Gerrymandering Is A Threat To Democracy, Eric Holder Says
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Much is at stake this fall as Americans vote for Congress. But in the long term, there may be more at stake in hundreds of races that receive little national coverage. They are elections for state offices, governors and state legislators and many, many others. They will have great influence in drawing election districts, and those districts influence who can be elected to Congress and other legislatures in the future. President Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, notes that Republicans dominated that process after the 2010 census. He leads a group trying to give Democrats influence after 2020.
What is the problem that you're trying to address?
ERIC HOLDER: Well, we're trying to deal with the problem of partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering. We saw the Republicans in 2011 use the power that they got in the 2010 election, and the redistricting occurred the year after, to draw gerrymandered seats at the state level as well as the congressional level. And so what we want to do is have in 2021 a fair process by which people will draw lines that will include Republicans and Democrats who are truly going to represent the people.
INSKEEP: Let's be blunt. When you say a fair process, do you really mean, because you're a Democrat, one that is slanted more to Democrats than to Republicans?
HOLDER: No. I'm just looking for a fair process. I think that if we have a process that is fair, Democrats and progressives as opposed to conservatives and Republicans will do just fine.
INSKEEP: Are you in this hole at least in part because, as his critics would suggest, President Obama didn't do much to build up the Democratic Party, to build up the bench at a time when Republicans and conservative groups were spending a lot of time and focus building up their bench?
HOLDER: No. I don't think I would criticize the president on that. But I would say the Democrats I don't think really have focused enough at the state and local level to the degree that Republicans did. And we have to reverse that. We have to make sure that we are focusing on every race in every state every time.
INSKEEP: So if your goal is a different map for legislative districts in 2021, what is at stake in 2018?
HOLDER: Well, we have at stake - a little less than half of the people who will be at the table in 2021 will be selected in 2018. The governors who are elected in 2018 who will be serving four-year terms will be intimately involved in the redistricting process in 2021. State legislators who are serving four-year terms and who are elected in 2018 will be at the table in 2021. So the impact that we want to have on 2021 has to begin now in 2018. And obviously, we have to have a good electoral effort as well in 2020, in addition to the lawsuits that we will be bringing and the Independent Commission efforts that we will be supporting between now and 2021.
INSKEEP: What kind of money is your organization raising, and how are you distributing it?
HOLDER: We've raised, I guess, about - I guess a little over $30 million, and we are distributing the money. We look at everything through a redistricting lens. So governors always matter; state legislators matter. But in certain states - if you look at Ohio, the state auditor, the state secretary of state, they matter. In certain places, Supreme Court justices will matter. So in North Carolina, we are supporting Anita Earls, who is running for the state Supreme Court. It's one of the reasons why we campaigned so hard for Rebecca Dallet, who won a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.
INSKEEP: Are you campaigning for judges who are elected in many states with the explicit idea that these are judges who might someday rule the way you would like on a redistricting case?
HOLDER: No. All I'm looking for are judges who will look at the facts, look at the law and rule in a fair way. We're not trying to pick judges who will rule our way. I'm confident that, again, if you put people on the bench who will look at the laws as they have been written, look at our Constitution as it has been written, look at the state constitutions as they have been written, that we will get rulings that will be acceptable to the people generally and I think ensure a fair process.
INSKEEP: One other thing, Attorney General; you received a lot of attention particularly in conservative media for a speech you made in which you riffed off a famous remark by Michelle Obama.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HOLDER: You know, when they go low, we go high. No. No. When they go low, we kick...
INSKEEP: What did you mean?
HOLDER: Well, what I meant in that remark was that I am going to stand up very forcefully against anybody who would try to undermine our democracy, that Democrats have to be tough when it comes to confronting people like that or parties like that.
INSKEEP: As you know, there's a broad debate about how properly to be forceful. Is that something to be expressed through votes, through protests, through yelling at lawmakers at restaurants, something else? What's appropriate?
HOLDER: Well, I certainly think through votes, through protests. I say that just personally I would not be yelling at lawmakers in restaurants going to their homes. You know, I'd be going at them at the ballot box. I think it was extremely powerful when women came out the day after the Trump inauguration. I think it was very powerful when young people marched here in Washington to ask for more sane gun safety measures. Those are the kinds of ways I think in which the people should express themselves.
INSKEEP: Attorney General Holder, thanks so much.
HOLDER: Thank you.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/65974...ic-holder-says
These midterm victories will expand voting rights, curb gerrymandering
Voters in some key states across the U.S. overwhelmingly approved a slew of ballot initiatives during the midterm elections that will expand access to voting and curtail excessive partisan gerrymandering.
Why it matters: The measures will make elections more accessible and competitive, and they have the potential to shift the states’ electorates, which will greatly impact the outcome of local and federal elections — including the presidency. Meanwhile, the success of these initiatives could give grassroots organizations a blueprint on how to circumvent GOP-controlled legislatures that have largely opposed attempts to end gerrymandering and expand voting rights.
The state of play:
- Last night, Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment that automatically re-enfranchised 1.5 million ex-felons. The move is one of the most significant expansions of voting rights in decades, and it will shift the makeup of the country’s largest battleground state, which plays a deciding role in presidential elections.
- Maryland will allow eligible residents to register to vote as late as Election Day.
- Nevada enacted automatic voter registration when drivers contact the Department of Motor Vehicles.
- Michigan voters approved sweeping election law changes that will be enshrined into the state’s constitution, including same-day voter registration, no-reason absentee ballots and straight-party voting.
- Anti-gerrymandering initiatives in Colorado, Michigan and Utah have now shifted the duty of drawing state legislative and congressional districts into the hands of independent redistricting commissions rather than lawmakers. The goal is to make election maps more fair and competitive, and this comes ahead of the next reapportionment process that begins after the 2020 Census count.
Yes, but: Voting rights advocates received brutal blows in Arkansas and North Carolina, where Republican-sponsored constitutional amendments requiring voters to present a photo ID at the polls were approved.
- North Carolina Republicans, who lost their supermajority in the state legislature, will now decide what forms of ID will be accepted.
Reality check: WithRepublicans successfully securing control of the Senate, President Trump, with the aide of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), will continue to rapidly transform the federal bench with conservative judges who are more likely to uphold restrictive voting laws challenged by advocacy groups.
https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-e...b0c1c90b1.html
Republicans Have a New Plan to Thwart the Will of the People
When Karl Rove laid out the Republican plan to win back power by weaponizing redistricting in a March 2010 op-ed, Democrats failed to pay proper attention.
The vision set forth — called Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project — proved simple yet revolutionary: In most states, legislatures control the decennial redistricting that follows the census. So in November 2010, Republicans invested tens of millions of dollars in these ordinarily sleepy local races and swept elections.
Through gerrymandering, they drew themselves huge advantages in Congress and state capitals, firewalls that have allowed Republicans in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan and elsewhere to survive wave elections in which Democratic state legislative candidates won hundreds of thousands more votes.
It’s a census-year election again, and this time both sides understand the stakes. Democrats know down-ballot elections this fall are the last opportunity to close the redistricting gap before next decade’s maps are drawn.
Republicans appear to have a different strategy for 2020 — subtler, more technical and instructed by successful legal challenges that overturned Republican-drawn maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.
Last week, Republicans in Missouri presented a dress rehearsal of this plan. If left unchallenged, it could once again dye many states red for a decade or more.
In 2018, nonpartisan movements in five states, including Missouri, won redistricting reform via ballot initiative. (Oregon, Oklahoma and Arkansas are attempting to follow suit.)
So last week, Missouri lawmakers looked to dismantle the initiative — called Clean Missouri and supported by 62 percent of the state’s voters — that would have taken mapmaking authority away from politicians and handed it to a nonpartisan state demographer. If Republicans have their way, that demographer won’t draw a single line and control over maps will be returned to a commission of party insiders.
That’s not all they want to do, and it’s entirely likely that the fine print tucked inside this proposal will make its way into redistricting bills in Republican-controlled state capitals nationwide.
First, the new bill would add language to the state constitution that makes it harder for Missouri citizens to gain legal standing to challenge a gerrymandered map in court. Voters living in districts intentionally “packed” with members of one political party — which allows a mapmaker to hand the surrounding seats to their own side — would not be eligible to argue that their rights have been harmed by a statewide plan, because they were still able to elect a member of their choosing within their own specific district.
Second, under the new plan, if a legal challenge did make it into the courts, the state constitution would limit the remedies available to judges. A judge would not be able to throw out the entire map as unconstitutional but merely to order smaller changes to individual districts — essentially retaining most of the advantages embedded into the map by partisans.
The Clean Missouri proposal required the state demographer to draw a map that reflected Missouri’s overall political balance. The legislature’s new plan would have insiders drawing a map that prioritized compactness. In a state like Missouri, where Democratic voters are concentrated in two cities at opposite ends of the state, weighting the criteria in favor of compactness would artificially benefit the party whose voters are spread more efficiently across the state.
While the Clean Missouri plan required a map that achieved “partisan fairness” as closely as practical, the Republican plan allows for a much looser calculation of partisan fairness — which would allow for a map that is more gerrymandered than some of the nation’s most one-sided maps in Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Perhaps most dramatically, the Republican plan would open the door to drawing state legislative districts in a way that could shift the essence of representation itself. The longtime standard has been to count everyone — the total population — when drawing up equally populated legislative districts.
Republicans, however, have urged states to redistrict based on voting-age population instead — and so count only American citizens over the age of 18. What impact would this switch have? Before his death in 2018, the Republican redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller completed a study to assess the impact of drawing political maps that were based not on a state’s total population — the current practice virtually everywhere in the nation — but on citizens of voting age. Looking at Texas, he concluded that the switch would pull power away from cities and toward older, rural populations. It would also, he said, “be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
Last summer, at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s gathering of conservative lawmakers, a panel of Republican election experts urged state legislators to redistrict based on voting-age population as well.
The redistricting wars of 2021 will not be the same as 2011. The effort in Missouri should ring alarm bells that failed to go off after what amounted to a warning from Mr. Rove 10 years ago.
Republicans are looking ahead and planning carefully. If Democrats look to win last decade’s battle and fail to fight this one, they’ll be staring at another decade in the wilderness — and America’s creep toward anti-majoritarianism will accelerate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/o...rrymander.html
Democracy in the Balance: Gerrymandering and Voter Nullification
In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry led a backroom redistricting plan. One rigged district was so contorted that it looked like a salamander. Since then, the practice of manipulating electoral maps for political advantage has been called gerrymandering. When Gerry carved up Massachusetts district, it was an art not a science. Politicians sitting around some smoke-filled room would draw district maps by imprecise political instincts, and handwritten street lists.
Today, sophisticated computer models using massive amounts of personal data from commercial sources, including social media like Facebook, drive gerrymandering. Big data and advanced mapping technology have been available to Republicans paid for by the Koch Brothers. Politicians can now use advanced mapping technology to carve districts with surgical precision. They can track their voters using this sophisticated data base. Politicians pick who they want in or out of a voting district and are now able to choose voters as never before.
Modern high-tech gerrymandering has happened in several states, including Pennsylvania. Based on simple statistical tests, Pennsylvania is one of eight severely gerrymandered states, including Florida, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. A large number of seats are uncontested because rigged districts are so uncompetitive. Yet, the partisan U.S. Supreme Court has washed its hands and the hands of Federal Courts to address the blatantly undemocratic threats.
Republican Governor, Senate, and House gerrymandered Pennsylvania’s Congressional districts, and House drew the legislative boundaries. A Republican-controlled State Supreme Court ratified it. The original map ensured that Republicans would win control even though there were 4,172,826 Democrats, and 3,280,202 Republicans voting in Pennsylvania. This gerrymandered electoral map produced 6 Democrats and 12 Republicans despite the 892,624 democratic voter lead. Through precise gerrymandering, Pennsylvania GOP dominates both the House and Senate.
Pennsylvania is known for its gerrymandered districts—in fact, in 2016, researchers at the independent Electoral Integrity Project gave our redistricting practices an 11 out of 100—the third-worst rating in the Nation. More recently, the State Supreme Court redrew the Congressional boundaries more fairly but not the State House or Senate districts. After a lengthy court battle, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was eventually forced to redraw congressional districts. This is a temporary fix in Pennsylvania, as we must establish a non-partisan “fair districts” mechanism to curb future gerrymandering.
The Koch Brother’s gerrymander plan worked spectacularly around the country and it’s why in 2012, Democratic statehouse candidates won 51 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, which voted for Barack Obama in the presidential election, yet democrats ended up with only 28 percent of the seats in the legislature.
Shelby County v. Holder, and the Erosion of the Voter Rights Act
In an unbelievable decision on June 25, 2013, the right-wing United States Supreme Court decided that racism is no longer a political factor in America when they ruled in a partisan 5-to-4 vote in Shelby County v. Holder. The U.S. Supreme Court is either dangerously cloistered or deliberately bent on undercutting the minority vote when they decided to undermine voter rights in southern states.
The high court overturned a vital provision of the hard-fought Voting Rights Act of 1965, declaring it unconstitutional. Founded on a false assumption that forty years have healed past discriminatory practices, they ruled Section 4(b), the provision that spells out the formula identifying the jurisdictions subjected to pre-clearances based on their histories of discrimination, unconstitutional and no longer needed. This also nullified Section 5 that required certain states and local governments with long histories of voter discrimination to obtain federal pre-clearance before implementing changes to their voting laws or practices.
Eight years after the ruling, we are witnessing polling places being systematically and cynically closed across the country, and voter rolls purged of tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters. Far too many closed polling places were in predominantly African-American counties to be a coincidence. Following the Shelby County v. Holder, new voting restrictions were put in place before the 2016 Presidential election, and 868 fewer polling places were closed across the country. While these laws have disproportionately targeted Black people, at least 17 states saw voter suppression cases targeting American Indian and Alaskan Native voters in 2016.”
Through several troubling decisions, Roberts Court has done more to destroy our democracy than any other court in history. Chief Justice Roberts has dodged responsibility by blaming voters’ lack of education. He should look in a mirror and own the damage his court has done to our democracy. Unchecked now, several state departments and local governments have deployed brazen, and often illegal attempts to suppress turnout. Recent research by Stephen Pettigrew at the University of Pennsylvania, found minority voters are six times as likely as whites to wait longer than an hour to vote. In many states, this disparity is intentional. States controlled by Republicans made several changes from strict voter ID laws and polling place closures to make voting harder targeting minority communities that tend to vote Democrat. Mr. Pettigrew’s research also suggests that this discourages voters. For each hour would-be voters wait, their probability of voting in the next election drops by one percentage point.
Georgia’s current Governor Brian Kemp stole the election from Stacey Abrams. Running as Secretary of State, Kemp closed polling places, lock up hundreds of voting machines and purged 340,134 voters by falsely asserting they had moved. He carried the state by just under 55,000 votes after the purge. Georgia’s well-publicized strategy to purge black voters and close voting locations got a new dimension last week. Defective voting machines, incorrect passwords, and untrained and ill-equipped poll workers did the trick to make voting extremely difficult while black. Last week in Georgia’s primary, minority districts were targeted, forcing voters to stand in line for 3-6 hours while nearby white districts seemed to have no problems. While the voting location irregularities received little oversight, they are theoretically being investigated now. Voters must be on guard voter suppression in November. The shenanigans in Georgia will only expand. The stakes are much higher there with two U.S. Senate seats and the Presidency in the balance.
Abuses are not limited to Georgia. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that “election officials removed at least 17 million voters from the rolls between 2016 and 2018, on top of the 16 million registrations that were canceled between 2014 and 2016.” The report found “counties once covered by Section 5 purged voters at a higher rate than counties that were not required to seek pre-clearance. The counties with histories of discrimination now purge about 10 percent of voters on their roles, while counties that did not require pre-clearance canceled about 7 percent of registrations.”
William J. Barber, II, Episcopal Bishop and the head of the Poor People’s Campaign, asks, “Did you know that there are fewer voting rights in 2018 than there were 50 years ago when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed? Since 2010, 23 states have passed racist voter suppression laws, including racist gerrymandering, reduced early voting days, and fewer hours, purging voter rolls, closing targeted voting locations, and more restrictive voter ID laws that make it harder to register. We must add to Barber’s list, the GOP’s efforts to block voting by mail as they are doing in Iowa.
America’s democracy is dysfunctional and that threatens every voter. The weaponization of gerrymandering coupled with voter suppression has distorted the outcome of elections and creates a cloud of illegitimacy. It contributed to the decline of black voters in 2016, according to a Pew Research study. The study found black voter turnout declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after a record-high 66.6% in 2012.
As we watch Pennsylvania Speaker Mike Turzai’s taillights as he departs Harrisburg, let’s not forget his attempts to suppress voter turnout. Mike Turzai became the poster child for voter suppression when he was caught on tape bragging about rigging registration requirements. Leading up to the 2012 election, Turzai bragged on tape that the state’s new ID law would “allow Mitt Romney to win the state in November. Done!” Fortunately, the State Supreme Court found Turzai’s voter suppression bill reinforced by his claims unconstitutional before the 2012 election.
The Republicans are now throwing sand in the gears for the 2020 election to keep us from voting by mail. We must demand the right to vote by mail everywhere, end gerrymandering and demand an end to voter suppression. Time is long overdue for restoring democracy to America. Our Supreme Court has failed us and it’s up to every American to protect democracy and demand vote by mail in the upcoming Presidential election.
https://www.pittsburghcurrent.com/de...nullification/
Gerrymandering could take power from booming communities of color
Communities of color are driving population growth in states like Texas, North Carolina and Florida, but gerrymandering could limit their representation in Congress as district lines are redrawn this year based on a complicated 2020 census and just plain politics.
Why it matters: When census counts are accurate and political boundaries fairly drawn, voters havemore control over how their community is represented in government.
Between the lines: Historically, two main tactics have been used to draw districts that dilute the voices of communities of color, experts say.
- Cracking: By drawing lines through a large community of color, their votes are swallowed by the largely white surrounding areas and their representation is limited.
- Consolidating: By packing as many people of color as possible into one district, their voices and power are centralized, rather than present in multiple districts. The result is better representation but less political power statewide.
What to watch: In 2013, the Supreme Court knocked out a section of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of racial discrimination — largely in the South — to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department before adopting their redistricting maps.
- The requirement shed light on gerrymandered local districts, which doesn't get the same news coverage as congressional districts. Now "there may not be anybody there to notice, bring a lawsuit," Paul Smith, VP of litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, told Axios.
- In addition, the Supreme Court recently blocked political gerrymandering cases from federal courts, ending legal recourse beyond state courts, except for racial gerrymandering cases.
There's no straightforward solution. Different communities of color have different preferences for how they think lines should be drawn to ensure that their political voice is heard — and different groups will disagree about whether their neighborhoods should be contained in one district or split among multiple districts.
What they're saying: The question is "whether those communities will actually receive that additional representation or whether districts will be drawn in a way to manipulate boundaries" to further empower white communities, Yurij Rudensky, redistricting counsel in the Brennan Center's Democracy Program.
- The coronavirus and the Trump administration's handling of the census during the pandemic have raised concerns about data accuracy on top of conventional undercounts of hard-to-reach groups such as immigrants. Data delays will also make the map-drawing process even more chaotic.
- New maps can help growing Black and brown neighborhoods elect politicians who can better represent them and address issues that affect them at the local, state and federal level.
- Census undercounts and partisan gerrymandering instead dilute the power of voters of color in their own communities.
What you can do: "It can be incredibly powerful just to say, 'I live here. My neighbors also live here.... We want to have a representative that represents us together,'" Justin Levitt, a national redistricting expert, told Axios.
The bottom line: Advocates are hopeful that this year's process will garner more public attention, forcing better accountability than in past years.
Gerrymandering could take power from booming communities of color - Axios
The GOP Cheat Code to Winning Back the House
Quote:
Originally Posted by
S Landreth
A little help coming (but not enough),……..
The damage has been done...
Democrats face a daunting future of severe Republican gerrymandering that could flip control of the House in 2022 and suppress diverse younger generations’ political influence for years to come, according to a new study released today. Those findings underscore the stakes in Democrats’ efforts to pass national legislation combatting such electoral manipulation.
The four big states to watch are Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, where the GOP enjoys complete control over the redistricting process, says Michael Li, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and the author of the new report on how congressional redistricting could unfold following the 2020 census. “Those four states, which are seat-rich and where Republicans control the process, could decide who controls the next Congress,” he told me.
Over the longer term, Republican states could impose gerrymanders that prevent the nation’s growing nonwhite population from building political power commensurate with its numbers—even though voters of color accounted for about four in five newly eligible voters in the past decade, the study found.
The report, which was provided exclusively to The Atlantic, comes as Democrats prepare to advance two bills to guarantee voting rights and reshape the rules regarding federal elections: a new Voting Rights Act and the omnibus legislation called H.R. 1. Both bills, which the Democratic-controlled House approved in the previous session, are likely to pass the chamber again this year—with H.R. 1 potentially winning approval as soon as early next month, House aides say. But both are virtually certain to be blocked in the Senate by a Republican filibuster—unless Democrats change the upper chamber’s rules to allow them to pass with a simple-majority vote.
The gerrymandering report bookends other analyses, by the Brennan Center and others, documenting how state-level Republicans have introduced some 165 proposals in 33 states this year that would make voting more difficult. These include imposing new voter-identification laws, rolling back access to mail balloting and early-voting periods, and adding new hurdles to the voter-registration process. H.R. 1 and a new VRA, if they become law and survive legal challenges, would preempt almost all of those moves as well.
Given the likelihood that, absent federal intervention, red states will enact severe gerrymanders and new obstacles to voting, the decision about whether to end the Senate filibuster to pass these two bills could shape the future of American politics more than anything else Democrats do in the next two years. “If the filibuster remains in place, [H.R. 1] dies in the Senate,” Dan Pfeiffer, the former White House communications director for Barack Obama, wrote this week. If that happens, “the Republicans—who represent a shrinking minority of Americans—will likely return to power and control politics for the next decade or more."
“When Senate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and [Dianne] Feinstein oppose getting rid of the filibuster,” Pfeiffer added, “they are deciding to make it more likely that their time in the majority is ever so brief.”
Li told me that, in some respects, partisans may have less opportunity now for aggressive redistricting than they had after the 2010 census, though that may not be true in key states. States draw new lines for congressional districts after each decennial census, and that process is shaped by a complex convergence of legal and political factors.
Republicans’ leverage over the process seems slightly reduced since the 2010 redistricting. Parties have the greatest freedom to manipulate the lines in states where they control redistricting without input from the other side—almost always because they hold both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship. (Some states deny the governor any role.) After the 2010 census, Republicans enjoyed this level of control over the drawing of 213 congressional districts. They used their authority to impose extremely one-sided gerrymanders in states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
This time, Republicans hold complete control in states that will draw up to 188 districts. (Democrats, by contrast, completely control the maps in states with up to 74 seats.) The number of seats Republicans will oversee has diminished because they lost unified control of government in some states—including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—and because Michigan transferred control of redistricting from the state legislature to an independent commission. Additionally, in GOP-controlled Ohio, voters approved an initiative that created redistricting standards that could impede, though not eliminate, gerrymandering.
Taken together, Li said, these shifts have produced “a tale of two countries.” While midwestern states seem more likely to avoid severe partisan gerrymanders, “the South is at high risk for worse outcomes than [it saw] last decade,” Li told me.
The reason is that Republicans in the South will face far fewer legal constraints than they did in the post-2010 redistricting. In the landmark Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to invalidate the cornerstone provision of the original VRA: its requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination receive “preclearance” from the Justice Department for changes in their election laws, including their congressional and state legislative-district maps. Then, in the Rucho v. Common Cause decision in 2019, five Republican-appointed justices again outvoted the Democratic appointees to rule that federal courts could not overturn partisan gerrymanders.
The loss of the VRA’s preclearance provision—Section 5 of the law—is an especially profound change. After the 2010 redistricting, 16 states, mostly in the South, were required to submit their maps to the Obama administration’s Justice Department under the preclearance process, as Li notes in his report. Now this will mark the first time since the law’s passage in 1965 that “communities of color will … lack the protection of Section 5” during redistricting.
Even if the Justice Department did not reject a state’s map, the preclearance requirement at least somewhat constrained partisan excesses, “because everyone knew there was going to be a review,” says Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in redistricting. He worries that the lawmakers’ incentives have now flipped: Since legislatures no longer need prior approval to proceed, they will feel emboldened to pursue aggressive racial and partisan gerrymanders because even a successful legal challenge against those maps could take years.
“There is very little incentive for a state legislature to refrain from discrimination at this point, because they are playing with house money, essentially,” he told me. “The taxpayers pick up the legal defense, that legal defense takes time and is burdensome, and all the while elections are happening” under the disputed maps.
To election reformers, one positive trend over the past decade was the willingness of some state courts to strike down severe partisan gerrymanders as a violation of state law. The 2019 Supreme Court ruling closing off federal judicial review of gerrymanders might encourage more state courts to intervene, Levitt believes. “Federal courts may be out of the picture but … now that it is abundantly clear that no superhero is arriving on the doorstep, state courts are starting to step in,” he said.
Still, in many of the Southern states where Republicans are likely to push for the most gratuitous lines—such as Texas, Georgia, and Florida—conservative-leaning state courts are unlikely to put up much resistance, most legal analysts I spoke with agree. That deference could have enormous racial, as well as partisan, consequences. Li notes in his report that voters of color accounted for fully 78 percent of the total increase in the nation’s eligible voting population since 2010. They also accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the total in almost all of the southern states at greatest risk for severe gerrymanders, including Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.
With the Shelby County decision eliminating preclearance protection, Li says those diverse communities face elevated risk that GOP legislatures will attempt to maximize seats for white Republicans. They could do this either by concentrating minority voters into a few districts or dispersing them too widely to have much influence—what’s known as “packing and cracking.” “To win back the House,” he told me, “Republicans have to target communities of color.” The Biden Justice Department and civil-rights groups can challenge such maps under another surviving provision of the original VRA. But those cases are difficult to win and can take years.
All of this shows how another round of severe gerrymandering could dilute the political impact of demographic change. One of the next decade’s defining demographic stories will be the steady march of diversity up the age ladder. In the 2020 census, nonwhites for the first time are expected to become a majority of the nation’s under-18 population, notes William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. By 2030, people of color, also for the first time, will comprise a majority of the population younger than 30, he forecasts.
But Republican-controlled legislatures in the Sun Belt states that are at the epicenter of that transition can dull its political impact by drawing district lines that favor older white voters, Li notes. “These gerrymanders could delay the American future,” he told me. “Our future is coalitional, our future is multiracial, and these gerrymanders could mean that Congress and state Houses continue to look much whiter than states as a whole—and older. It will be older voters who determine the future.”
The long odds that Democrats can stop the approaching red-state gerrymanders—either in state legislatures or in the courts—means their only real point of leverage to avoid this fate is through their federal election-reform agenda. While Democrats are in a race against the clock, Li and Levitt both agree that if the party can pass those proposals fast enough, they could influence the current redistricting process (especially because delays in completing the census will delay redistricting as well).
H.R. 1 “would matter in a big way” to shape the current redistricting through its provisions establishing clear national standards to govern the line-drawing process, Levitt said. House aides told me that those provisions—including prohibitions on any map that discriminates against minorities or “unduly favors or disfavors a political party”—will be written to take effect immediately. That provides Democrats with a fallback if another key provision of H.R. 1—a requirement that states use independent commissions to draw congressional lines—can’t be put into effect quickly enough to affect the current redistricting, as seems likely. “We are going to address partisan gerrymandering and we are going to prevent Republicans from putting forth extreme district lines, but the method and what that looks like is going to be shaped by how quickly we move,” said one House Democratic aide involved in the planning, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.
Likewise, while experts say that it would be difficult to fully restore the federal preclearance process in time, the new VRA could still shape the redistricting outcomes through its provisions that give judges more leeway to issue injunctions blocking racially biased maps.
The magnitude and speed of the GOP’s efforts since its 2020 losses to impose new state-level voter-suppression laws, even as it gears up for aggressive gerrymanders, have exceeded even the most alarmist predictions from Democrats and voting-rights advocates. If nothing else, the sudden and sweeping Republican efforts to tilt the rules of the game should leave Democrats with no illusions about the fate they can expect if they allow the filibuster to block new federal standards for redistricting, election reform, and voting rights. H.R. 1 and a new VRA represent the Democrats’ best, and perhaps only, chance to preempt the multipronged offensive Republicans are mounting to tilt the balance of national power back in their direction—and potentially keep it there for years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-party/617987/
Challenges to Black voting rights hark back to Jim Crow era
After a turbulent election season, fueled by unfounded allegations of voter fraud, Republican lawmakers are laboring to rewrite voting laws in ways that would restrict access to the polls. Though House Democrats pushed through a voting rights bill Wednesday that would make voting more accessible, critics worry about GOP tactics could suppress the vote in ways that hearken back to Reconstruction.
"On one side, you have concerns about fraud prompting restrictions on voting, and on the other side, you have concerns about turnout prompting a focus on greater access to the polls," said Rebecca Green, a law professor and co-director of William and Mary Law School's Election Law Program.
Since the beginning of the year, Republican-controlled legislatures have introduced a cascade of restrictive voting measures:
•An Arizona Republican legislator introduced a bill Feb. 2 that would mandate everyone vote in person who is physically able and severely reduce the number of voting centers in some counties.
•A New Hampshire bill introduced Jan. 18 would permit election officials to remove voters from rolls based on data provided by other states, a practice federal courts ruled violates the National Voter Registration Act.
•A Mississippi bill would purge voters from the rolls if they failed to respond to a notice within 30 days with proof of citizenship.
•In Georgia, a longtime Republican stronghold that went blue in November's presidential election, House representatives approved a sweeping measure Monday that would restrict the use of ballot drop boxes, make ID requirements for absentee voting more stringent and prohibit the distribution of food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
The bill, which heads to the state Senate, aims to limit early voting on weekends, which would stifle "Souls to the Polls," a widespread voter mobilization campaign among the state's Black churches.
State Rep. Barry Fleming, who sponsored the bill, said its purpose is to ensure that someone's vote cannot be stolen. "It is our due diligence in this legislature to constantly update our laws to try to protect the sanctity of the vote," the Republican said during a meeting on election integrity last month.
To critics, the barrage of legislation harks back to the post-Reconstruction era when white lawmakers, threatened by a shift in political power, tried to stymie the Black vote with new laws designed to restrict access to the polls.
"When you have a huge turnout, as we had in this last election, the question becomes how do you suppress that turnout," said Marion Orr, a public policy professor at Brown University.
The language in these new voting laws does not openly target a specific group of people, but the laws' implications disproportionately impact people of color, Orr said.
Voter suppression after Reconstruction
After the Civil War, Black men emerged from shackles and slavery with an unprecedented amount of political freedom.
The passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which gave Black men the right to vote, ushered in a wave of Black politicians. Over the next two decades, roughly 20 Black men served in the U.S. Congress – all in Southern states.
This foray into national politics came with a steep price. White supremacy groups responded with violence and intimidation to keep Black people from the polls.
This newfound political participation and activism sparked a series of laws that stripped away African Americans' ability to vote for decades to come. "They saw all of these Black politicians and moved quickly to suppress this new voting force," Orr said.
During his opening address at the 1890 Mississippi state convention, where restrictions to Black voting rights were first discussed, President Solomon S. Calhoun did not mince words about the gathering's purpose.
"We came here to exclude the Negro," he said. "Nothing short of this will answer."
Mississippi passed laws that required a poll tax and mandated literacy tests. The state's voter suppression strategy became the playbook for other Southern states. Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and others followed its lead.
Several states instituted a grandfather clause as a loophole for white men who could not afford the poll tax or pass a literacy test. Under this clause, men whose fathers or grandfathers could vote before the Civil War were exempt from the stricter voting requirements. These new voting requirements made it nearly impossible for Black lawmakers to be elected, even in Southern states with dense African American populations.
George White of North Carolina, the last Black congressman of this era, saw the writing on the wall before he left office in 1901.
"This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, phoenix-like, he will rise up someday and come again," White said in his final months in Congress. "These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people – rising people, full of potential force."
After White's departure, it was nearly 30 years before another Black congressman stepped foot in the U.S. Capitol. And 70 years before a Black congressman from a Southern state was elected.
These new laws all but eradicated the Black politician, disenfranchised Black citizens and required a federal voting law in 1965 to address the rampant racism and voter suppression.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and provided federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50% of nonwhite people were registered to vote. The attack on voting rights protesters marching across Selma's Edmund Pettis Bridge in Alabama on March 7, 1965, was a factor in passage of the act.
Election experts say a Supreme Court decision in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the act by freeing states and municipalities with a history of racial discrimination from being required to seek the federal government's approval to change their voting laws.
The backlash from that Supreme Court decision was immediate and predictable, said Bobby Hoffman, the American Civil Liberties Union democracy division's deputy director.
States quickly tightened voter identification requirements, curtailed early voting, purged voters from voting rolls and shuttered hundreds of polling locations.
Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas introduced stricter voter ID requirements. Florida and Virginia attempted to purge thousands of people from their voter rolls.
Within hours of the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who was the state attorney general at the time, announced stricter voting requirements.
"With today's decision, the state's voter ID law will take effect immediately," Abbott said in a statement. "Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government."
Abbott's actions and the surge of voting law proposals worry lawmakers such as Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
"I think what we're seeing is the most serious attempt across the country to restrict the rights of certain Americans to vote since the days of Jim Crow," Allred said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ow/6919352002/
Jim Crow Lives or Georgia governor signs sweeping election regulations into law
Georgia Republicans passed restrictive changes to the state election process Thursday after weeks of debate about how to tighten voting laws. The new law adds a host of restrictions, like requiring identification for mail voting and making it illegal to take food or water to voters in line.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law immediately, calling it "common sense" legislation while aligning himself with former President Donald Trump in remarks promoting the bill.
Within hours, Marc Elias, an election lawyer with prominent Democratic clients, announced a lawsuit that argues the new measures violate the Fourteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Act.
Trump baselessly claimed that the election was stolen from him in Georgia and pressured Republican election officials to investigate. He dismissed their claims that the election was secure and that the results were accurate.
Republican legislators seized on Trump's false claims and pushed dozens of restrictive voting bills this year. Kemp said he and legislators set out to make it "easy to vote and hard to cheat."
"The bill I signed into law does just that," he said.
Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, founder of the voting rights group Fair Fight, said in a statement that the law was "blatantly unconstitutional" and "nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
Democrats opposed the bill's passage, and Kemp's news conference was interrupted for several minutes with Kemp walking way from the podium midway through his remarks asking, "What's the problem?"
Outside the room, Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon was arrested as she knocked on the door to the news conference and then was dragged through the Capitol in handcuffs.
The 95-page bill adds a spate of changes to the state election process.
It will dramatically shorten runoff elections from nine weeks to less than a month and cut the early voting period required for runoff elections from three weeks to one week. In January, runoff elections sent Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to Washington, securing the party's majority in the Senate.
The law allows the Legislature to appoint the chair of the State Election Board; previously, the board was chaired by the secretary of state. The current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, sparred with Trump over the accuracy of the state's election. The bill also allows that State Election Board to take over county election administration.
The law will require mail-in voters to include their driver's license numbers or other documentation to verify their identities, instead of using signature verification. Drop boxes can be located only inside election offices and early voting locations, curbing their usefulness. It also shortens the window to request absentee ballots.
People will be prohibited from taking food and water to voters waiting in line, which has become common in past Georgia elections, in which voters have waited extremely long hours to cast ballots in the past.
The bill standardizes early voting across the state, which will likely lead to expanded early voting in many counties. But it standardizes the hours for most early voting to 9 to 5 p.m., which is likely to limit the hours in larger counties like Fulton County, which has previously offered early voting until 7 p.m.
"Today, democracy was assaulted," Elias, the elections lawyer, said Thursday night on MSNBC, adding that he was filing the lawsuit on behalf of the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Rise, a student group.
"These laws are all aimed at disenfranchising Black voters and also young voters," Elias said on "The Rachel Maddow Show."
President Joe Biden appeared to refer to some of Georgia's proposals earlier in the day when asked about proposed voting restrictions in his news conference.
"It's sick," Biden said. "Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote, deciding that you're going to end voting at 5 when working people are just getting off work."
Georgia governor signs sweeping election regulations into law. There are even restrictions on snacks.
