DOJ, through the Bureau of Prisons, already uses a risk assessment tool, PATTERN, to make critical decisions about incarcerated populations. The use of this tool has been roundly criticized by several civil rights organizations.

Beyond influencing decisions about imprisonment and government surveillance, the data produced by law enforcement agencies and the predictions generated from risk assessment tools are often used in making decisions that can have a catastrophic impact on people’s lives — including loss of parental rights, homelessness, prolonged job insecurity, immigration consequences (including deportation), and inability to access credit. The voices of those impacted by these tools should be embedded in the design and implementation of these tools, as they are the individuals who will have to suffer the consequences of poorly designed systems. By involving impacted communities in the development of predictive tools, the design of these types of systems may look dramatically different, or these tools may be determined to not be useful at all.

For more information about the NIJ’s Recidivism Forecasting Challenge and its shortcomings, check out our paper below. Our paper was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization at the end of October, where it won an Honorable Mention for the New Horizons Award.