The ACLU of Arkansas and a group of co-plaintiffs will not appeal a November ruling which limits lawsuits seeking to enforce parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 related to racial discrimination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Representing the Arkansas Public Policy Panel and the Arkansas State Conference NAACP, the ACLU of Arkansas sued in December 2021 over a new Arkansas House district map which it claimed discriminated against Black voters and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court’s ruling that Section 2 is not privately enforceable, meaning only the U.S. Attorney General can bring a suit to enforce it and not private citizens or organizations.

In January, the full 8th Circuit Court declined to reconsider the 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel.

“Did Congress give private plaintiffs the ability to sue under (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Act? Text and structure reveal that the answer is no,” 8th Circuit Judge David Stras wrote in the decision.

According to Reuters, it’s been very common for private individuals to sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act over the decades since it was enacted.

The ACLU of Arkansas said in a 2021 news release that the “proposed (state House district) map, as currently drawn, denies Black Arkansans an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice.”

Stras described the alleged practice of “vote dilution” as “creating supermajorities in just a few districts and then spreading out the black voters who remain.”

The ACLU of Arkansas and NAACP said in a written statement Tuesday that the new ruling was “radical, wrong, and contrary to sixty years of precedent in which federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have issued hundreds of decisions granting private plaintiffs relief under Section 2 for nearly 60 years. The decision only applies in the Eighth Circuit, and no other circuits or courts have followed suit to date.”

Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, told Reuters that there is another avenue to challenge voting rights violations — Section 1983, a Reconstruction era law which gives citizens the right to sue states in federal court over rights violations, recently used by Native American voters in North Dakota to challenge a legislative map there. That factored into the decision not to pursue a Supreme Court appeal.

“It is important to remember that Arkansas’s redistricting process is handled primarily by three statewide constitutional officers who are answerable to Arkansas voters,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a defendant in the suit, said in a written statement Monday, calling the NAACP a “special interest group.”

Griffin is one of those three officers, along with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Secretary of State John Thurston.

This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: Arkansas voting rights lawsuit: ACLU won’t appeal to US Supreme Court