Witness In Florida Senate Redistricting Trial Says Race Was A Major Factor In Creation Of SD 16

By Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix

June 11, 2025

An expert witness testified Tuesday that race was absolutely a major factor in how one Florida Senate district was drawn during the reapportionment process by the GOP-controlled Florida Senate in 2022.

“I think it’s clear. I think race was definitely a factor,” said Dr. Matthew Barreto, faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, during testimony in the federal trial taking place in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa.

The ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic at New York University are challenging the constitutionality of the 2022 Florida Senate redistricting plan because they claim that the Tampa Bay area district was racially gerrymandered.

“Race was used and can explain where the boundary lines are,” Barreto added, discussing the report he produced for the ACLU of Florida, which asked him to analyze the “enacted” map of Senate District 16. The district includes a portion of South St. Petersburg before stretching across Tampa Bay to join a substantial part of Hillsborough County. It’s held by Democrat Darryl Rouson.

Five plaintiffs who live in St. Petersburg and Hillsborough County testified on Monday that they had their equal-protection rights violated by the Legislature’s movement of Black voters into District 16 and removal from nearby District 18, reducing their influence there. The defendants are Senate President Ben Albritton and Secretary of State Cord Byrd.

Testimony throughout Tuesday was filled with political science references like ecological inference, racially polarized voting, and cohesion to break down the racial composition of Florida legislative districts. A lengthy discussion of statistics was at times mind-numbing.

Barreto emphasized that the Senate drew District 16 deliberately to include more Black voters than white ones, referencing how the drawing left out the city of Gulfport, which sits right next to South St. Petersburg, as one specific example.

The other legislative redistricting expert called to the stand on Tuesday was Penn State statistics professor Cory McCarten, who was asked earlier this year by the ACLU of Florida to draw up a version of Senate District 16 that would be located exclusively in Hillsborough County while still complying with the Florida Constitution.

McCarten created three alternative maps for the ACLU that changed the composition of several other nearby Senate districts in Tampa Bay while still keeping Hillsborough by itself.

Attorney Tara Klimek Price, representing the Florida Senate, was aggressive in trying to poke holes in the testimonies of both Barreto and McCarten, while Mohammad Jazil, the attorney representing Byrd, questioned both men about their objectivity.

McCarten initially responded that he wasn’t sure whether he was a registered Democrat. When asked by Jazil whether he would like to see more Democrats elected he responded, “It depends on who the Democrat is.”

Jazil got Barreto to acknowledge that some of the organizations he has worked with have done work for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and the Democratic National Committee.

The morning began with attorneys for the ACLU of Florida questioning Jay Ferrin, who served as staff director of the Florida Senate Committee on Reapportionment in the fall of 2021. He testified that GOP legislators never asked him to draw up a Senate map that would have placed a district solely in Hillsborough County while ensuring that parts of south Pinellas County would not suffer from “diminishment.”

Under the Fair Districts Amendment’s “non-diminishment standard” placed by the voters into the state Constitution in 2010, districts cannot be drawn in a manner that “diminishes” the ability of minority voters to elect their preferred candidate of choice.

While Ferrin was never asked to draw up such a map, which the ACLU contends would have avoided this predicament, attorneys for the plaintiffs have focused on former Orange County Democratic state Sen. Randolph’s Bracy’s comment during the committee meeting in the fall of 2021 that the Reapportionment staff should “look into the matter.”

Daniel Tilley, an attorney with the ACLU, challenged Ferrin that to speculate whether it was possible to draw such a Senate district just in Hillsborough County that would not have protected against diminishment. Ferrin said it was “hard for me to speculate.”

Meanwhile, the whereabouts of former Sen. Bracy has become an issue during the first two days of the trial. ACLU lawyers hoped to bring him to the stand late Monday before acknowledging that he wasn’t present.

After attorneys again told the three-judge panel on Tuesday that Bracy had yet again failed to appear, Justice Thomas Barber said that in a previous trial when a witness did not appear, U.S. marshals were called to retrieve the witness.

In this case, a court officer called Bracy during a morning break, when he reportedly answered and said had not been personally served with a subpoena but had just found it at one of his residences. He then said that he previously told the plaintiffs in the case that “he did not want to be involved,” according to Justice Barber.

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