On Wednesday, the Supreme Court rejected a revised plan for legislative districts in Wisconsin that created a new Black voting district and was opposed by the GOP, NBC News.

Drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the map created a Black-majority state House district and Republicans requested that the court block the plan and accept the boundaries drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature. Their pleas were rejected by the state Supreme Court, which ordered election officials to follow the governor’s map.

The Supreme Court wrote in an unsigned opinion that Evers’ plan embraced “the sort of uncritical majority-minority district maximization that we have expressly rejected.”

The court declined to block new maps for the state's congressional districts, rejecting a challenge filed by state Republicans. While the new maps would only account for minimal changes to the boundary lines for the state’s eight congressional districts, they would still preserve the Republicans’ 5-3 advantage. 

“On remand, the court is free to take additional evidence if it prefers to reconsider the Governor’s maps rather than choose from among the other submissions. Any new analysis, however, must comply with our equal protection jurisprudence,” the US Supreme Court’s order said.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan each dissented on the question of the state’s legislative districts noting that the court punished the state for failing to comply “with an obligation that, under existing precedent, is hazy at best.”

The GOP argued that the map they drew only made minimal changes to existing districts and were “consistent with the demographic reality that Milwaukee’s Black population remained almost the same between 2010 and 2020.”

The Wisconsin ruling is just the latest court battle over redrawing voting districts across the country. GOP governors and state legislatures have been attempting to minimize or even eliminate voting districts with majority Black populations.

In Alabama,  GOP leaders secured an order last month from the five most conservative justices halting lower court rulings requiring that its congressional map be redrawn. The Supreme Court is slated to hear the case where Republicans are accused of diluting Black votes, which is a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Democrats won two key victories that were appealed to the Supreme Court earlier this year. The US Supreme Court rejected GOP requests for intervention and left undisturbed Democratic-preferred maps that were adopted by the state supreme courts in both cases.

Legal experts are expecting the conservative court to continue to make changes to the Voting Rights Act.