Grisham v. Van Soelen

In 2021, a citizen committee submitted a proposed redistricting plan to the New Mexico legislature. The legislature declined to adopt the committee’s proposed plan and instead created and adopted its own redistricting plan. One month later, the Republican Party of New Mexico and others (plaintiffs) sued the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Grisham (defendant), and other elected officials (defendants) (collectively, the elected officials), alleging that the legislature’s plan was the result of egregious partisan gerrymandering and that this gerrymandering violated the New Mexico Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause by denying individual Republican voters their fundamental right to vote. Specifically, the complaint alleged that the legislature had gerrymandered the state’s three congressional districts by (1) cracking or diluting the Republican votes from one area across all three districts to reduce these individual Republicans’ voting power and (2) spreading a high concentration of Democratic votes from one area across all three districts to increase those individual Democrats’ voting power. The elected officials filed a petition with the New Mexico Supreme Court for a writ of superintending control, asking the high court to declare that (1) partisan-gerrymandering allegations could not state a valid equal-protection claim and (2) a partisan-gerrymandering claim was a nonjusticiable political question. The supreme court agreed to review the petition.