Packing the Vote: City council in Florida racially gerrymanders
districts despite Black voter outrage
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Rhonda Sonnenberg, SPLC Senior Staff Writer | Read the full piece here
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Friend,
In the face of fierce Black community opposition during months of
public hearings, the city council in Jacksonville, Florida, voted 17-1
on March 22 to pass a voting district map with racially gerrymandered
districts.
The new map packs most of the city's Black voters into districts
7, 8, 9 and 10, classifying these voters because of their race and
weakening their ability to affect elections in other districts.
Further, it fails to reflect the city's changing demographics.
According to the 2020 census, Jacksonville's nearly 1 million
residents had equal percentages of non-Latinx white people and people
of color. In wider Duval County, which is filled almost completely by
the city - the country's 13th largest - white
residents slid into the minority.
Racial gerrymandering
A report that a coalition of civil rights groups submitted to the
council concludes that Jacksonville's districts show a
consistent pattern of racially polarized voting over 14 elections
since 2014, and that - in these elections - Black
voters' candidates of choice would have been elected, on
average, in districts with at least a 41% Black citizen voting age
population (the percentage of U.S. citizens age 18 and older who
identify as Black).
The report on racially polarized voting in Jacksonville elections
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was commissioned by the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville
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, the ACLU Northeast Florida Chapter
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, the Harriet Tubman Freedom Fighters
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- which is a client of the Southern Poverty Law Center in
voting rights litigation against the state of Florida - and the
NAACP Jacksonville branch
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.
The report found that candidates preferred by Jacksonville's
Black voters disproportionately failed to achieve electoral success
citywide. Further, a majority of white voters in Jacksonville voted as
a bloc against Black-preferred candidates. In every single election
studied in the report, most Black voters supported one candidate and
most white voters supported the opposing candidate.
The civil rights groups asked that the council analyze the
report's findings and redraw the currently proposed neighborhood
seat plan such that Black voters are properly and lawfully represented
in the final plan. The report's author, Hannah Walker, assistant
professor of government at the University of Texas, told the SPLC that
based on her analysis, "an alternative map could be drawn with
additional districts that allow Black voters to elect their
representatives of choice."
Some advocates for the Black community believe the council never even
considered their concerns.
"At the public council meetings, we were allowed three minutes
to speak but we weren't allowed to ask any questions,"
said Ben Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition, a community
organization focused on social, racial and economic justice.
"The council said at the beginning [of the hearings process]
that they were going to pass the map. They said the process was
transparent and open. They heard, but they didn't listen. It was
an exercise in futility."
READ MORE
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