Anatomy of the Texas Gerrymander

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[REDISTRICTING]

The State of Play

So far, 21 states have completed drawing congressional maps and 23 states have completed legislative maps. The Brennan Center has released a tracker

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you can use to view new redistricting maps that have been approved across the states.

Featured Pieces

Anatomy of the Texas Gerrymander

Once again, Texas lawmakers enacted a redistricting plan that discriminates against the state’s Black, Latino, and Asian residents, and once again they are facing lawsuits from voters and the Department of Justice for violating voting rights laws. The Brennan Center’s Michael Li and Julia Boland have analyzed

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exactly how Republicans in Texas gerrymandered their way to a congressional map that “ruthlessly divided” communities of color under the guise of partisan gain. They warn that without Congress intervening by passing vital legislation like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

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and the Freedom to Vote Act

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, “Texas will have one of the least competitive maps in the nation, and its booming communities of color once again will be shut out of their fair share of power.”


How Gerrymandering Contributes to Environmental Injustice

Callia Téllez, a policy fellow at the Ohio Environmental Council

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, traces gerrymandering’s disastrous health and environmental effects on Ohio’s communities of color. She writes

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, “The communities packed and cracked into districts that minimize their influence and create political inequality are often the same ones that deal with disproportionate exposure to toxic air, polluted waters, and systemic inequities. This is the product of decades of intentional economic disinvestment, redlining, and zoning decisions... Low-income people of color are far more likely to live in these ‘sacrifice zones,’ communities immediately adjacent to polluting industries and infrastructure.”

The Ohio Environmental Council is among several groups and voters that the Brennan Center is representing in a lawsuit

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challenging the partisan gerrymandering of Ohio’s legislative maps. You can read more about the case here

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Featured Map: Racial Discrimination in Alabama

Source: Alabama Permanent Legislative Committee on Reapportionment

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Alabama’s legislature enacted a congressional plan that includes only one majority-Black district, AL-07. However, 27 percent of Alabama’s voting population is Black, and Black voters contend that a second majority-Black district should be made by separating the predominantly Black areas surrounding Montgomery and Birmingham into two different congressional districts.

The map on the right was proposed by State Sen. Bobby Singleton (D-Greensboro). In his plan, many more counties are kept intact, and the newly configured AL-06 would become another majority-Black district centered in Birmingham. Alabama voters and organizations like the Alabama Conference of the NAACP have alleged that lawmakers deliberately diluted the power of Black voters

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by not including a second majority-Black district.

Redistricting in the News

Over a dozen Democratic governors wrote a letter

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to the Senate majority and minority leaders telling them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act before the end of the year in order to tackle gerrymandering and voter suppression. In the letter

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, the governors cite a Brennan Center report and write, “We’ve been extremely disappointed to see Republicans use congressional procedures to block the paths of these straightforward, commonsense, and long-overdue pieces of legislation in the Senate.”

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered the 2022 primary election be delayed

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to May 17 to give itself more time to review the new congressional and legislative maps, which Democrats allege are blatant partisan gerrymanders. The court directed the trial court to rule on the maps no later than January 11. Meanwhile, there are rumors

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that Republicans may try to impeach judges who vote to strike down discriminatory maps.


Democratic legislators in Maryland voted to override

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Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of their congressional plan, cementing their party’s 7–1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. The plan has sparked outcries of partisan gerrymandering, and redistricting reform groups are already threatening litigation.



The bipartisan duo of special masters appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court to draw congressional and legislative maps has released its initial redistricting plans

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that significantly alter existing boundaries. Democrats would hold a slight edge in the number of safe seats in the congressional delegation and the new maps could send more Black legislators to the state’s general assembly. The commission initially tasked with redistricting devolved into partisan gridlock and failed to produce any redistricting plans, sending the process to the state supreme court.

The Department of Justice has filed a federal lawsuit

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alleging that Texas’s new redistricting plans discriminate against Black and Latino communities. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said, “This is the third time in three decades where Texas has eliminated a Latino electoral opportunity in this same district . . . These redistricting plans will diminish the opportunities for Latino and Black voters in Texas to elect their preferred representatives. And that is prohibited by federal law.” You can read the complaint here

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Activists are calling on elected officials to act against newly enacted redistricting plans across the South that they argue amount to “an all-out assault on Black political power

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” at the local level. As the first Black woman elected to chair the board of commissioners in Georgia’s Gwinnett County explained, “It's a perception that there's a loss of control for Republicans, and we have people of color who are assuming leadership roles and now you are trying to take that power away."

After failing to get their proposal on the ballot in 2020, Nevada redistricting reform advocates are once again attempting to pass a statewide initiative

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that would hand control of redistricting to a bipartisan commission. Republicans and nonwhite activists have argued that this year’s redistricting process was rushed by state legislators behind closed doors, highlighting the need for another push for reform in 2022. To make it to the ballot, the measure must receive over 140,000 signatures by June 2022.

The U.S. Census Bureau has released

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an updated list of jurisdictions

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that are required to provide language assistance in languages other than English under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, which currently covers 334 state, county, and local jurisdictions. The Bureau used 2015–2019 Community Survey Estimates in place of 2020 Census data due to Covid-19 -related delays.

This is the last edition of our Redistricting Round-Up for 2021, we’ll be back in your inbox on January 5, 2022. You can find older editions here

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