"The U.S. Supreme Court may be on the verge of making it even harder to win legal challenges accusing state officials of racial gerrymandering - the illegal manipulation of an electoral district's boundaries to alter its racial composition - to dilute the clout of Black and other minority voters.

The nine justices this week heard arguments in such a case involving the relocation of 30,000 Black residents from South Carolina's 1st congressional district to another one in an electoral map adopted by the state's Republican-led legislature. The Supreme Court has been asked by the litigants to rule on the legality of the map by the end of the year."