Don’t Redistrict with Texas

Following the 2010 Census, Texas’ representation in the House increased from thirty-two to thirty-six seats, thanks to population growth driven almost entirely by racial minorities. Faced with an influx of (mostly) Democratic voters, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature proposed a redistricting plan which aimed at reducing their influence. That map was recently struck down by a federal court, and the Supreme Court has forced the Lone Star State to use an interim, judge-drawn congressional map in this year’s election (downloadable from here). The fight over where and how to draw the four new districts illustrates the advantages, as well as the shortcomings, of the Voting Rights Act.

Like most southern states, Texas must have its statewide redistricting plans precleared with either the Justice Department or the federal district court in the District of Columbia. In 1992 and 2002, Republican Attorneys-General were able to shape state maps to their liking; this year, the Democrats are able to block attempts at diluting the voting strength of their supporters. In a state in which racial minorities now form thirty-nine percent of the population, the Texas map, which retained only ten majority-minority districts from last decade and created no new ones, was never likely to be approved. Echoing the language of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the landmark 1992 redistricting case of Shaw v. Reno, the court determined that the shape and composition of Texas’ districts could not be explained without reference to race, and that the map violated the Voting Rights Act.

Passed in 1965, the VRA was intended to end the disenfranchisement and under-registration of African-American voters in the South. Over the decades, federal courts have interpreted it as granting a geographically compact minority population the right to have a district drawn for them. The result has been the packing of African-Americans and Latinos into safe urban Democratic seats, leaving the suburban and rural South covered with safe Republican ones, and allowing the GOP to paint minority office-holders as beneficiaries of the electoral equivalent of affirmative action. The increase in minority office-holding that has resulted has been balanced by a ‘bleaching’ of most districts, so that most white politicians no longer need to appeal to a significant share of minority voters.

The Texas controversy demonstrates the ways in which state legislatures would dilute the votes of minorities if left to their own devices. As noted by Robert Draper in the Atlantic, the new map preserved the five-way split of Fort Worth, in which heavily-growing minority communities are ‘cracked’ into parts of Anglo-majority districts, until the judge-drawn plan granted the city a sixth, majority-minority, seat. Elsewhere in the state, Democratic-leaning groups such as liberal whites in Austin and Mexican-Americans in the state’s rural south are split over multiple districts. Without the constraints imposed by the VRA, Texas Republicans would have been able to gerrymander the state without limits in order to stave off the partisan effects of the state’s changing demographics.

On the other hand, the shortcomings of the VRA are numerous. While electoral reformers in the rest of the world try to move away from single-member districts and first-past-the-post, both features are seen by American litigants as the best way to protect minorities from vote dilution. By equating minority office-holding with racial progress, the VRA channelled the energies of the civil rights movement into re-electing minority members of Congress. By limiting its provisions to racial and linguistic minorities, it fails to protect other types of minority (such as San Francisco’s gay population, who were undoubtedly victims of hostile gerrymandering in the 1970s and 1980s). Worst of all, the focus on racially-gerrymandered districts has diverted attention from the more widespread phenomenon of less-race-conscious partisan gerrymandering.

It’s time to recognise that no system of single-member districts can make the House live up to John Adams’ wish that it would be “in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large” by adequately reflecting America’s ideological and demographic diversity. Larger, multi-member seats choosing members of Congress by open-list proportional representation or by the Single Transferable Vote would better achieve the goals of the VRA without leaving voters at the mercy of computer-assisted legislative gerrymandering. It would also allow any minority, whether racial or otherwise and whether geographically compact or dispersed, the chance to achieve its fair share of representation.