Supreme Court blocks redistricting plan that 'packed' black voters

[sinkingfeeling]

Source: USAToday.com

WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court dealt a blow to a Republican redistricting plan in Alabama Wednesday that packed black voters into urban districts to dilute their impact elsewhere.

The court's liberal justices, along with Justice Anthony Kennedy, upheld the objections raised by Democratic and black lawmakers and sent the case back for further review by a lower court.

That court had upheld political maps drawn by Alabama's Republican state Legislature in 2012 that maintained or increased the percentages of black voters in black lawmakers' districts.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/25/supreme-court-political-redistricting/21698137/

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This is a running headline. I will post as story becomes available.

[PoliticAverse]

1. Link to text of the actual court decision (.pdf)

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-895_o7jq.pdf

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Thanks.

[Thinkingabout]

3. I look at the district lines drawn in Texas, what a shame the GOP is so vile and dirty to

do any and everything to distort the rights of citizens to have a fair election. I hope this gerrymandering can become obsolete and allow correct line to be drawn. Hopefully SC will turn some more of these redistricting attempts back.

[PoliticAverse]

5. "allow correct line to be drawn." - there is no such thing as an objectively 'correct' line.

[eggplant]

12. There can be ones generated by machine with well-understood and accepted inherent bias.

No matter what method, one side can argue that it benefits the other side. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to partition land into fair and reasonable regions, based solely on geography and population.

It really isn't that hard.

[Thinkingabout]

13. If you looked at Texas districts and realize there is a thin line from Houston to Austin

why make the lines in strips except to elect more republicans. they make more smaller population districts and make very large democratic districts, more people with one representative and a small population district with a representative and they get a representative but when they vote in the legislative it is not a fair spread of the population.

[ieoeja]

16. Each district has to have roughly the same population.

There is a science to gerrymandering. I'm no expert in it. But I will play one on DU!

Let's say you have 900 voters who must be spread evenly across 3 districts. Each district has 300 voters and requires 151 to win. The demographic makeup of the total is:

200 African-Americans
60 Latinos
200 White Liberals
440 White Conservatives

Split equitably you would have 147, 147 and 146 White Conservatives in each of the 3 districts. Making each district a toss-up. Instead ...

District 1 - guaranteed one Democratic seat
200 AAs
20 Latinos
80 White Liberals

Districts 2 & 3 - guaranteed two Republican seats
20 Latinos
60 White Liberals
220 White Conservatives

[Igel]

20. The propriety of that's varied over the years.

Gerrymandering has a long and distinguished history in liberal courts. If you think that a population that's 30% AA should have, ideally, 30% AA members in the legislature then you might want to gerrymander to pack districts.

Otherwise you might wind up, as happened, with 20 districts where the black candidate gets less than 50% of the vote and no district where black candidates get more than 50% of the vote. This is a "good" use of gerrymandering. Some such districts have stretched credulity to the thickness of gold leaf.

To do the same with a Latino population is fine. We just don't like calling this "gerrymandering." It's "ensuring proportional representation." Motive matters.

At the same time race is so strongly correlated with party affiliation that the appropriateness of gerrymandering boils down, at times, precisely to motivation. You want a (R) district, you gerrymander. You want a (D) district, you gerrymander. Heck, you want to keep incumbents in office, you gerrymander. When I lived in one state two representatives suddenly were thrust into the same district when the area was redistricted. The lines drawn were entirely reasonable--they went along major highways and between communities. It was considered a partisan gerrymander, even though the districts that resulted were really compact and ethnically random, because in other cases the party in power gerrymandered to suit themselves. The (D) called for gerrymandering to protect their incumbents.

The entire process reeks. The only time it smells sweet is when your party profits. And about the only time a party wants to throw it to a non-partisan commission is when the committee is crypto-partisan ("Hi, I've voted reliably (R) for the last 30 years, but since this is a non-partisan committee I will not be acting as a (R)." Right. It's like a lot of boards of elections, where they're non-partisan but every member or nearly so votes (D) or every member or nearly so votes (R).) Or when the state or area is so reliably in the pocket of one party that the legislature can't imagine a time when it would help the opposition.

[rurallib]

4. Anthony Kennedy: America's most powerful unelected person

[hughee99]

8. He's in charge of the FED?

I thought he was a SC justice?

[daleanime]

15. Helped to strip the voting rights act....

among other things.

[Nye Bevan]

6. If I could pick one new constitutional amendment, it would be to outlaw gerrymandering.

All district boundaries should be based on the distribution of population and communities and have nothing to do with race or politics. In the UK all constituency boundaries are set by a nonpartisan Boundary Commission and we should do the same.

[mountain grammy]

7. Agree, along with term limits for SCOTUS, campaign finance limits, and more.

Our Constitution has never needed amending more than now.

[AlbertCat]

10. A computer algorithm....

...... could set up districts nicely.

[samsingh]

14. to say we believe in Democracy, that is a must

[Gothmog]

9. This is great news for the Texas redistricting case

[Xithras]

11. Packing, Cracking, Stacking. This stuff gets complicated.

I participated in the process of redrawing the election district boundaries in my home city a few years back. One of our cities longstanding problems is underrepresentation of latino voters, and several people went in with the idea that they could create a hispanic majority district to guarantee a hispanic voice on the city council. They quickly learned the intricacies of the law.

Packing: Illegal. Drawing boundaries to encompass one particular racial or ethnic group, whether or not its for their benefit.

Cracking: Illegal. Dividing areas with a large racial or ethnic minority into multiple districts in a way that prevents them from winning seats.

Stacking: Illegal. Combining low income minority areas with wealthier areas. Because wealthier areas have the resources to dominate poorer areas politically, this leaves the poorer areas without political representation.

We lost hair trying to find a middle path between these. In the end, the city ended up with one district with a hispanic majority, but that district has never actually managed to elect a hispanic because they are politically dominated by the middle class white areas that had to be included to comply with the law. Our city, with a nearly 40% hispanic population, has an all white city council because of it.

And the poor areas continue to be ignored. Our poorest neighborhoods don't even have fucking SEWER SYSTEMS or SIDEWALKS. In a city of over 200,000 people, that should be a goddamned crime.

[snooper2]

18. They use outhouses or septic tanks? what city is this?

[Xithras]

19. Modesto California

Hispanic groups filed suit against the city in 2011, and the settlement put the issue on the ballot. After city voters passed the measure, sewer services have been extended into some of the larger areas that lacked them, but not all of them. Even the neighborhoods that did get sewers still lack basics like sidewalks, street lights, and storm drains.

The city of Modesto has a longstanding tradition of allowing the county to approve developments on the city fringes. Wealthier neighborhoods get annexed into the city, while poorer neighborhoods aren't. There are neighborhoods deep within the city that are not "formally" part of the town. The city offers no services to them, the city police won't respond to calls there, and most of the areas become slums. The homes in those areas rely on the county sheriff for law enforcement and septic tanks for their sewage.

This article discusses it a bit, but erroneously claims that Parklawn is the last unincorporated to get sewers. Parklawn is the last large neighborhood to get them, but there are still other small ones: http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/unincorporated-neighborhood-finally-getting-sewer-service-18849

[Geoff R. Casavant]

17. Gosh, there sure are a lot of these cases.

And they always seem to come from the same states too.

If only there were some way to have these repeat offenders submit their plans ahead of time to some kind of department that looks out for justice. Not even the whole department, maybe just a small division of that department . . . one that is concerned with civil rights.

That would be totally awesome.