The Left’s Pernicious Redistricting Strategy
Hans A. von Spakovsky
The Corner
The Project on Fair Representation (PFR) has filed a lawsuit in Texas that has not gotten much national attention but has important implications for the redistricting process after the 2010 Census. PFR is representing eleven residents of Irving, Texas, who have sued the city because of electoral changes made in response to a prior lawsuit filed by a Hispanic activist.
After Irving’s at-large system of city-council elections was struck down by a federal court as a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it supposedly diluted the vote of Hispanics, the city agreed to implement a new system with six single-member districts and only two at-large districts. In other words, rather than have the city-council members elected at large by all Irving voters, the city agreed to carve out individual districts and stipulate that only the voters living in a given district could vote for the city-council member representing that district.
The problem is that the city agreed to draw the new districts based on the total population of Irving, which includes large numbers of noncitizens. While Irving is 40 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of those Hispanics are not U.S. citizens and therefore not entitled to vote. The city drew six individual districts, one of which has a majority Hispanic population. But because the city disregarded citizenship, that particular Hispanic district only has 13,000 citizens of voting age. By comparison, other districts in Irving have approximately 23,000 citizens of voting age.
The result is that the votes of citizens in those districts are substantially diluted when compared with the votes of citizens in the Hispanic district; indeed, the vote of citizens in the Hispanic district are worth nearly twice as much as the votes of citizens in the other districts. This is an obvious violation of the “one man, one vote” principle. Irving’s plan weighs the votes of citizens differently depending on where they live.
Why is this important? Because the way the districts were drawn in Irving — based on total population instead of citizen population — is a very deliberate strategy that the Left wants to replicate wherever it can. By under-populating Hispanic districts that tend to vote Democratic and over-populating non-Democratic districts, the Democratic party can consolidate its political power. This is a pernicious political strategy designed to increase Democrats’ political strength using noncitizens, including illegal aliens.
PFR should win this case because the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which includes Texas) has previously ruled that courts should consider the citizen voting-age population of groups challenging electoral practices under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But that rule should apply to all redistricting, not just cases involving litigation under the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue. What would be ideal is for this case to reach the Supreme Court on appeal so that the Fifth Circuit’s commonsense rule could be implemented nationwide for all redistricting.
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