A Florida judge on Tuesday declined to temporarily block the state’s new congressional map, which is expected to give the GOP four additional U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterm elections. As a result, the map will remain in place while a lawsuit challenging it plays out. Florida Circuit Court Judge Joshua Hawkes denied a request by several voting and civil rights groups, who argued that the map violates a state ban on partisan gerrymandering. The lawsuit is likely to reach the Florida Supreme Court. Axios: Florida judge denies temporary injunction to block newly enacted 24R-4D congressional map of the state “The fight likely ends at the Florida Supreme Court, where DeSantis appointed six of seven justices and all seven were appointed by Republican governors.” Link to… pic.twitter.com/o6NDzj1c2V — Politics & Poll Tracker (@PollTracker2024) May 26, 2026 The Hill shared further: DeSantis signed the map into law earlier this month after convening a short special session of the Legislature in which he pressed lawmakers to pass it. The new map could impact as many as four Democrats in the state, which currently has a 20-8 GOP advantage in its congressional delegation. Critics who sued over the new map argue that it violates the Florida Constitution, which bans lawmakers from redrawing maps for partisan gain and undercutting minority voters from fair representation. They also argue that the map has become less compact, urging the court to block it from being used before the November elections. Hawkes, however, argued that the groups didn’t sufficiently prove that the map was made with partisan intent and that it was too close to the election to introduce changes to voters. The plaintiffs said they plan to appeal. “Because Floridians of all political backgrounds are so clearly against partisan gerrymandering, we will exhaust all legal options to make sure a map this partisan does not last the rest of this decade,” said Amy Keith, executive director of Common Cause Florida, one of the plaintiffs, according to The New York Times. “The primary is less than three months away, and the general less than six months,” Hawkes wrote, according to the outlet. “The public interest weighs more in favor of certainty than a haphazard judicial mandate of discarded maps,” he added. A Florida judge declined to block the state’s new congressional map for the 2026 elections. pic.twitter.com/eHWt44TSk8 — SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 26, 2026 More from The New York Times: Lawmakers were preparing to vote on it when the Supreme Court issued a long-awaited decision that weakened the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act; the ruling set off a scramble across Republican-held Southern states to redraw voting districts. The court found that Louisiana lawmakers had unconstitutionally relied on race when they drew a 2024 congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Mr. DeSantis had predicted such an outcome and used it to justify redrawing Florida’s map, citing a majority-Black district in South Florida. The state’s new map not only carved up that Democratic-held district, making other districts around it more Republican-leaning, but also did away with Democratic-held seats in the Tampa Bay and Orlando areas. The case before Judge Hawkes, whom Mr. DeSantis appointed in 2020, did not center on race. Rather, three voting rights groups argued that the map violates the ban on partisan gerrymandering that Florida voters passed in 2010 under the Fair Districts amendments. The DeSantis aide who drew the new map told state lawmakers last month that he had done so based partly on the partisan breakdown of voters. “This case is unusual, because the map drawer admitted on the public record that the districts were drawn with partisan data and without the need to comply with the Fair District amendment,” Christina Ford, a lawyer with Equal Ground, one of three groups that sued, said in a virtual court hearing in mid-May. Lawyers for the DeSantis administration and for state lawmakers countered that the plaintiffs had not proven a partisan intent behind the new map, and Judge Hawkes agreed.