The Florida Supreme Court on June 10 declined to block the state's newly drawn congressional map, meaning the boundaries challenged by voting-rights groups will govern Florida's 2026 U.S. House elections, per reports from NBC News and WUSF. The ruling was 6-1, per CBS News Miami, and it clears the map for use this fall while the underlying legal challenge to its constitutionality continues in the lower courts.
The dispute centers on the map Governor Ron DeSantis produced and the Legislature adopted in 2022, which voting-rights organizations, including the NAACP, argue violates the Fair Districts amendments voters added to the state constitution to ban partisan gerrymandering. The challengers asked the state's highest court to stop the map from being used in the 2026 midterms while the case proceeded. The court refused that interim step, and critics immediately faulted the justices for letting an, in their words, illegally gerrymandered map stand for the election, per Democracy Docket's statements.
What does not change on November's ballots: the map's basic effect. Republicans currently hold 20 of Florida's 28 U.S. House seats under its boundaries, per WUSF, and in Miami-Dade the redrawn lines reorganized the county's congressional districts, reshaping which neighborhoods share a representative and which incumbents face reconfigured electorates. Candidates qualified and campaigned through the spring on the assumption the map would be in place, and the June 10 order removes the main obstacle to that assumption.
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Why it matters here: the decision sets the districts Miami-Dade voters will actually vote in this fall, from the Black Belt corridors of Broward and Miami-Dade that the 2022 redraw affected to the coastal Miami Beach and downtown Miami precincts moved between seats. The constitutional challenge survives the interim ruling, so the same boundaries can still be struck down after the election, a outcome that would trigger another round of mapmaking. The court's case docket and the written order are posted on the Florida Supreme Court's website for readers who want the reasoning in full.
The court that issued the order sits at the top of Florida's judiciary: seven justices appointed through the state's merit-selection process, who hear appeals from the district courts and review questions of state constitutional law. Redistricting suits arrive there under the Fair Districts provisions, which impose standards stricter than federal law requires, including a prohibition on intent to favor or oppose an incumbent or party. That stricter standard is what the challengers invoked, and it is the standard the pending case will test even as the map governs the fall election.