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The Census Bureau is set to release the long-awaited data that states need to draw new voting cards on Thursday, kicking off what advocates fear will be the most eventful and turbulent redistribution cycle. controversial to this day.
Detailed local population results are arriving months behind thanks to Covid-related delays, meaning the notoriously complex and sometimes covert process of congressional district boundaries determination will occur faster as states try. to finish before the end of the year. It’s a decennial undertaking coinciding with the Decennial Census, a count of the population that decides everything from representation in Congress to the distribution of federal aid.
Redistribution has the power to shape elections for years to come. But this cycle, experts and advocates of the right to vote have agreed, the stakes are higher than ever. New maps drawn by Republicans in the state could eliminate Democrats from their slim majority in the House, aside from the 2022 midterm results, experts said. It is also the first time that the redistribution process has occurred since the Supreme Court removed key federal protections against discriminatory cards in 2013 while giving the green light to partisan gerrymandering in 2019, leaving defenders concerned about the limits. would significantly dilute the political power of people of color. even though minorities are the engine of the country’s population growth.
“From the perspective of voters of color in the South, a train is coming down the tracks, and we’ve seen it coming for a long time. The reality is that in places in the South you can’t make a partisan gerrymander without targeting voters of color, ”said Michael Li, redistribution expert and senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the Law School of the United States. ‘New York University. “Due to residential segregation, it is easier to separate or group communities of color to move the dial.”
What is gerrymandering?
Gerrymandering, the act of manipulating borders to favor a party or class of people, is as old as American politics. But technology and improved data have enabled lawmakers to draw district maps with increasing accuracy. Experts and critics argue that letting lawmakers draw constituency boundaries allows them to choose their own voters, while people who gerrymandering tend to argue that voters elected them and empowered them to do so. as they see fit.
And although both parties have historically been guilty of gerrymandering, Republicans invested heavily in campaigns for state legislatures before the last cycle and won top-down ballot races that helped them control the process. “Whoever controls the redistribution can control Congress,” Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote in the spring of 2010, describing the strategy in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. The maps Republicans drew the following year have given the GOP a significant advantage over the past decade. An Associated Press analysis found that in the 2016 election, Republicans won up to 22 more seats in the House than would have been expected based on the average share of the vote in the constituencies of the Congresses across the country.
In this year’s redistribution cycle, Republicans will once again be in control of much of the process. GOP lawmakers are responsible for drawing 187 House districts compared to Democratic lawmakers, who control the drawing of 75 districts, according to an analysis by Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
The remaining 173 borders are drawn by states with divided control, independent commissions, or no map at all because they are single-district states. This is in part because voters in some states have handed control of their redistribution processes to commissions, claiming that voters or appointed commissioners can draw better constituency boundaries than politicians who have an interest in drawing maps that help them retain power.
In another opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal this year, Rove argued that Democrats are stepping up in card-drawing even as they denounce gerrymandering.
“The truth is that both sides are using redistribution to improve their position. However, only one claims to be holier than you in the process,” he said.
What should the census data show and what is the next step in the process?
The data will show – as accurately as possible – where people live, detailing the ethnic, racial and voting age makeup of neighborhoods.
They are expected to show that the nation is diversifying rapidly, as the share of white voters – and potentially even the white population – declines.
The data will be turned over to map designers – state legislatures, independent commissions – who then set out to create House districts of equal size, so that the 435 members represent roughly the same number of voters.
In April, the Census Bureau released state population totals that determine the number of House seats in each state, with just seven seats moving among 13 states – the smallest change since the current model was adopted. breakdown of Congress in the 1940s.
Texas was the biggest winner, taking two seats in the House. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida and North Carolina each won one seat.
The losses were concentrated in the industrial Midwest, where Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio each lost one seat. The Democratic strongholds of California and New York each lost one seat as well.
The data set released Thursday is expected to reinforce a known trend: Hispanics have been the growth engine of the country for the past decade. They are the largest racial and ethnic minority in the country, but this has not automatically translated into more political power, in part due to gerrymandering. And supporters fear that the continuation of the trend will continue to dilute the political power of Latinos.
Latino lawmakers and others have expressed concern that the results released Thursday indicate that the census significantly underestimated the Latin American population, as it has in recent years. Former President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to include a citizenship question in the census and to exclude people without legal authorization to be in the United States from the results scared some to complete the survey, NBC News reported.
Activists from communities of color say they will try to mobilize their constituents to be involved in the process, advocating for fair limits and preparing to lobby against what they see as unfair cards.
Fenika Miller, an activist from Houston County, Ga. Who works with Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the 2011 redistribution helped hurt her community by dividing black communities in several districts.
“You find it hard to see that black people have been fairly represented here. It’s hard for people to believe that we can have more progressive, fair and diverse representation,” she said. “We need to educate people to help them understand how being removed from power negatively impacts our communities and our quality of life.”
How is this cycle different?
The loss of Article 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court gutted in 2013, is likely to result in the most significant change this year from past redistribution cycles, activists said and experts. The provision required states to prove to the Justice Department that their district cards would not discriminate against voters of color.
“Nothing prevents states from being really aggressive and daring a court to bring him down,” said Li of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Before you knew there was a cop in the field, so you changed your behavior a bit. Now without a cop in the neighborhood you can push the old ladies, you can target communities of color, you can do whatever you want to want, and maybe the cops will show up after someone calls them, but maybe they won’t. “
The move is one of the main reasons voting rights advocates have pushed for federal voting legislation to ban partisan gerrymandering. The proposal is blocked in the Senate.
Additionally, lawyers said, a more recent Supreme Court ruling that federal courts could not review partisan gerrymander claims gave Republicans a ready defense against those who might argue that a card is discriminatory. There is a strong overlap between race and partisanship.
Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel and senior deputy director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights advocacy group, said partisan gerrymandering was of particular concern to him in Georgia, where black voters were key to the President Joe Biden’s victory last year and the results of the Senate second round in January that gave Democrats control of the Senate. Republicans control all three branches of state government, as well as the redistribution process.
Greenbaum, one of the authors of a recent Lawyers’ Committee report outlining the risks of partisan gerrymandering in the state, noted that Georgia’s voter registration form requires voters to register their race, and not their party.
“I’m sure you’re going to hear from the mapmakers in Georgia: partisanship, partisanship, partisanship, partisanship,” he said. “They will avoid using the word ‘race’ as much as they can.”
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