Maps in Four States Were Ruled Illegal Gerrymanders. They’re Being Used Anyway.

“It creates all kinds of logistical issues. Candidates don’t know where they’re running,” said Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer at the firm Jones Day who has handled redistricting cases for Republican clients in a host of states and helped lead the legal team supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute. Should the original map be upheld later, he said, returning to it would be “triply disruptive to the system.”

Critics argue, though, that the court is effectively saying that a smoothly run election is more important than a just one. And they note that the longstanding guidance in redistricting cases — from the court’s historic one person, one vote ruling in 1964 — is that using an illegal map in an election should be “the unusual case.”

The Purcell doctrine is not always applied to Republicans’ benefit. In March, the court cited an approaching primary election in refusing to block a North Carolina Supreme Court order undoing a Republican gerrymander of that state’s congressional map.

But scholars say such decisions are the exception. “It just so happens that the unexplained rules in election cases have a remarkable tendency to save Republicans and hurt Democrats,” said Steven I. Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who addresses the issue in a forthcoming book, “The Shadow Docket.”

“It would be one thing if the court was giving us a compelling or even plausible explanation,” he added. “But the granting of a stay these days is often done with no explanation at all.”

The headline example came in January in Alabama, where a three-judge federal panel said the State Legislature had likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voters’ power in its new map of the state’s seven House seats.