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Texas Redistricting Plan Thrown Out by Court

danarhea

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Texas attempted to get a summary judgment against the US Attorney's office, and have it's redistricting plan implemented immediately. They got a rude awakening instead, when the court ruled that the plan's purpose was to dilute the voting strength of minorities. The Texas redistricting map has been thrown out, and the new map will be drawn by the court system.

Here is the actual decision from the court.
 
wish DoJ would have been so attuned to the NC plan revising voter districts
should have been rejected for the same reason as the tejas plan

The suits come on the heels of the U.S. Justice Department's approval of the plans that redraw legislative and congressional voting districts for the next decade.

Despite the Justice Department's action, state NAACP President William Barber said GOP mapmakers and their consultants "cut out the heart of black political power."
as if the good ole boy republicans would consider doing that [/s]

Lawsuits coming over voting districts | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper
 
Texas attempted to get a summary judgment against the US Attorney's office, and have it's redistricting plan implemented immediately. They got a rude awakening instead, when the court ruled that the plan's purpose was to dilute the voting strength of minorities. The Texas redistricting map has been thrown out, and the new map will be drawn by the court system.

Here is the actual decision from the court.

Politicians, special interest groups, political groups, judges should have no say in redistricting. It should be based on population and nothing else. I think they should make a computer that redistricts.Race,political affiliations, religious affiliations and other unimportant **** like that should not be taken into account when redistricting.
 
GOP attempts at voter manipulation has been rampant as of late. I s'pose the Koch Brothers were unable to buy the Texas judges. The GOP sure has been a joke these days but their jokes are about as funny as a fart in an elevator. Palin, Perry, Bauchmann, Cain, Santorum.... will the insanity ever end? LOL!!!

And people STILL support the GOP? Has insanity taken over the masses? WTF?
 
Texas attempted to get a summary judgment against the US Attorney's office, and have it's redistricting plan implemented immediately. They got a rude awakening instead, when the court ruled that the plan's purpose was to dilute the voting strength of minorities.

That's not quite right. They didn't specify whether they found that diluting the minority vote was the purpose or the effect of the plan. Either is illegal. Courts almost always focus on the effect since purpose is usually very hard to know.

This decision is part of a long series of racial gerrymandering problems in Texas over the last 15 years or so. Basically, in the 80s, the Democrats ruled Texas, but that started shifting to Republicans. The Democrats had the majority in the legislature after the 1990 census, so they drew the map in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. It was very aggressively gerrymandered. In the next election 59% of the state voted for Republicans, but Republicans only got about 40% of the seats because it was so gerrymandered. So, in 2000 when the Republicans finally had a majority in the legislature they basically retaliated and gerrymandered the hell out of the state in the other direction. So far, that's all legal. Gerrymandering, even extreme retaliatory gerrymandering, is totally legal.

But, there is a big legal problem. The hispanic population in Texas is rapidly increasing and as the GOP has managed to alienate hispanics, you have large pockets of the state that are potentially going to go back to the Democrats under the current already Republican gerrymandered map. So, in order to preserve the effectiveness of their gerrymander they need to split up the hispanic voters into predominantly white districts. So, for example, say you have a district that is 90% hispanic and it is surrounded by 3 districts that are 90% white, they would want to make it into 4 districts that were each of which is 30% hispanic, 70% white, so the hispanics would effectively not be able to get anybody they liked elected.

But, the voting rights act forbids doing that. The clever gerrymanderers have been working feverishly to try to come up with ways to circumvent the rules. For example, you can't reduce the number of majority hispanic districts, so they're making districts that are like 50.01% hispanic, but where many of the hispanics are not citizens, so they can't vote. The courts aren't going to allow it though.

Long story short, the Republicans can legally gerrymander all they like, but the one thing they can't do is break up minority groups into ineffectively small numbers.

Black voters its a different story. The problem there is more complex. You have a lot of the black population moving from concentrated urban areas to suburbs, which makes it hard to preserve majority black districts, since they're all spread out. Last time the courts looked at that situation in Texas they found that the Republican's plan was ok. Not sure if the situation is the same this time though.
 
So it's only ok when Northern states gerrymander their districts to concentrate minority voters?

The law actually REQUIRES you to gerrymander districts to concentrate minority voters. Sometimes that helps the Democrats, sometimes the Republicans. For example, maybe by not concentrating minorities you could have two 40% black districts that would both vote for a Democrat, but if you concentrate the black voters into one district, the other one would go Republican, so the Democrats would actually lose out because of the voting rights act in that scenario.

It's a pretty messy set of rules, but there isn't necessarily a better way to do it either. If you don't have a law forbidding breaking up minorities into politically ineffective groups, the south has proven literally thousands of times that they will still do it today.
 
The law actually REQUIRES you to gerrymander districts to concentrate minority voters. Sometimes that helps the Democrats, sometimes the Republicans. For example, maybe by not concentrating minorities you could have two 40% black districts that would both vote for a Democrat, but if you concentrate the black voters into one district, the other one would go Republican, so the Democrats would actually lose out because of the voting rights act in that scenario.

I'm aware.
I think it's dumb and inherently unfair.

A strictly computer generated, voting district map would end all this nonsense.

It's a pretty messy set of rules, but there isn't necessarily a better way to do it either. If you don't have a law forbidding breaking up minorities into politically ineffective groups, the south has proven literally thousands of times that they will still do it today.

That's not true.
Gerrymandering isn't about abusing minorities, it's about concentrating power for a political group.

News to the world, the South doesn't hate black people.
 
A strictly computer generated, voting district map would end all this nonsense.

Yeah... Maybe... That's one of those ideas I like in principle, but when you dig into the details it's trickier... Like some ways you can design a computer program dramatically tend to favor Republicans, other ways tend to dramatically favor Democrats. For example, Democrats tend to be more concentrated in cities. Some approaches computer programs use end up being way more favorable for the party that is more concentrated, some for the party that is less. Or maybe in key swing states Democrats tend to be more concentrated if you split the state up on east to west bands and Republicans if you split it up on north to south bands or whatever. A neutral sounding logic for how to split them up still has dramatic effects on election results, and the parties are very keenly aware of what those are, so picking a program is basically just gerrymandering all over again, but this time with a more complicated set of tools.

I kind of think that ultimately we'll go the way of a computer program, but so far, it doesn't seem like anybody has really nailed what a fair computer program would be.

That's not true.
Gerrymandering isn't about abusing minorities, it's about concentrating power for a political group.

News to the world, the South doesn't hate black people.

Well, it's a tricky issue, right? Trying to squeeze out Democrats so their votes don't really count in the south means trying to prevent the votes of black people from counting. Is the motivation hate for black people? No. Or at least mostly no. But still, we don't allow states to try to prevent minorities votes from being counted.

When you look at the actual cases and maps, the things the south has the gumption to continually keep trying to this day are pretty shocking. For example, there is a case in the courts now about two cities in Georgia that just incorporated. They both have centers that are mostly black and white suburbs. So guess how they drew the city limits? Donuts around the black area with the black middle cut out. Meaning that very few of the black people would be able to vote for the mayor or city council for the city they live in... Now, are they thinking "man, I hate black people"? I dunno. Probably some are. Probably more are on some kind of halfway point where they are thinking they only want "responsible, upstanding, established, long term residents voting" or whatever, and that turns out to mostly correlate to "white people" in their heads. Maybe they are thinking they want the town to be more prosperous, so they want to include only better off areas. Trying to untangle that mess of motives to figure out what to do is nearly impossible. So we have to just look at the actual effects. And, especially given the history in the south, we just can't overlook changes that have the effect of screwing the black people out of voting.

The courts and the legislature tried much, much, less intrusive standards for decades. More than 90 years actually, they just had vague standards saying that you couldn't intentionally discriminate against minorities in voting. Courts applied loose standards looking only for the most blatant stuff. But it didn't work. The south used literacy tests, at large districts, gerrymandering, poll taxes, "moral character tests", gerrymandering, etc, to effectively completely block all attempts for black people to participate in our democracy. For 90 years the courts and congress tried a wide variety of different ways to try to make sure that blacks had a meaningful ability to vote, but nothing worked. The southern states just kept coming up with new schemes, creating new discriminatory procedures right before the election so courts couldn't overturn them in time, etc. Eventually they just had to drop the hammer and force the south to cut it out. The voting rights act is what it took.

Now, you can eventually get removed from the list of jurisdictions that is under the strict scrutiny of section 5 of the VRA. That's what this case is about- this jurisdiction in Texas is still held to the tough section 5 standard because of past discrimination. In order to get off the list, they need to go 10 years in a row without a court finding that they were discriminating with relation to voting. Hopefully they'll strive for that goal and get themselves off the list. But until then, IMO, we need to keep watching them pretty close.
 
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Yeah... Maybe... That's one of those ideas I like in principle, but when you dig into the details it's trickier... Like some ways you can design a computer program dramatically tend to favor Republicans, other ways tend to dramatically favor Democrats. For example, Democrats tend to be more concentrated in cities. Some approaches computer programs use end up being way more favorable for the party that is more concentrated, some for the party that is less. Or maybe in key swing states Democrats tend to be more concentrated if you split the state up on east to west bands and Republicans if you split it up on north to south bands or whatever. A neutral sounding logic for how to split them up still has dramatic effects on election results, and the parties are very keenly aware of what those are, so picking a program is basically just gerrymandering all over again, but this time with a more complicated set of tools.

I kind of think that ultimately we'll go the way of a computer program, but so far, it doesn't seem like anybody has really nailed what a fair computer program would be.

These guys have a pretty good system.

FairVote.org | Home


Well, it's a tricky issue, right? Trying to squeeze out Democrats so their votes don't really count in the south means trying to prevent the votes of black people from counting. Is the motivation hate for black people? No. Or at least mostly no. But still, we don't allow states to try to prevent minorities votes from being counted.

When you look at the actual cases and maps, the things the south has the gumption to continually keep trying to this day are pretty shocking. For example, there is a case in the courts now about two cities in Georgia that just incorporated. They both have centers that are mostly black and white suburbs. So guess how they drew the city limits? Donuts around the black area with the black middle cut out. Meaning that very few of the black people would be able to vote for the mayor or city council for the city they live in... Now, are they thinking "man, I hate black people"? I dunno. Probably some are. Probably more are on some kind of halfway point where they are thinking they only want "responsible, upstanding, established, long term residents voting" or whatever, and that turns out to mostly correlate to "white people" in their heads. Maybe they are thinking they want the town to be more prosperous, so they want to include only better off areas. Trying to untangle that mess of motives to figure out what to do is nearly impossible. So we have to just look at the actual effects. And, especially given the history in the south, we just can't overlook changes that have the effect of screwing the black people out of voting.

The courts and the legislature tried much, much, less intrusive standards for decades. More than 90 years actually, they just had vague standards saying that you couldn't intentionally discriminate against minorities in voting. Courts applied loose standards looking only for the most blatant stuff. But it didn't work. The south used literacy tests, at large districts, gerrymandering, poll taxes, "moral character tests", gerrymandering, etc, to effectively completely block all attempts for black people to participate in our democracy. For 90 years the courts and congress tried a wide variety of different ways to try to make sure that blacks had a meaningful ability to vote, but nothing worked. The southern states just kept coming up with new schemes, creating new discriminatory procedures right before the election so courts couldn't overturn them in time, etc. Eventually they just had to drop the hammer and force the south to cut it out. The voting rights act is what it took.

Now, you can eventually get removed from the list of jurisdictions that is under the strict scrutiny of section 5 of the VRA. That's what this case is about- this jurisdiction in Texas is still held to the tough section 5 standard because of past discrimination. In order to get off the list, they need to go 10 years in a row without a court finding that they were discriminating with relation to voting. Hopefully they'll strive for that goal and get themselves off the list. But until then, IMO, we need to keep watching them pretty close.

Who wants to pay for policing the ****ty part of town, that's just being blunt.
I'm more than sure that race has very little to do with it.

Like I said before, it's ok for some, but not for others.
It's cherry picking situations of legislative "discrimination."

illinois-4th-district-map-Gerrymandering-300x224.jpg

The rules should be applied to all states, not just southern states.
 
The rules should be applied to all states, not just southern states.

Agree...let the people dictate their representatives not lines on a map.

I also agree with you on the minority districts. Honestly, if a district has 40% latino's or blacks and the district is up for grabs (not a safe seat do to gerrymandering) then you better believe whoever runs will pander to either the blacks or latino's because they can't win without them.

The only reason we need laws protecting minorities currently is they are sticking latino's in "safe" districts where the politicians just ignore them because they don't need their votes.
 
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Who wants to pay for policing the ****ty part of town, that's just being blunt.
I'm more than sure that race has very little to do with it.

Like I said, I don't really care what the various motives at play are. Trying to enforce a policy based on motive failed for 90 years straight. The only thing that has actually worked is to look at the effects instead.

The rules should be applied to all states, not just southern states.

They do. Most of the VRA applies to every state. Section 5 is the part that requires states to submit any proposed change in advance to either the DoJ or the courts so that they can approve or reject it based on whether it would disenfranchise minorities. That section does not apply to all states. The way that works is that Congress defines standards for voting practices that get you on the list. Initially it applied only to states that had literacy tests and less than 50% voter turnout in the 1964 election. Then over time Congress has updated the test periodically to include the worst offenders. For example, a jurisdiction that has over 10% of the population that doesn't speak English, which provides ballots only in English goes on the list now. The states on the list are not all in the south. California, Arizona, Alaska, Michigan, South Dakota, New York and New Hampshire are all section 5 states too.

To get off the list a state needs to go 10 years without being shown in court to have been discriminating with regards to minority voting. That is harder than it sounds though. There is usually one jackass somewhere in the state every few years that screws it up by trying to prevent black people from voting at the polling place he is running or something.
 
Agree...let the people dictate their representatives not lines on a map.

I also agree with you on the minority districts. Honestly, if a district has 40% latino's or blacks and the district is up for grabs (not a safe seat do to gerrymandering) then you better believe whoever runs will pander to either the blacks or latino's because they can't win without them.

The only reason we need laws protecting minorities currently is they are sticking latino's in "safe" districts where the politicians just ignore them because they don't need their votes.

Yeah, that's more or less where the courts are heading. They used to say that you had to preserve districts that were over 50% minority. Now they're more inclines to look at whether minorities can effectively influence the elections in those districts. So, they're trying to prevent exactly what you're talking about- splitting up a community of minorities in small numbers in overwhelmingly white, Republican, districts so they basically can be ignored.

The conservative justices on the court push for the 50% rule, the liberal ones push for the effective representation approach. At present the conservatives are the majority on the supreme court, but the liberals are steadily managing to chip away at their 50% rule.
 
The states all do this. The power in charge during the census always redraws lines that try to unfairly give that party an advantage. Democrats are just as guilty of gerrymandering.
 
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The states all do this. The power in charge during the census always redraws lines that try to unfairly give that party an advantage. Democrats are just as guilty of gerrymandering.

Yeah, absolutely. The case isn't about gerrymandering in general though. You can legally gerrymander. It's when you try to gerrymander minority groups out of having an effective vote that you run afoul of the voting rights act.
 
Yeah... Maybe... That's one of those ideas I like in principle, but when you dig into the details it's trickier... Like some ways you can design a computer program dramatically tend to favor Republicans, other ways tend to dramatically favor Democrats. For example, Democrats tend to be more concentrated in cities. Some approaches computer programs use end up being way more favorable for the party that is more concentrated, some for the party that is less. Or maybe in key swing states Democrats tend to be more concentrated if you split the state up on east to west bands and Republicans if you split it up on north to south bands or whatever. A neutral sounding logic for how to split them up still has dramatic effects on election results, and the parties are very keenly aware of what those are, so picking a program is basically just gerrymandering all over again, but this time with a more complicated set of tools.

I would be okay with a rules-based districting system. I would allow anyone to propose a district map. Rate the proposal on 1) total linear length of the district lines. Favor shorter district lines, which indicates that the district in enclosed with the most efficient border. Also, favor district lines that correspond to existing political divisions within the state, such as county and township lines. Allow anyone to propose a districting map and select the one in which 1) the districts are even in population, 2) the district lines follow as much as possible the existing political boundaries, and 3) has the highest district area to perimeter ratio. What ever proposal best matches the rules, gets accepted.
 
Yeah, absolutely. The case isn't about gerrymandering in general though. You can legally gerrymander. It's when you try to gerrymander minority groups out of having an effective vote that you run afoul of the voting rights act.

Minorities tend to vote Democrat. Is it ok to violate the rights of white rural areas that go Republican?
 
I would be okay with a rules-based districting system. I would allow anyone to propose a district map. Rate the proposal on 1) total linear length of the district lines. Favor shorter district lines, which indicates that the district in enclosed with the most efficient border. Also, favor district lines that correspond to existing political divisions within the state, such as county and township lines. Allow anyone to propose a districting map and select the one in which 1) the districts are even in population, 2) the district lines follow as much as possible the existing political boundaries, and 3) has the highest district area to perimeter ratio. What ever proposal best matches the rules, gets accepted.

That's a really good set of rules. Justice Stevens pushed for something similar at one point. But it has some weird effects. It forces the map makers to basically try to include a bit of city in each district because otherwise they end up with these sprawling rural districts. So, in some places that is a huge win for the Democrats, in others it is a huge win for the Republicans.
 
That's a really good set of rules. Justice Stevens pushed for something similar at one point. But it has some weird effects. It forces the map makers to basically try to include a bit of city in each district because otherwise they end up with these sprawling rural districts. So, in some places that is a huge win for the Democrats, in others it is a huge win for the Republicans.

what is the down side of having sprawling voting districts?
 
That's a really good set of rules. Justice Stevens pushed for something similar at one point. But it has some weird effects. It forces the map makers to basically try to include a bit of city in each district because otherwise they end up with these sprawling rural districts. So, in some places that is a huge win for the Democrats, in others it is a huge win for the Republicans.

Thanks.

Another option would be to entirely dump the idea of districts and have "at large" elections for congressmen. This would allow minorities to pool their votes, no matter where they live within a state.
 
Minorities tend to vote Democrat. Is it ok to violate the rights of white rural areas that go Republican?

The VRA is racially neutral on paper. It protects all people against discrimination in voting based on their race, so white people certainly have successfully sued under the VRA if they were being discriminated against.

But, some of the provisions kick into a higher level of scrutiny if the group asserting that they have been discriminated against by some practice or another has historically been the victim of discrimination or is a minority of voters in that state, so usually that is blacks and hispanics.

That said though, who knows man, maybe some day it will be the other way around and your grandkids will be very happy the VRA is on the books to protect them.

But, your point is still valid. If it favors Democrats, even if it has a noble purpose, that isn't fair. But, it isn't really clear that it favors Democrats. For example, nationwide, 95% of black voters voted for Obama, but only 43% of white voters. That means that very often, the best thing for the Democrats would actually be to spread the black voters around to a lot of white dominated districts where they could tip the scale for the Democrats. Instead of having 5 totally white districts vote for the Republican 57% to 43% and one totally black district that votes for the Democrat 95% to 5%, they would far prefer to have say 4 districts that were each 20% black, because then the Democrats would win all four instead of just one. Republicans actually are raising about the same number of voting rights act claims as democrats in the last 20 years or so.
 
what is the down side of having sprawling voting districts?

Nothing necessarily. I'm saying that you would not get sprawling districts under the standard Centinel proposed, you would get what they call "spoke districts" where each district was part in the city and then going out like spokes in a wheel. Which isn't necessarily good or bad either, but you can see why some parties in some states would love that and some would hate it.
 
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Thanks.

Another option would be to entirely dump the idea of districts and have "at large" elections for congressmen. This would allow minorities to pool their votes, no matter where they live within a state.

Yeah, proportional representation. IMO that's the way to go. That's what most first world countries do in one form or another.
 
Nothing necessarily. I'm saying that you would not get sprawling districts under the standard Centinel proposed, you would get what they call "spoke districts" where each district was part in the city and then going out like spokes in a wheel. Which isn't necessarily good or bad either, but you can see why some parties in some states would love that and some would hate it.

what i don't understand is if there is nothing inherently wrong with having sprawling rural districts then why do we avoid creating them
 
what i don't understand is if there is nothing inherently wrong with having sprawling rural districts then why do we avoid creating them

We don't. Most states do sprawling rural districts. But Centinel was proposing a formula for how we could basically automate the process with a neutral standard rather than having politicians haggle it out each time and I was just pointing out that one of the effects of his proposal would be that you would get spoke districts instead of sprawling districts, which some parties would like in some states and hate in others and so on. So picking that standard would itself be kind of like the current gerrymandering process. That said, it would have the merit of only having to happen once, which is appealing...
 
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