Tag: gerrymandering

SCOTUS – Louisiana v. Callais

“The Supreme Court’s invalidation of Louisiana’s congressional map has triggered a swirling debate about just how fundamentally the justices altered the Voting Rights Act landscape.” This and following quotes are from The Hill article: the hill – regulating voting-rights-act-supreme-court – SCOTUS-Decision  

The court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais was adopted by 6 – 3 of the judges.

I am quite amazed how dramatically differently some people have characterized the decision’s result.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [as Amended in 1982] has enabled groups to force states to draw additional majority-minority districts for decades,” despite the 15th Amendment to US constitution in 1870, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, effectively protecting the voting rights of Blacks.

Section 2 “bars voting maps that give a racial minority ‘less opportunity than other members of the electorate’ to elect their preferred candidate.”

In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that multi-member legislative districts in North Carolina violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power. The landmark ruling established a critical three-part legal test to determine if an electoral map illegally discriminates against minority voters.

To prove a violation of Section 2, plaintiffs must satisfy the following three preconditions:

  1. Numerosity and Compactness: The minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a voting majority in a single-member district.
  2. Political Cohesion: The minority group must show that it is politically cohesive, meaning they largely vote for the same candidates.
  3. Majority Bloc Voting: The plaintiffs must prove that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority group’s preferred candidates

After Thornburg v. Gingles, plaintiffs could prove vote dilution by showing that a minority group was large and compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably drawn district, was politically cohesive, and faced bloc voting by the majority that usually defeated its preferred candidates.

That framework gave civil-rights groups a litigation template: draw an “illustrative” majority-minority district, show polarized voting, and argue that the state had cracked or packed minority voters so they could not elect their preferred candidate. If they won their case, the remedy often required the state to create an additional majority-minority district, even though Section 2 formally says it does not create a right to proportional representation.

In its recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling the Court held that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that Section 2 did not require Louisiana to draw it. The Court majority said that Voting Rights Act compliance can be a compelling interest only when Section 2 is properly construed, and it tightened the Gingles test by requiring race-neutral illustrative maps, closer adherence to state districting goals such as compactness, incumbency protection, and partisan objectives, and evidence separating racial bloc voting from ordinary partisan voting.

The practical effect is that plaintiffs can no longer easily say, “Here is a compact majority-minority district; therefore, the state must draw it.” After Callais, they must show that the alternative map satisfies the state’s nonracial redistricting criteria, that the voting polarization is racial rather than merely partisan, and that the totality of circumstances points to present-day legally relevant discrimination rather than mainly historical disadvantage.

A “majority-minority district” is one in which a racial minority (blacks, Asian, Hispanics, etc.) constitute a majority of the voters. The presumption seems to be that, for example, only (or mostly) blacks will vote for a black candidate. That is clearly a racist view. Barack Obama, for example, was elected President of the United States by a majority of white voters.

I am really shocked at how overtly racist the opposition to the court’s decision is. “’Unfortunately, we are talking about rolling back to an era of Jim Crow, and I don’t believe I’m overstating that,’ Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, But Jim Crow laws were used to segregate blacks and whites. Majority-minority districts move in the same direction. The court’s weakening of the arguments for such districts is the opposite of a Jim Crow law. Voters are motivated by many things, but I have more confidence than does Ms. Lakin in voters choosing the candidate they think best and most effectively supports the policies they support, whether the voter is black, white, or yellow whatever the color of the candidate.

“House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the law was ‘largely gone,’ telling reporters the decision was ‘designed to undermine the ability of communities of color all across this country to elect their candidate of choice.’” Good grief.

Here is an excellent discussion of this issue: “The supreme court’s vote ruling empowers minorities”

Gerrymandering

The United States has flourished and grown to almost the highest GDP per capital in the world (exceeded only by tiny Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Singapore, and Iceland) because of the individual freedom of its citizens to act in their own interest and whose property and freedoms are protected by a government to which they gave limited powers. Historically individuals only had the rights and freedoms handed down to them by their Kings/rulers.

The preservation of the rule of law under our Constitution is essential for our continued flourishing. It is eroding.

The U.S. House of Representatives has 430 members of which currently 217 are Republicans and 212 are Democrats (one is independent). These numbers have changed slightly because of recent “resignations.” The number of representatives from each state depends on its population at the end of each decade’s Census. Each state is geographically divided into the number of congressional districts matching its number of representatives. While states may approach the drawing of its congressional districts in its own way, there are some criteria that must be observed.

1. Federal Mandatory Criteria

These rules apply to every state, regardless of their internal policies:

  • Equal Population: Based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” districts must be as nearly equal in population as practicable. This is rooted in the U.S. Constitution and upheld by Supreme Court cases like Wesberry v. Sanders.
  • Race and Ethnicity (The Voting Rights Act): Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, districts cannot be drawn in a way that dilutes the voting power of racial or language minorities. In some cases, this requires the creation of “majority-minority” districts.

2. Traditional Districting Principles

Most states also follow “traditional” principles to keep districts logical and representative. These vary by state law:

  • Contiguity: All parts of a district must be physically connected. You shouldn’t have to leave the district to get to another part of it.
  • Compactness: Districts should be geographically “tight” rather than sprawling or having jagged, “finger-like” extensions (though this is frequently debated in court).
  • Respect for Political Subdivisions: Mapmakers often try to avoid splitting counties, cities, or towns between multiple districts.
  • Communities of Interest: This is the effort to keep groups with shared social, economic, or cultural interests together so they have a unified voice in Congress.

If district lines are drawn to concentrate likely Republican or Democrat voters into one or a few districts, their voting strength in other districts would be reduced. In this way the likely number of Republican or Democrat representatives from the state can often be increased or decreased, a practice known as gerrymandering. Such political concentration has also favored the election of candidates with more extreme views within their party hollowing out the center.

 “Ordinarily, states draw new congressional lines once every 10 years, at the start of the decade when they receive new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Last year, Trump pressed Republican-led states to break with that tradition and gerrymander their districts to help his party maintain its narrow control of the House.

“The push resulted in better lines for the GOP in five districts in Texas, two in Ohio and one each in Missouri and North Carolina. Democrats responded by persuading voters to approve new maps that would give Democrats the edge in five seats in California and four in Virginia.”  Washington Post  Redistricting in Virginia

While I have been a free market, limited government Republican all my life until Trump’s first campaign in 2016, I was not willing to vote for him and changed my party to Libertarian. Given my disappointment with the Republican Party’s unwillingness to use its constitutional authority to vote on tariffs and war among other things, I am hopeful that the Democrats will take control of Congress in the midterm elections later this year. None the less I voted No on Virginia’s referendum on a midterm redistricting that is expected to give Democrats 4 additional seats in the House. Why? Gaining House seats by questionable (The Supreme Court may reverse all of this) mid-decade redistricting rather than by convincing voters to change their votes diminishes the rule of law I so strongly defend.

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) reacted with dismay Tuesday evening when informed during an appearance on NewsNation’s “Cuomo” that a Democratic redistricting initiative had passed in Virginia, declaring, “We all lose at this point.”

“Even The Washington Post has said the ‘yes’ campaign is, in their words, brazenly dishonest.”  David Weigel, Semafor