The Supreme Court should seize the chance to strike down voter discrimination
*This case before the Supreme Court isn’t getting the attention it deserves. It’ll have deep repercussions for Latino voters across the country, and many of those voters don’t know or don’t understand what’s going on. MALDEF’s Nina Perales does a very good job of framing the issue and putting it in its proper perspective. VL
By Nina Perales, The Washington Post
Texas has a long history of voting discrimination against racial minorities. As Supreme Court rulings invalidated the Texas white primaries in 1944, the poll tax in 1966 and Texas’s system of multi-member state House districts in 1973, Texas turned to redistricting to dilute minority voting strength.
The federal Voting Rights Act is the bulwark against unfair redistricting in Texas. Nationwide, the Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and, for certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination (including Texas), until 2013 it required federal preapproval of voting-related changes. In every decade since the 1970s, courts or the U.S. Justice Department have relied on the Voting Rights Act to block one or more unjust statewide redistricting plans enacted in Texas.
[pullquote]The core of the plaintiffs’ argument in Evenwel v. Abbott is that legislative districts should not be drawn to equalize population.[/pullquote]As minority voters in Texas work to close the historical gap in political participation — relying on federal courts to make slow but steady progress in redistricting — fringe activists from the conservative Project on Fair Representation have filed the Evenwel v. Abbott case in order to neutralize the Voting Rights Act. If their plan for mandatory unequal population in redistricting prevails, Latino and other minority voters will be punished for living in areas with relatively more children and fewer registered voters.
Evenwel seeks to impose a radical new rule for redistricting across the country. Since the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited extreme population deviations across districts more than 50 years ago, states have ensured that the voting districts they draw comprise roughly the same number of people. Texas state Senate districts are drawn in compliance with that rule, yet this lawsuit alleges that those districts are unconstitutional.
The core of the plaintiffs’ argument in Evenwel v. Abbott is that legislative districts should not be drawn to equalize population. Instead, the plaintiffs say that children and other non-voters should not be counted when district lines are drawn, which would result in dramatic variations of population across districts.
Click HERE to read the full story.
Nina Perales is vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She wrote an amicus brief in Evenwel on behalf of the Texas Senate Hispanic Caucus and the Texas House of Representatives Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
[Photo by Claudia A. De La Garza/Flickr]