Michael Harriott thread on racial gerrymandering

[Nevilledog]

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Michael Harriot
@michaelharriot
If you're one of the people who wonder if the sudden need for voting rights legislation is about race, the facts are impossible to explain in a brief two-minute segment on the news so:

A thread.
3:20 PM · Jan 8, 2022

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If you're one of the people who wonder if the sudden need for voting rights legislation is about race, the facts are impossible to explain in a brief two-minute segment on the news so:

A thread.

It began with a dude named Ernest Montgomery, who was the only Black councilman in Calera, Ala. He represented a district that was mostly Black

The interesting thing about Calera is that the town's demographics are almost the EXACT mirror of the state of Alabama.
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In 2008, when it was time for him to run again, the town decided to redraw the district lines. So they gerrymandered the Black district, which...

You know what?

I know someone who can explain it better.

Why'd they do this? Well, because during the presidential election for Barack Obama, something weird happened in AL:

Black people were registered in droves. And when it came time for the election, they OUTVOTED white people.
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But, because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this was actually illegal. According to the VRA, places with a history of voter suppression, including the entire state of AL, were supposed to get permission (or preclearance) from the DOJ before changing their voting maps or rules.

Alabama didn't do this, so Montgomery lost the election. When the DOJ found out, the Attorney General told Calera:

He ordered a new election and Montgomery won his seat back.

This may seem like a victory, but this was EXACTLY what Republicans were hoping for. For years, they had filled the Supreme Court with judges who were hostile to voting rights. Now they had their chance.

They basically argued that Alabama wasn't racist anymore so they shouldn't be subject to a preclearance formula that was 40 yrs old (you know they think racism was something that was "back then&quot

So Shelby County, Ala. (where Calera is located) sued attorney general Eric Holder
When SCOTUS decided Shelby v. Holder, the court's most virulently anti-voting rights justice just happened to be Chief Justice John Roberts. He basically said:

"Because the preclearance formula successfully stopped racists from being racists, we can't say they're still racists.

"Let's get rid of the formula that stopped racists from being racist. And since the DOJ won't have anything to judge racism (except the ENTIRE HISTORY OF AMERICA), they should stop judging racists until Congress creates a new racism formula"

He wrote that down on paper!
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But of course, maybe they were right. Maybe those places had changed. Maybe racism was over and poll taxes were a thing of the past. So, what happened?

Within 24 hrs, Texas passed a voter ID law that constitutional scholars called "racist AF."

Or, as a Federal Court found:
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Alabama and Mississippi soon followed suit (Fun Fact: Mississippi is also one of the states where Black people register and vote at higher rates than d'wights)

By the time next national election in 2016, guess which places had new voting laws?

The "formerly" racist places.
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Now, here is the thing: The Shelby v. Holder (and a lot of other rulings) are based on widely-held assumptions:

1. That a thing is only racist if its INTENT is to discriminate–the EFFECT doesn't matter.

A lot of people believe this (It's John Roberts's entire legal philosophy)
This only applies to racism, though. When someone spits in your face, does the wetness of your face depend on the spitter's intent? If we applied that concept to anything other than racism, we wouldn't need manslaughter laws or adult diapers

You can't truly know someone's intent
The EFFECT of the actions is what matters.

The second concept is:

2. Racism is a thing of the past.

Maybe you can name an example where this country achieved racial progress because white people collectively said: "Let's do better."

I can't.

Slavery didn't end by choice. It took laws, constitutional amendments & the bloodiest war in the history of America to stop it. Laws, court rulings and bloodshed ended Jim Crow, lynching, redlining, segregation and racial disenfranchisement, not goodwill or the passage of time.

Yet, for some reason, people still believe we don't need laws to prevent white people from acting the way they acted since the day they arrived on this continent.

I know it sounds like I'm ranting, but this actually brings us back to Shelby v. Holder.

See, the Shelby v. Holder (and many other recent SCOTUS rulings on racial discrimination) were decided on the concept that the EFFECT of a law can be racist as long as it wasn't created with racist INTENT

They have literally redefined racism by making it unprovable

For instance, in '19, SCOTUS & your boy Roberts wrote that partisan gerrymandering is OK if it isn't done with racist intent. And, because you can't prove intent, they can openly target Black districts for gerrymandering as long as they claim it's political

Again, it's on paper.
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Here is where I inject a crazy conspiracy theory, but this one is actually true.

Shortly after the SCOTUS decided in Rucho v. Common Cause to let North Carolina gerrymander away Black voters' power, Stephanie Hofeller found her deceased father's hard drive.
When she looked at the contents, she was like: "Y'all gotta see this all this bullshit!"

But before she could let us see all that bullshit, NC filed a lawsuit to stop her from letting us see all that bullshit. But Stephanie didn't give a fuck no goddamned lawsuit

So she put that bullshit on the internet.

What was the bullshit that NC didn't want us to see?

Stephanie's dad was Thomas Hofeller, the man known as the "master of the modern gerrymander" (White people are TERRIBLE at nicknaming. I would've called him "Tom N. Gerrymaster&quot
Hofeller drew up the NC map that went to the SCOTUS. So what was on his hard drive?

Intent.

70,000 emails, spreadsheets & documents showing race was the ONLY factor in NC redistricting. He even pitched a map that could've created an all-white legislature

To Fix Racial Gerrymander, N.C. Republicans Considered a Map That Could Have Elected an All-White Slate
The draft maps, obtained by The Intercept, illustrate how Republican mapmakers can secretly calibrate maps to have a deep partisan bias, even when they follow the rules.
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/30/north-carolina-gerrymandering-maps-redistricting/
But that's not all. It turns out, Hoefeller had secretly created maps for Republicans in other states used to gerrymander their states.

Which states?

The racist ones. All were either under preclearance or passed restrictive laws after Shelby v Holder.

Well...ALMOST all of them
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To be fair, there was one map that predated Shelby v. Holder...The redistricting map for the great state of Alabama.

One document contained summaries of each map Ala was considering.

The summaries were literally just how many Black people would live in the proposed district
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Did the gerrymandering, Voter ID and voter suppression work?

In 2008 & 2012 Black voters in Ala, Texas, & NC outvoted white voters. The same thing happened in 2016.

But after the gutting of the VRA that stopped states from passing restrictive voting laws, watch what happened:
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Shelby vs. Holder is what struck down preclearance & the VRA.
If that never happened, states wouldn't be able to pass these restrictive voting laws.
If states hadn't passed these restrictive preclearance laws, there wouldn't be this new call for voting rights legislation

History, data and an actual hard drive show that it is ALL about race. Nothing else.

But the most important question is:

What if they took all that energy they use to stop Black people from voting & actually put it toward liberty and justice for all?

I guess we'll never know.

[wendyb-NC]

1. Excellent article

It explains a lot. Thank you, for posting it.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Partisan Gerrymandering is being used to disguised racial gerrymadering

I have been volunteering on voter protection issues for a very long time. One of the key provisions of the Manchin proposal is the elimination of partisan gerrymandering. I have testified before the Texas state house and Senate committees a while back on the Texas redistricting plans and had fun following the Texas redistricting case. MALDEF used part of my testimony to contest the state house maps in my county which were heavily gerrymandered, but the court was unable to do anything due to the SCOTUS ruing set forth below. I first heard of the efficiency gap theory a while back from a presentation by Chad Dunn (the lawyer who won the Texas voter id/voter suppression case) and this concept is in effect a major part of the Manchin proposal

Racial gerrymandering has been illegal for a while but the SCOTUS has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not covered by the Voting Rights Act https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/731847977/supreme-court-rules-partisan-gerrymandering-is-beyond-the-reach-of-federal-court

In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Trump Threatens Census Delay After Supreme Court Leaves Citizenship Question Blocked
Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution.

Partisan gerrymanding is a method where districts are drawn so that Democratic voters are packed into districts with large majorities while republican districts are drawn so to maximize the number of seats won by GOP candidates

Republicans managed to both maximize their advantage and minimize Democratic power by drawing district lines to pack as many Democrats as possible into three districts, and then cracking other potentially Democratic districts in half or thirds, diluting the Democratic vote to create safe Republican districts.

The League of Women Voters, one of the challengers in the case, pointed out that the GOP had even split predominantly Democratic Greensboro so that half of the dorms at historically black North Carolina A&T State University were put in one Republican district, and half in another.

You can combat partisan gerrymandering with a concept called the efficiency gap where one attempts to draw districts so that GOP and Democratic voters are in effect spread more equitably. Here is a brief explanation of this concept by the Brennan Center https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/How_the_Efficiency_Gap_Standard_Works.pdf

The efficiency gap is a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering that is currently at the heart
of the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Whitford v. Nichol.

Developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and
Eric McGhee, Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, the efficiency gap counts
the number of votes each party wastes in an election to determine whether either party enjoyed a
systematic advantage in turning votes into seats.2 Any vote cast for a losing candidate is considered
wasted, as are all the votes cast for a winning candidate in excess of the number needed to win.

Here is another explanation of this concept https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/03/upshot/how-the-new-math-of-gerrymandering-works-supreme-court.html

The Supreme Court is considering a gerrymandering case in Wisconsin. At the core of the debate is a new way to measure gerrymandering. Here’s the simple math behind it. RELATED ARTICLE

Ever since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy left the door open to a “workable standard” to limit partisan gerrymandering, political scientists have sought to construct a measure to satisfy him. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will test whether they’ve pulled it off.

At the center of the case is the “efficiency gap,” a relatively new measure of partisan gerrymandering. A federal court in Wisconsin ruled in November that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature had discriminated against Democratic voters, and it partly relied on the efficiency gap to find that the Wisconsin State Assembly map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Whether it’s persuasive to Justice Kennedy — expected to be the key swing vote in the case — is another matter. The efficiency gap is not a perfect measure. But it would probably address many of gerrymandering’s problems, with few downsides.

The Manchin proposal on getting rid of partisan gerrymanding is a major deal. This one proposal would make a major difference in the real world