Texas GOP’s secret anti-Hispanic plot: Smoking gun emails revealed

*Meanwhile … away from the border and the crisis that’s nudged all other issues important to Latinos to the sidelines, a precedent setting lawsuit began toady in Texas. At stake is the right of Latinos voters to elect representatives of their choosing. A possible outcome could be a change in the way electoral districts are drawn, as well as a way of putting teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. If you’re a registered voter, this will eventually affect you – even if you don’t vote in Texas. VL

By Miriam Rozen, Salon

On Nov. 17, 2010, Eric Opiela sent an email to Gerard Interiano. A Texas Republican Party associate general counsel, Opiela served at that time as a campaign adviser to the state’s speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio; he was about to become the man who state lawmakers understood spoke “on behalf of the Republican Congressmen from Texas,” according to minority voting-rights plaintiffs, who have sued Texas for discriminating against them.

A few weeks before receiving Opiela’s email, Interiano had started as counsel to Straus’ office. He was preparing to assume top responsibility for redrawing the state’s political maps; he would become the “one person” on whom the state’s redistricting “credibility rests,” according to Texas’ brief in voting-rights litigation.

In the Nov. 17, 2010, email, Opelia asked Interiano to look for specific data about Hispanic populations and voting patterns.

“These metrics would be useful to identify the ‘nudge factor’ by which one can analyze which census blocks, when added to a particular district [they] help pull the district’s Total Hispanic pop … to majority status, but leave the Spanish surname RV [registered voters] and TO [turnout] the lowest,” Opiela writes to the mapmaker.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo  by athrasher/Flickr]

 

 

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