Votebeat

What we know about Galveston County’s redistricting and what it means for voters

2026-08-25T09:44:00+00:00

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Galveston County’s decision to redraw local precinct lines this year between the primary and general elections means some voters could cast general election ballots in contests where they had no say in the primary, unless the courts intervene.

Election experts say they’re not aware of any prior instance where this has happened. Galveston County’s latest round of changes is adding new complications to a long-running lawsuit over the maps the county had adopted in 2021, and voting rights advocates say the new maps could further dilute Black and Latino voting power in the county.

When the county redistricted in 2021, county leaders openly said their goal was to draw lines that would be friendly to electing a commissioners court with a Republican majority. Voting rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice subsequently filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Galveston County voters, claiming the map was unconstitutional and violated the Voting Rights Act because it eliminated the only majority-minority commissioners court precinct. The challenge before the court now alleges the county intentionally dismantled that precinct because of race. That case is still pending.

Then, this past June, commissioners voted to redraw precinct boundaries throughout the county for commissioners, constables, and justices of the peace — once again citing partisan aims behind the change. Voting rights advocates again sued, this time on behalf of three county residents in Texas state courts, saying the move to redistrict between a primary and a general election violates state and federal laws. That case is now pending before the Texas Supreme Court.

Here’s what we know:

Why are Galveston County commissioners redrawing lines now?

Galveston County Judge Mark Henry in June told the Houston Chronicle that the latest map accomplishes his goal of turning Galveston County Republican. Henry did not respond to a request for comment from Votebeat.

But the unusually timed change could serve another purpose for the county too, coming as it continues to argue against legal challenges to the 2021 map. A day after Galveston County commissioners approved the newest map, the county told the federal judge overseeing the federal case over the 2021 map that the changes rendered the lawsuit over that map moot, according to court documents.

“This Court no longer has jurisdiction to consider declaratory or injunctive relief relating to implementation of the 2021 Map,” Galveston County lawyers said in their court filing.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown of the Southern District of Texas rejected that argument. In an order that effectively kept the 2021 challenge alive, he described the timing of the new maps as “highly suspicious.” Brown noted that the county could have redrawn lines to accomplish their partisan aims at any time since the 2021 map was issued, but chose to do so between the 2026 primary and general elections even though the change was unlikely to shift partisan outcomes until the 2028 election.

“If the defendants really cared about improving Republican partisan performance, they would have changed the 2021 map before the primary election to encourage a Republican to run for Justice of the Peace in that now-Republican-leaning precinct in 2026,” he wrote.

Is the commissioners’ move to redraw precinct lines after a primary election and about 70 days ahead of the November midterm election legal?

That question is now before the Texas Supreme Court. The plaintiffs say that it isn’t legal, but Galveston County officials argue that it is.

What do the Galveston County residents suing the county argue?

Plaintiffs argue that the county cannot hold the March primary under one set of precinct boundaries and then conduct the November midterm election under another.

The plaintiffs say the county should be required to hold a new primary because otherwise, some voters who can vote for an office in November would never have had the chance to vote for that same office in the primary election. In addition, they argue some candidates would not have had the chance to run for office because they weren’t in the correct precinct at the time of the primary. Plaintiffs say moving forward with the new map violates state and federal laws requiring all voters to be treated equally and fairly.

“This is a matter of federal equal protection. You have to run your elections in a manner that allows equal access to them,” said Mark Gaber, Campaign Legal Center’s senior director of redistricting litigation. “Galveston County is just dispensing with that part of the process and just deciding who the candidates are.”

What do Galveston County leaders say?

Galveston County officials did not respond to a request for comment.

But in an Aug. 10 filing with the Texas Supreme Court, the county argued that state law does give them the authority to redraw precinct lines between a primary and a general election. They also argue that redrawing the lines doesn’t mean that the county must conduct a new primary in order for voters to cast ballots in November. County attorneys in the filings said that state law does not “freeze precinct boundaries in place once a primary occurs.”

What’s the status of the lawsuit?

The latest case filed in state court has followed a convoluted legal route, but is now pending a decision in the Texas Supreme Court. The court could request additional information, or rule based on the existing record.

What are the implications for voters?

The shifting boundaries have confused voters who aren’t sure who their candidates are or which district they’ll belong to come November, said Sarah Chen, senior supervising attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. And depending on how the court rules, they could shift again.

“I think people are still even trying to understand what the impact is because it happened so quickly and so just like out of the blue,” Chen said.

Which Galveston County communities are most affected?

Under the 2021 redistricting, county commissioners redrew Precinct 3, historically a predominantly Black and Latino district that was the county’s only majority-minority district, significantly but did not change the justice of the peace and constable boundary lines within it. The 2026 map does, and likely eliminates the only remaining majority-minority justice of the peace and constable districts that remained.

Brown, the federal judge overseeing the 2021 case, in his order described that as “the primary partisan change under the new map,” but said it likely wouldn’t kick in until the 2028 election.

“People in our community are enraged. It doesn’t make any sense why they keep doing this to Precinct 3,” Lucille McGaskey, a resident of the precinct who isn’t one of the plaintiffs in either lawsuit, told Votebeat in an interview. “For years we’ve built a coalition of Black and Latino voters to have a seat at the table, and now it feels like we can’t even have that. We only have this precinct, Precinct 3.”

Administratively, is redrawing precinct lines now doable for election officials?

Galveston County Clerk Dwight Sullivan, who oversees the county’s elections, did not respond to a request for comment. But other Texas election officials have told Votebeat that redistricting is a time-consuming task that requires a lot of attention to detail to make sure that voters’ addresses are aligned with the correct boundaries. Redistricting now, in the midst of ongoing legal challenges and on a tight timeline, could create more opportunities for errors — a concern Texas election officials are already familiar with, as the state’s mid-cycle congressional redistricting and ensuing legal challenges left them scrambling.

The first deadline election officials are up against ahead of the November election is coming up on Sept. 19, when ballots must be mailed to military and overseas voters who have already requested them. By then, election officials must know which precincts voters will be assigned to.

Has this been done before?

Gaber and Chen said they had never heard of something like this happening anywhere else, and if allowed to go ahead, it could set a new precedent.

“I think it’s such a dangerous precedent for something far worse than just gerrymandering. It’s like changing the rules in the middle of the election to discard the votes of the voters and to prevent candidates from running,” Gaber said.

Could other places also decide to redraw lines before the November election?

Yes, it’s a possibility, if the courts don’t step in.

Chen pointed to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to the decision, plaintiffs could prove a claim under Section 2 by showing evidence of a disparate impact on minority voters, regardless of whether the mapmakers intended it. Now, they must be able to show a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” the high court’s conservative majority declared, a much higher bar.

Earlier this year when the ruling came out, experts warned that it could undo decades of progress that expanded the voting power of Black and Latino voters in Texas and elsewhere.

“We all knew there was going to be this wave of local redistricting,” following Louisiana v. Callais, Chen said. “And we’re preparing for that. We just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. It is like, mindfully disruptive and illogical according to the norms of our democracy to try to redistrict in June and after a primary election.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

A dispute over Missouri’s congressional map could snowball into a legal and logistical elections crisis

2026-06-01T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

It was another week of on-and-off redistricting drama: In case you missed it, it’s on in Florida and off in Alabama and South Carolina. But there’s one state where a legal and logistical crisis is brewing over the fact that election officials can’t agree on whether redistricting is on or off. Call it Schrödinger’s map.

Missouri was one of the first states to heed President Donald Trump’s call for Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional lines. But unlike the others that have done so, Missouri allows residents who don’t like a law passed by the legislature to gather signatures to put that law to a statewide vote. Opponents of the new Republican gerrymander did just that, and in December they submitted more than 305,000 signatures to the secretary of state — almost three times as many as are required to make the ballot.

Crucially, under the Missouri Constitution, a law that is referred to a public vote isn’t supposed to take effect unless and until voters approve it — meaning the mere existence of a referendum on the map should have been enough to prevent it from being used in the 2026 election. But, breaking from precedent, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins took the position that merely submitting the signatures wasn’t enough to put the map on hold. Instead, he said, the map would remain good law until his office officially verified all the signatures and certified the referendum for the ballot. That decision was legally challenged, but the Missouri Supreme Court sided with Hoskins.

As things stand today, the referendum still is not officially certified. Hoskins has until Aug. 4 to make a final determination. The problem is, Aug. 4 is also the date of the Missouri primary — and local election officials have to plan to hold that election under one map or the other. They have to assign voters to the appropriate districts in their computer systems as soon as possible and send out the first ballots to overseas and military voters by mid-June.

With the Republican gerrymander still technically on the books, Hoskins is telling county clerks to plan for the primary to take place under the new map — even though it’s very likely that the referendum got enough signatures to qualify.

At least one clerk is not yet doing that.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, a Democrat, initially said she would not update voters’ information to reflect the new map while the referendum remained uncertified. She has since gained the ability to load both the old and new congressional lines into the state voter registration system and toggle between them, but she still has not decided which map to use for the August primary.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, a Democrat

“We’re trying to look down the timeline building up to August 4 and figure out what the least likely damage will result from,” Lennon told Votebeat. In theory, Lennon said, her office could create two sets of ballots, include both possible congressional districts on a single ballot, or go “full bore” into the old congressional map and hope that it turns out to be the right one. Those were the kinds of questions she said clerks had hoped to have answered “well before we started setting up for the election.”

For Lennon, the uncertainty is not just technical. She is worried “about the validity of the results of the August primary.” Candidates have already filed to run under the new congressional map. But if Hoskins certifies the referendum, the Missouri Supreme Court has confirmed the map would be paused until voters decide whether to approve it. “And if that’s the case, does that mean we’ve just run a primary election on a set of maps that are no longer valid?” Lennon said.

The logistical burden is concentrated in just a handful of places. Most Missouri counties either are not affected by the new map or would move wholesale from one congressional district to another, making the change relatively simple. But four counties — Boone, Jackson, St. Charles, and St. Louis — have voters who must be reassigned at a more granular level because the new map changes the lines within the county. For those clerks, the uncertainty is not just which map is legally correct, but how much time they have to build ballots and voter records around it.

“Right now it’s every county for themselves and not everyone will make the same decision,” Lennon said.

That frustration is shared by Clinton Jenkins, the Republican Miller County clerk who serves as president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities.

Jenkins has described communication with Hoskins’ office as poor since Hoskins took office last year, telling the Missouri Independent in mid-May that Hoskins had failed to provide guidance on the switch, and that Jenkins’ efforts to build a relationship between clerks and the secretary of state’s office “just never materialized.”

After the Missouri Independent article was published, Jenkins said, Hoskins asked for a meeting and accused Jenkins of being “a liar” over his claims of poor communication. In that meeting, Jenkins said, Hoskins also told him he was committed to “hold firm” to the Aug. 4 deadline for a final answer on certifying the referendum — the same day as the primary.

“He said we were in uncharted waters,” said Jenkins. “At least this has meant more communication with clerks.”

But more communication has not brought more clarity. Hoskins has told clerks to prepare to use the new map because, for now, it remains in effect. But Jenkins said he has not told them what to do if the referendum is certified on or near Aug. 4, suspending that same map just as voters are using it. Instead, Jenkins said, Hoskins has told clerks only that he expects them to comply with whatever map is in effect.

Hoskins’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

Hoskins’ critics are also worried his stance could provoke a constitutional crisis. It’s possible that Hoskins announces the referendum has made the ballot — legally blocking the use of the new congressional districts — on the same day that voters are actively voting in those new districts. That could throw the legitimacy of the primary into doubt — it’s even possible the results could be thrown out in court, said Lennon.

No one can say with confidence what would happen next. Lennon said she expects litigation after the primary “no matter what,” because candidates would likely have standing to challenge the outcome if the election is held under a map that is later suspended. The question then would move from election offices to the courts: whether the primary results still count, whether Missouri must somehow redo part of the election before November, or whether it is too late in the cycle to change course. For now, Lennon said, all of those outcomes seem possible.

Practically speaking, though, August is too late in the summer to order and pull off a whole new primary election under different lines before November. So realistically, whatever congressional map is used on Aug. 4 is also going to be used in the general election — even if it’s the map that is legally not supposed to be in force.

That’s certainly Hoskins’ position. “I would say that it’s too far along in the election in order to change the maps for 2026,” Hoskins told St. Louis Public Radio earlier this month. Of course, that’s a convenient truth for Republicans, who are eager to use the new map because it increases their chance of holding onto the House in 2026. Indeed, the maps’ opponents and local clerks argue this was Hoskins’ plan all along: drag his feet on certifying the referendum so as to leave election officials with no choice but to implement the gerrymander.

If that was the plan, and if it works, House Republicans will have Hoskins personally to thank for almost certainly adding one member to their ranks next year. But if a court rules after the primary that Missouri just held an election under an illegal map, well, it could be a very chaotic few months for the state’s top election official.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Two reminders that the rules of the 2026 election are still in flux

2026-05-11T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

With less than six months until the general election, and state primaries already well underway, you’d think that the rules of engagement for the 2026 midterms would be set by now. But two developments last week should quickly disabuse you of that notion.

Redistricting risks confusing voters and costing states millions

First up: Multiple states are plowing ahead with redrawing their congressional districts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. As we reported in last week’s newsletter, the flurry of mid-decade redistricting has already diluted the voting power of millions of people. But there’s another consequence to redrawing maps specifically at this late juncture: It will throw primary elections that are actively underway into disarray, confusing voters, forcing election officials to scramble, and costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

For example, after the Callais decision ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, quickly issued an emergency executive order suspending the state’s May 16 congressional primary for U.S. House candidates — even though voting had already started. Approximately 42,000 voters had already cast absentee ballots with those races on them.

Under Landry’s order, the rest of the primary will go ahead, but votes in those U.S. House races won’t count.

Legal challenges to his order are still pending, voters are confuzzled, and election officials are warning that adding a second primary election just for U.S. House elections will be expensive. “This election cost about $212,000 to $215,000, and so if we still go forward … and have to add the other closed party primary, that’s going to be more money,” Louis Perret, the Lafayette Parish clerk of court, said in an interview with KADN-TV. Perret estimated the statewide cost at around $8 million.

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a new map on May 4, county election supervisors say they’re preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars sending voters updated information about their new districts and clarifying where they’ll be voting. Alabama has petitioned courts to let it use a previous version of its congressional map, which would require new primary elections this summer, and a state fiscal note attached to the legislation estimates that could cost $4.5 million over two fiscal years.

Tennessee, which enacted a new map on Thursday, also enacted a law that eliminated the requirement for counties to notify voters by mail when their precincts and polling places change, according to the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, though counties can still get reimbursed by the state if they choose to send the mailings. This would save money but leave voters responsible for figuring that out themselves. “When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” the coalition wrote.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court on Friday overturned the congressional map voters passed in a referendum late last month, citing problems with the process lawmakers followed in putting it on the ballot. That means the millions of dollars the state spent on the election was essentially for naught.

It does also mean that state and local election officials will avoid the “very, very time-consuming, incredibly detailed process” of assigning voters to the new districts while preparing to administer the upcoming August primary election, said Chris Piper, who was Virginia’s chief election official until 2022.

“In order to make those changes, it takes quite a lot of work,” he said.

The feds aren’t sure what to do with Trump’s mail voting executive order

Redistricting isn’t the only thing that could turn the midterms on their head. On March 31, President Donald Trump issued a second executive order on elections that would have given the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots, which immediately drew legal challenges.

Democrats, voting rights groups, and states all filed lawsuits challenging the order. In a May 1 filing in a lawsuit consolidating some of those challenges, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuits and not issue a preliminary injunction blocking the order. That was no surprise, but more notable was their reasoning for it: The department argued that the lawsuits were premature because federal agencies haven’t even started to implement the order yet.

The order called for the creation of three separate lists of potential voters, including a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state. But as Votebeat reported, it didn’t specify what any of these lists had to do with each other or, really, anything about how the order was supposed to work.

In statements accompanying the filing, leaders at the U.S. Postal Service and Social Security Administration basically said they were still figuring out what the order means for them. And the DOJ essentially agreed with many of the order’s critics who had pointed out that the order provided no direction on what to do with the lists it created.

“The Order does not specify any particular purpose or intended use for the State Citizenship Lists,” the department wrote in the filing, “and (other than their creation by the Department of Homeland Security … and transmission to States) does not require anyone inside or outside of the federal government to do anything with those lists.”

The administration’s inaction on implementing Trump’s executive order at least makes it less likely it will change anything for voters or election officials in the 2026 election, even if the courts decline to block it. But if there’s one thing we learned this week, it’s that politicians aren’t afraid to upend election administration if their motivations are strong enough, so the status of the order’s implementation bears watching into the summer and fall.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision could reshape local government across Texas

2026-05-05T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Guillermo Ramos remembers seeing few elected leaders who looked like him while he was growing up in the 1980s in Farmers Branch, a fast-growing affluent suburb northwest of Dallas.

Over the years, Latino representation continued to lag, he said. In 2015, after he had become a lawyer, he decided to do something about it.

Ramos stepped forward as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, alleging that its at-large system of electing board members violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by denying Latino voters the right to elect representatives of their choice. At the time, Latino voters made up 56% of the district, but every Latino school board candidate had lost since at least 1995, the lawsuit said.

The case settled, and as part of the agreement, Ramos was appointed as the board’s first Latino trustee. The settlement also replaced the at-large system — in which every seat was filled by districtwide vote — with what’s known as cumulative voting. The new system lets voters cast as many votes as there are seats on the board, but allows them to stack their votes on a single candidate or spread them across multiple candidates.

Ramos, now 51, won the next election to keep his spot on the board, which he said created a ripple effect that drew in more Latino candidates.

“They felt at this point that if they throw their hat in the ring, that they’re going to have actually a shot at getting elected. And that’s what happened,” Ramos said.

Changes like those in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch School District played out over decades on local governing bodies all over Texas, enabling representation of Latino and Black voters. Those changes were a direct result of claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or electoral maps that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language minority status.

But a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last week weakened that key provision, and Ramos and others say it could make it harder and more uncertain for other candidates of color to follow the path he took to local office.

The effects of the decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, are reverberating around the country and setting off a new cycle of redistricting for partisan advantage. Experts say there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the decision will play out, especially at the local level and when it comes to nonpartisan local governmental bodies such as Texas school boards and city councils.

“The judges in the opinion are discussing congressional elections, not school board elections, even though that’s where Section Two has been applied probably more frequently,” said Christian Grose, director of the Democracy and Fair Elections Lab at the University of Southern California.

But whether it’s after the 2030 Census or sooner, he added, “I do think there are going to be challenges, even in nonpartisan elections, saying that Section 2 doesn’t need to be enforced anymore.”

Prior to the decision, plaintiffs could prove a claim under Section 2 by showing evidence of a disparate impact on minority voters, regardless of whether the mapmakers intended it. Now, they must be able to show a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” the high court’s conservative majority declared.

With the court having previously authorized maps to be drawn for partisan aims, dissenting Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the new standard under Louisiana v. Callais gives plaintiffs virtually no recourse under Section 2, as long as a mapmaker declares a partisan motive and leaves “no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive.”

FARMERS BRANCH, TX - NOVEMBER 13: Elizabeth Villafranca (L) speaks to a crowd of protesters outside the city hall November 13, 2006 in Farmers Branch, Texas. Later in the evening, council members unanimously voted to pass the legislation that would make English the official language of the city and approving fines for landlords and businesses who do business with illegal immigrants. (Photo by Brian Harkin/Getty Images)

Going back in time

The decision could quickly become a factor in ongoing litigation.

Though most local elections in Texas are nonpartisan, county commissioners courts are an exception, and last week’s opinion will likely give a boost to counties that are already citing partisan motives in defending their maps. Last year, for example, the Republican-majority commissioners court in Tarrant County redrew its district lines, prompting a challenge from a group of voters who alleged the new map illegally diluted the power of Black and Latino voters by packing them into a single precinct. But Republican commissioners argued they’d drawn the lines for partisan gain, and earlier this year, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the maps.

But Bill Brewer, the Dallas lawyer whose firm handled Ramos’ case in Farmers Branch, said he believes the ruling could actually help advocates win some challenges involving nonpartisan races.

Brewer, whose firm has filed at least 18 lawsuits against school districts and city councils in Texas under the Voting Rights Act, is representing a parent who sued the Keller Independent School District under Section 2, claiming the school district’s at-large system dilutes the votes of Latinos. The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year and Brewer filed an appeal hours after the ruling to renew his push for a switch to cumulative voting. Brewer said the Callais ruling’s emphasis on intentional discrimination strengthens his claim for access to emails, meeting recordings and other evidence that could show intent.

“If they’re refusing to change because they intend to dilute opportunities for Hispanics or Blacks or Asians at the voting box, well, then you still have a claim under Section 2,” he said.

Keller ISD did not respond to a request for comment.

Ramos’ suit against the school board wasn’t the only Section 2 case brought in Farmers Branch. Its city council, too, was forced to switch from at-large to single-member districts in 2012, and the first Latino council member was elected in 2013. Council Member Elizabeth Villafranca, who was first elected last year, eventually became one of many Latino candidates to win a seat. The impact of the Voting Rights Act in the city has been “immeasurable,” she said.

But after the decision from last week, “I’m just horrified at the thought of having to go back in time,” Villafranca said. Still, she believes the community has come too far to revert to its old system. “You can see the incredible pride that there is when our residents see someone that looks like them, that speaks like them, that can represent them, and ultimately, that benefits everyone.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

How the Voting Rights Act reshaped Texas’ electoral maps

2026-05-04T19:28:03+00:00

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

In 2002, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a Republican, nearly lost his South Texas seat to Democrat Henry Cuellar. So when the GOP used its newfound majority in the state Legislature to redraw the voting maps the next year, they sawed through Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo and scattered Latino voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into other districts.

Latino advocacy groups sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the cornerstone provision of the law that prevents government bodies from diluting the voting power of specific groups. The Supreme Court found Texas lawmakers had taken away Latino voting power “because they were about to exercise it.”

“Latino voters were poised to elect their candidate of choice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The State not only made fruitless the Latinos’ mobilization efforts but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming most politically active.”

Bonilla’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn, and he lost to a Democrat. Just five years later, Latino voters flipped it back to Republican control; the seat was held most recently by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned last month.

Nina Perales, who argued that case at the Supreme Court, sees that district as an enduring testament to the power of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“A lot of the districts that we see in the map today were created to make sure that minority communities were not accidentally chopped up, and that minority communities could have a voice in some parts of the state,” Perales said. “In CD-23, when a majority of Latino voters support Gonzales, they get to elect Gonzales, and it’s irrelevant what Gonzales’ political party is.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2, raising the bar for voter dilution claims so high as to make the statute a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. Partisan gerrymandering, like the type used to try to keep Bonilla in power, is a defense against allegations of vote dilution, the conservative majority ruled. Under the new standard, plaintiffs will have to prove mapmakers intentionally set out to discriminate against voters on the basis of their race.

Even as it diminishes in power, the legacy of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is deeply woven into Texas’ political maps, reflected in districts carefully drawn to ensure voters of color could have a say. The landmark 1965 law also gave rise to a new generation of leaders, elected from Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. From that point on, both parties would have to look out for voters of color when drawing their maps — and if they didn’t, voters would have legal recourse.

Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said his career has been “defined” by the Voting Rights Act. As a young Black state representative, he was elected in 2012 to a congressional district drawn to right what a court found to be a legislative wrong: Texas had divided communities of color in North Texas across multiple majority-white seats designed to elect Republicans. Fourteen years later, Veasey is now departing Congress after GOP lawmakers redrew the district out from under him last summer.

With Section 2 of the VRA now significantly weakened, it will be harder to make the legal case that this redraw had an improper racial, rather than partisan, intent.

The recent hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act created a disconcerting full circle moment for Veasey, who recalled that his district was originally drawn for Willow Park GOP Rep. Roger Williams. Under the new lines, Veasey noted, Williams “will end up representing my neighborhood after all.”

How Section 2 remade Texas’ maps

In 1965, when Texas’ favorite son, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said the vote “is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”

The law included two pillars with significant implications for Texas — Section 2, which prohibits voter discrimination based on race, and Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get preapproval from the Department of Justice for any voting changes, including new electoral maps.

Before the law went into effect, Texas had just two people of color in its congressional delegation — Reps. Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio and Kika De La Garza from the Rio Grande Valley, both of whom were Mexican-American. They each voted for the Voting Rights Act that would enable the ranks of Hispanic lawmakers to swell significantly.

In the 1970s, Barbara Jordan became the first Black member of Congress from Texas. As a state senator, Jordan helped draw the district she would soon be elected to, a seat that provides Black Houstonians the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice to this day. Three new representatives of color joined Texas’ congressional delegation in the 1980s. By the 1990s, there were 13 members of color who served at any point during the decade. With two more election cycles to go, the 2020s have already reached a peak of 22 members of color, some of whom have represented white-majority districts.

During her sophomore term, in 1975, Jordan got Texas added to the list of states that needed preclearance for its maps. In 1982, Congress reinforced the law with an amendment that said maps ran afoul of the law if they had the effect of diluting racial or ethnic groups’ vote, even if that wasn’t the intent. These new provisions, the second of which overruled a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, opened the floodgates to litigation against Texas’ maps, at every level of government.

In each decade since the law’s passage, at least one of Texas’ maps has been found to have violated the law, and courts have ordered at least one new district to be drawn. The maps drawn in 2021 and 2025 are still under active litigation.

In the 1980s, plaintiffs successfully sued over the congressional, state Senate and state House maps under the Voting Rights Act, compelling redraws of legislative seats that were found to have diluted Black and Hispanic voting strength through packing them into just a few districts in the state’s urban counties — and into a single district in South Texas. Through preclearance, the Department of Justice also ordered Texas to redraw districts that diluted Black and Hispanic voters’ strength. The effects of those redraws can still be seen in today’s maps.

“You had charges and claims against the South Texas district, because they were packed down against the border,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and founder of the Lone Star Project who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “That’s why now, you see South Texas districts running north and south instead of along the bottom. It’s because [of] the court rulings under the Voting Rights Act, that you couldn’t pack those districts down against the border.”

More subtle, but just as important, was the way the Voting Rights Act pushed Texas lawmakers to proactively consider voters of color when drawing their electoral maps, Perales said. In the 1990s, for example, the majority-Hispanic 28th and 29th Congressional Districts “were born out of an understanding that the state needed to comply with Section 2,” she said.

Having grasped that it would be better to comply on the front end than be hauled into court later, the Legislature used to bring MALDEF and other groups in around the decennial census to train legislators on how to draw maps that met the law’s requirements.

“Part of that legal training was always on the obligation to avoid discriminating against minority voters under Section 2 the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “The guidance was, don’t inadvertently chop up minority communities when you’re drawing lines, because even if it’s inadvertent, it could be a legal problem.”

In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated preclearance for most jurisdictions, including Texas. The state immediately reinstated a voter ID law that had been caught up under Section 5. The decision also freed Texas’ 2011 electoral maps from preclearance, though some parts of the map were later redrawn over Section 2 violations.

“A pre-1965 posture”

The centerpiece of the court’s redrawn map was the new 33rd Congressional District, crafted to allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidate in fast-growing Dallas and Tarrant county. The new lines were later upheld after a trial, in which the court concluded that lawmakers had “acted at least in part with a racially discriminatory motive … with regard to the districts in DFW in particular.”

Veasey was a state representative planning to run for reelection — and on his way to see a pre-Thanksgiving movie with his family — when he got a call that changed his career.

“I heard, hey, they’re gonna draw a new map, and there’s probably going to be an opportunity for you to run,” Veasey said. “You’ve got to make up your mind quick over whether you’re going to do it.”

He ran, and won, giving him a chance to represent a district that was as diverse as the state of Texas — one that would last about a decade and a half before falling victim to the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting.

Several other congressional districts that were shaped by the Voting Rights Act were subsequently dismantled by Republicans last summer. Among them are Hispanic-opportunity districts in South Texas, such as the 28th District represented by Cuellar, who rebounded from his loss to Bonilla to become one of Texas’ longest-tenured members of Congress.

The VRA also helped create Houston’s 9th Congressional District, where more than four in five residents are Black or Hispanic.

Last summer, lawmakers redrew it to a “bare majority” — 50.3% Hispanic — as they did several other districts.

Early last week, the Supreme Court allowed that map to go into effect while a trial proceeds. Just two days later, the court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the results-based test that had been used for decades should be replaced with a new, higher bar that allows for an easier partisan defense.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said lower courts had applied Section 2 “in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” Under the new framework Alito laid out in the decision, a Section 2 claim must prove that the state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Angle said Texas’ most recent rounds of redistricting demonstrate what a post-Section 2 future may look like.

“You’ve got a situation in which a state that’s over 60% people of color is only going to have somewhere between 20% and 30% of the districts where voters of color’s vote matters at all,” Angle said.

State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from Plano, said the U.S. had a long history of vote suppression that made the Voting Rights Act necessary.

“But we’ve moved on from that, clearly, and I think people recognize minority voters are entitled to equal representation but not certain election outcomes,” Shaheen said. “It really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color.”

Shaheen is among several GOP lawmakers who say they hope Texas takes up redistricting anew during the 2027 legislative session, this time with a focus on the state House and Senate lines.

Perales agrees that the Voting Rights Act is not about specific electoral outcomes. But she disagrees that the country is ready to move on from ensuring racial and ethnic voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, regardless of political party or the ethnicity of the candidate.

“As much as Justice Alito wanted to make it seem like a case about partisanship, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about dismantling something much more historic and much more deeply needed in our country, which is equal opportunity for everybody.”

For Veasey, the ruling was not a surprise. But now that his district has been chopped up and the VRA’s core provision has been kneecapped, the retiring congressman sees a bleak future for the representation of Black and brown voters.

“It’s going to go back to a pre-1965 posture,” he said. “We just won’t have nearly as many voices pushing. It’s just be [like] when we had one or two voices that were pushing back before the VRA was passed — that’s what it’s going to be like now.

Here’s where redistricting stands after Florida’s new congressional map and the Supreme Court’s Callais decision

2026-05-04T13:52:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

If you love redistricting, boy, was it the week for you.

The Florida Legislature convened in a special session to pass a new congressional map that could net Republicans up to four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. And on Wednesday morning, literally as legislators were debating the map in Tallahassee, the U.S. Supreme Court defanged Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, a long-anticipated decision that could inspire several other states to join the redistricting fray.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had cited the looming decision in Callais as a reason that Florida’s congressional map needed to be redrawn. But the maneuver is widely understood to be part of the nationwide epidemic of mid-decade redistricting that started last summer. To shore up Republicans’ chances of holding the House in the midterms, President Donald Trump urged Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina to draw new congressional maps that created more safe seats for Republicans. In retaliation, Democrats in California and Virginia successfully passed ballot measures that instituted Democratic gerrymanders of their own.

Once DeSantis officially signs the map, Florida will become the sixth state to voluntarily enact a new congressional map this cycle, and the eighth state overall. (Ohio and Utah also got new congressional maps this cycle for unrelated reasons.) Both of those numbers are modern records for election cycles not immediately following a census (when redistricting normally takes place).

The losers of this cartographical arms race have been the voters. There’s no set definition of what makes a political map gerrymandered, but one measure of a map’s partisan bias is a statistic called efficiency gap, or the difference between how many votes the map “wastes” for one party versus the other. (Any vote cast for the losing party in a district, or cast for the winning party after it already won a majority, is considered wasted.)

An ideal efficiency gap is 0, meaning the number of wasted votes is perfectly balanced between the parties. But based on the results of the 2024 presidential election, all but one of the new maps has an efficiency gap of 20 percentage points or greater in favor of the party that drew it. And all but two got less fair.

The maps also have a lot fewer swing seats — meaning fewer competitive elections and a House that is less responsive to changes in voters’ preferences. In 2024, these eight states had 28 districts that voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris by 8 points or less. Under their new maps, though, they have just 13.

Ironically, the one thing mid-decade redistricting doesn’t seem to have done — at least, at this point — is give Republicans the upper hand they were looking for. When Trump kicked off the redistricting race, he likely didn’t anticipate that California and Virginia would be able to amend their state constitutions and implement such brutal Democratic gerrymanders, with the result that Democrats have actually been able to neutralize all of Republicans’ gains. According to redistricting expert Jonathan Cervas, who used past election results to estimate how the eight new maps would perform in a variety of political environments, the new maps actually produce an average net Democratic gain of 2.69 seats.

A map of the estimated partisan impact of 2025-26 redistricting.

At least so far. Thanks to Louisiana v. Callais, we’re not quite done with 2025-26 redistricting. On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced that he was postponing the Pelican State’s May 16 primary for U.S. House contests — in which voting was already underway — in order to redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. That should result in a net gain of at least one, and possibly two, seats for Republicans.

Trump also said Thursday he had talked to Gov. Bill Lee about redrawing Tennessee’s congressional lines to target the state’s lone Democratic representative. While redistricting this late in an election year would present hurdles for any state, they might be surmountable in Tennessee, whose primary isn’t until Aug. 6. (It would still have to reopen its candidate filing period, which closed on March 10.)

In addition, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to strike down its congressional map in light of the Callais decision and has called a special session to reschedule its May 19 primary if that happens. Republicans in South Carolina, including Gov. Henry McMaster, and Mississippi have also urged their legislatures to draw new lines. Each of those states has one Democratic-held seat that Republicans would like to eliminate.

Meanwhile, Gov. Brian Kemp has announced that Georgia won’t redraw its lines before the 2026 election, although it may do so for 2028.

Adding to the chaos, state courts could still block some of the new maps that have already taken effect. The Virginia Supreme Court is hearing a procedural challenge to the referendum that passed its new map. Voting-rights groups have vowed to sue over Florida’s new map once it’s official. And a lawsuit is ongoing over whether Missouri’s new map can go into effect before a ballot initiative challenging it qualifies for the ballot.

Basically, we’ve entered a world where redistricting isn’t a once-in-a-decade occurrence — it’s all around us, all at once. If you don’t love redistricting, well, it might be time to get used to it.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

The Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. It may change how maps are drawn in Arizona.

2026-04-30T19:02:02+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to weaken a key section of the Voting Rights Act could change how election boundaries are drawn in Arizona — most immediately through a potential lawsuit to challenge its existing state legislative maps.

Several experts who spoke with Votebeat within hours of the high court’s decision said any such challenge would likely face an uphill legal battle. But the recent ruling, which affects Section 2 of the Civil Rights Era law, also stands to ripple into the battleground state’s next redistricting cycle. Its full implications for the state’s voting maps remain unclear.

Section 2 has long been used to require mapmakers to consider whether district lines give minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Under the court’s decision, the law still remains intact, but it now applies in significantly narrowed circumstances, making it much harder to challenge political maps for being racially discriminatory.

The decision is likely to result in quick, mid-decade redistricting action in certain GOP-led states where that process is controlled by politicians. In Arizona, where an independent commission conducts redistricting every decade, GOP leaders praised the decision, and one said he was likely to file a lawsuit to challenge the state’s legislative map.

But experts said the ruling is most likely to affect mapmaking at the end of the decade, when the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, or IRC, reconvenes to draft new congressional and legislative boundaries. In the meantime, it could also shape districts at the local level, which are controlled directly by city councils and county boards.

“They’ll have more free rein to draw lines, regardless of the impact on racial minority groups’ opportunity to elect representatives of their own choice,” said Bo Dul, a former state election official and lawyer who specializes in election and political litigation at Coppersmith Brockelman in Phoenix.

GOP legislators could challenge existing voting map

Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, said in a social media post on Wednesday that he was “very likely” to challenge the state’s existing legislative boundaries in the wake of the high court’s decision.

In a separate statement, he told Votebeat that he was reviewing options to challenge “any unconstitutionally drawn districts.”

“For years, Democrats have pushed racial gerrymandering under the [guise] of Voting Rights Act compliance,” he said. “Arizonans deserve maps based on communities of interest, not race.”

If Petersen brought a successful lawsuit, it could force mid-decade changes to the state’s voting map. But legal experts said he’d need to produce strong evidence that the mapmakers relied on race while drafting existing boundaries.

Otherwise, the IRC could easily defend its maps by pointing to other legally recognized factors, such as partisan competitiveness, jurisdictional boundaries, or communities of interest — all criteria it must consider while developing the state’s voting maps. Those maps, while not completely without controversy, are widely considered to be among the fairest in the country.

“The legislative leaders who bring that suit would have to show that those districts were in fact drawn with a motivation that is unconstitutional,” said Tom Collins, a former assistant attorney general and executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission. “The IRC would defend that by saying something like, ‘We have these other reasons for doing it.’”

Collins added that it would be “very difficult” for any lawsuit to change the state’s maps before the upcoming midterm election.

“It’s very hard to get these things resolved within an existing cycle,” he said.

Experts did say that local elected seats, which aren’t drawn by the IRC, could be redrawn before the end of the decade if there was political will to do so.

“They perhaps might be a little more vulnerable on a sooner timeline,” said DJ Quinlan, a political consultant with Radar Strategies. He led the Arizona Democratic Party’s redistricting efforts in 2011 and 2012.

Dul said county boards of supervisors could feel the biggest impact. Those bodies are partisan, which means they could lean on arguments for partisan competitiveness to draw lines during redistricting that split minority groups’ voting power. They also aren’t subject to the IRC’s criteria in the state constitution, which directs that its mapmaking should comply with the Voting Rights Act and take communities of interest into account when practicable.

“There’s a reasonable argument that basically all of the guardrails have come down in that context,” Dul said.

But she said racial discrimination claims might be easier to prove regarding city seats. In Arizona, almost all city councils are nonpartisan, making it harder for them to claim they were considering partisan competitiveness while drawing their maps.

“I think it’ll still be hard,” she said. “But at least map drawers in those contexts won’t be able to lean entirely on partisan motives to justify what they did.”

Quinlan said he suspects the biggest impacts of the ruling will come at the turn of the decade.

“At the end of the day, this is going to be a really big story for Arizona in 2031,” he said.

What does the court’s decision mean for future maps?

All of the experts who spoke to Votebeat said the high court’s decision is likely to affect how maps are drawn in Arizona, but were less aligned on how far-reaching the impact could be and exactly which districts could see changes.

“I think there’s a lot that remains to be seen about what that actually looks like, and it will definitely be dependent on what the composition of the commission looks like at that point,” Quinlan said. The IRC will next meet at the turn of the decade. Barring a court order, it cannot convene earlier.

Danny Ortega, a longtime attorney and community activist in Phoenix, said the future “does not look good for people of color being able to have maps drawn that would give them an opportunity to elect members of their community.”

He specifically referenced Arizona’s two minority-majority congressional districts — the 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses south and west Phoenix, and the 7th Congressional District, which spans from Tucson to Yuma. The former is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari, and the latter by Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva.

“Now, that district, when redistricting starts, can literally be done away with,” said Ortega, who is known for his work with farmworker, immigrant, and Spanish-speaking clients. “So, Arizona’s going to be affected.”

But Collins pointed out that having a minority-majority district isn’t necessarily unconstitutional under the court’s ruling. Rather, the question is whether the district was drawn in a way where race predominated over other considerations.

He questioned whether either of these two districts would look dramatically different if mapmakers were “trying to account for competitiveness and trying to account for the other factors that are there.” He said the same of the state’s 6th legislative district, where more than 60% of residents are Native American. The district covers nine distinct tribal communities, including Navajo Nation.

“I’m not a demographic expert, but I’d be surprised if you ended up with a situation where there was no Native American community representation in the legislature,” Collins said.

Some Republicans said the high court’s decision might offer upshots for Democrats in Arizona, too. Brian Murray, a political consultant with Cornerstone Public Affairs and former executive director of the Arizona GOP, said in a social media post that Section 2 had long “worked to GOP advantage” in the state’s congressional maps by packing heavily Democratic areas into the 3rd and 7th districts, rather than dividing portions of them into other surrounding districts that are more closely split along partisan lines.

Dul added that the ruling could have been worse in terms of how it might upend redistricting Arizona. She said it is effectively “the final nail in the coffin” of Section 2 and will have “devastating” effects nationally. But if the Supreme Court had outright held that the section was unconstitutional, she said it could have put the entire framework of the IRC at risk, because the state constitution directly says the body must comply with the Voting Rights Act.

“I think from the perspective of Arizona, it could have been worse,” she said.

Still, Dul said the ruling effectively means that the IRC will face tighter limits on when it can consider race while drawing lines. And Collins said there will be more pressure on the system to be partisan as redistricting becomes “more zero sum than it ever has been” nationwide.

In Arizona, that pressure quickly emerged on Wednesday as political leaders digested the court’s decision.

State Senate Democratic Leader Priya Sundareshan said in a statement that the ruling would have “real consequences” and limit the IRC’s ability to “draw maps that truly reflect our state’s diversity and risks diminishing minority and tribal representation at every level of government.”

“Fair maps are the foundation of a healthy democracy, and this decision moves us in the wrong direction,” she said. “Arizona Senate Democrats remain committed to fighting for fair maps, free elections, and a democracy that truly represents all people. The right to vote is fundamental and we will not stop working to protect it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona GOP Chair Sergio Arellano said in a social media post that the court’s decision sent a clear message to the IRC.

“Maps should not be drawn to engineer outcomes, but to reflect fair, constitutional principles where every voter counts the same,” he said, adding that the ruling was about “restoring trust.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

U.S. Supreme Court restricts Voting Right Act, but effect on Pennsylvania likely limited

2026-04-30T14:17:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a Louisiana voting rights case will make it harder to challenge political maps as being racially discriminatory, but the ruling will likely have limited effect on statewide district maps in Pennsylvania, where the state constitution provides stronger protections against gerrymandering.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines that raises the bar for proving illegal racial gerrymandering.

The case revolved around Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a Civil Rights era protection that prohibits racial discrimination in voting and has historically been used to challenge how voting districts are drawn and require that members of a racial minority have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. In the most recent round of redistricting, Louisiana’s legislature drew a map that would create a second congressional district that was majority-Black, instead of the single majority-Black district it had previously. The new map was challenged on the grounds that it explicitly used race as the basis in determining the districts.

“Allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. He argued that compliance with Section 2 “could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here.”

Election law experts in Pennsylvania have said in the past that Section 2 hasn’t had much of an impact in the state.

Chris Fowler, a geography professor at Penn State University, said that’s because there hasn’t been a clear advantage for mapmakers of either party in drawing majority-minority districts.

Most of the people of color in Pennsylvania are concentrated in its major cities. Minority voters in Philadelphia, a heavily Black city, are generally already concentrated in districts where their numbers allow them to elect preferred candidates. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has a smaller minority population, and Black communities in the city tend to be geographically intermixed with communities of other races. More racially mixed communities and less consistent racial bloc voting make claims under Section 2 harder to bring in Pennsylvania than in the South.

So while the Voting Rights Act remains relevant in the state and communities of color exist, Fowler said there are “very idiosyncratic reasons that it would be hard to win a case” on those grounds in Pennsylvania.

”It’s not necessary to draw a racially gerrymandered district to gain advantage,” he said. “I think both parties sort of know it and they come up with maps that are pretty bland when it comes to racial gerrymandering.”

Ben Geffen, a lawyer at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Public Interest Law Center, agreed that Section 2’s relevance in Pennsylvania has been limited, aside from the general background rule it created — that you cannot discriminate racially when drawing districts — and the implications it has had for the growing Latino population in the northeast part of the state.

Section 2 has been invoked at the local level. Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s administration, his Department of Justice brought a case against Hazleton, alleging that its at-large method of electing city council members was diluting the power of Hispanic voters. Donald Trump’s Justice Department dropped that case. The Hazleton Area School District is currently facing a similar accusation that its at-large elections lock Hispanic voters out “from electing candidates of their choice.”

But Geffen has concerns about the Callais decision that extend beyond Pennsylvania. Namely, that more states may turn to drawing partisan gerrymanders, which the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts cannot review. He worries the overlap of racial and partisan voting trends could produce similar maps that are harder to challenge.

Pennsylvania, however, has dealt with partisan gerrymandered maps several times in recent years, and the state’s Supreme Court has struck them down. Geffen said that’s because rules about fairness are much stronger in state law than they are federally.

“Our [state] Supreme Court has said the [state] constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering, so state lawmakers can’t brazenly draw maps for partisan gains,” he said. “I think that has put important boundaries on what map makers do here that helps avoid the excesses we see in other parts of the country.”

Marian Schneider, an adjunct professor of law at Villanova University, said that in her two decades practicing election law in the state she has only pursued one case related to Section 2. She agreed state law protections are stronger, and said there may be a path to bring the types of arguments in state court that a plaintiff might have previously made in federal court under Section 2.

But Schneider said that regardless of Section 2’s historically limited role in Pennsylvania, Wednesday’s ruling will have an effect on the state’s voters.

“Knowing that other states could engage in suppression of minority voters, we are all affected by that, because if they are not truly electing people that reflect the voters, what happens in Congress affects all of us,” she said.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin will likely see limited, local effects from Voting Rights Act ruling — at least for now

2026-04-29T23:35:48+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin will likely face limited immediate impact at both the legislative and congressional level from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge political maps. But it may make it easier for people to challenge school district and city council maps in court.

The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raises the bar for voting rights challenges by requiring stronger evidence that race, rather than political considerations, drove how districts were drawn, and making it easier for states to defend maps on non-racial grounds.

Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said that the boundaries that could be most easily struck down as a result of the Wednesday ruling are those that were drawn explicitly for racial reasons. Some examples, he said, are the boundaries for Milwaukee city council districts and certain school districts.

Race is a common factor in drawing Milwaukee city council districts, though campaigns to add additional majority-minority districts haven’t always succeeded.

For example, departing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in December 2021 vetoed a proposed city council map because it didn’t include a third Latino-majority district, only for Mayor Cavalier Johnson to sign that same map several weeks later.

Lennington also pointed to state laws that use race as a factor to determine school district boundaries. One of those laws explicitly mentions “racial composition of the pupils” as a factor for drawing boundaries — a law that he said is now implicated by the Callais decision.

“If a plaintiff comes to us and says that they live in a district that’s been racially gerrymandered, we would take a very close look at that case,” he said.

Less likely impact on legislative and congressional level

There likely won’t be much impact in Wisconsin at the congressional district level because there’s just one majority-minority district in the state, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ahead of the ruling. That district comprises much of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs in Milwaukee County.

Even if Section 2 of the VRA did not apply, he said, the district would likely stay much the same given the general principle of keeping communities intact.

A decision like the one handed down, he said, “would open the door if line drawers wanted to break up that county or city in some way, but I think it would probably be challenged on other grounds,” he said.

Challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps have often had more to do with partisan than racial line-drawing. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he wasn’t surprised by the federal decision but reiterated his call for new congressional maps, which he said unfairly gave Republicans a 6-2 seat advantage in a swing state.

But two recent judgments in Wisconsin state courts rejected challenges to the state’s congressional maps on the basis that they constitute an unconstitutional “anti-competitive” gerrymander. Those rulings focused not on race, but on whether courts can take up claims based on partisan advantage.

Doug Poland, co-founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said this ruling could empower lawmakers to pursue partisan goals while making racial challenges harder to prove.

But because of Wisconsin’s demographics — a largely white state, with the most significant minority populations concentrated around the Milwaukee area — the state has run into Section 2 challenges far less often than Southern states, he said.

“As a practical matter, this decision doesn’t have a big impact on Wisconsin at the moment,” he said. “That could change.”

There’s more at play among state legislative districts, Burden said. The state has nine majority-minority legislative districts, where a single minority group makes up over half of the population: seven in the Assembly and two in the Senate. Two other districts — one in each chamber — are minority influence districts, where combined minority populations make up a majority.

Democrats in Wisconsin have generally steered clear of breaking up minority districts to avoid violating the VRA, Burden said, but packing minority voters in one district sometimes costs them adjacent districts where they might have been competitive if the minority population was more evenly distributed. For that reason, there’s a history of Republicans supporting majority-minority districts in the state.

The issue has been a factor in recent redistricting fights. In March 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court initially selected Evers’ legislative maps, which created an additional majority-Black Assembly district.

But while Evers argued this addition was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. A Black Democratic legislator criticized the move as diluting Black voices, while Republicans appealed the maps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the GOP and ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select a different map.

If any of the districts are found to be out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution under the ruling via some additional challenge, Burden said, Wisconsin may draw new districts sooner than later.

“I don’t know who that advantages,” he said. “It probably depends who’s drawing the lines.”

Lennington also pointed out President Donald Trump’s success with Black and Latino voters relative to past GOP candidates, adding that splitting majority-minority legislative districts wouldn’t necessarily give either party an advantage here.

What he did predict, though, is that splitting such districts “might polarize us even more” if they were replaced with districts drawn on partisan as opposed to racial lines.

“It just might make the red more red and the blue more blue,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

New SCOTUS decision on Voting Rights Act could have implications for Michigan’s maps

2026-04-29T22:01:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in a major redistricting case Wednesday reshaped the Voting Rights Act, raising the bar for when race can be considered in drawing voting districts. That change is likely to ripple into Michigan’s next redistricting cycle — and could even shape elections before that.

At its core, the Louisiana v. Callais decision makes it harder to challenge political maps as racially discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Members of the the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission disagreed on whether the ruling means new maps are likely.

Rebecca Szetela — vice chair of the commission and a politically neutral member of it — now believes the commission could be called back in the wake of the ruling.

“I think it’s likely the maps that were drawn by Michigan’s Independent Redistricting Commission are likely going to be challenged and may, under this ruling, need to be redrawn,” she told Votebeat on Wednesday, just a few hours after the decision was released.

The 13-member commission finished its work on the current maps in 2024 and is currently dormant, but it can be reactivated under some circumstances.

Voters in 2018 overwhelmingly approved that year’s Proposal 2, which took redistricting for both statewide and congressional maps out of the hands of the state legislature and put it in the hands of the newly created independent redistricting commission. The commission has four members each from the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as five members considered politically neutral. Members apply and are selected via lottery.

But the commission must “comply with the Voting Rights Act and other federal laws.” Its initial proposed legislative maps after the 2020 U.S. census were challenged in a lawsuit alleging they would “dilute Black voter voting strength.”

Courts eventually approved redrawn legislative maps that tried to fix that problem. But the role race played in drawing those revised districts could draw renewed scrutiny under the new ruling, Szetela said.

“Race was a predominant factor,” she said. “With respect to the House and the Senate maps that we did redraw, there were still districts within those maps that had been drawn with race predominating.”

But Anthony Eid, chair of the commission and also a neutral member, disagreed Wednesday.

He said the ultimately approved maps were made with “a race-blind approach,” and that he would be surprised if the current commission ended up drawing maps again. Michigan’s maps are some of the fairest in the country, he said, and he doesn’t expect challenges to them.

“It could happen,” he said. “If that happens, I’m sure the commission will be ready to defend this work.”

One of the biggest barriers to a 2026 redistricting is timing. The deadline for candidates to file to run in the current districts was April 21, and the primary elections are Aug. 4. The state is just six months away from a major election, one that will see the entire Michigan Legislature up for grabs, as well as the governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and other statewide seats.

New maps could be theoretically possible in that timeframe, Szetela said, although it would be difficult. Regardless, she thinks the state will have to draw maps again before the next census.

Michigan’s local elections could change in aftermath of Callais decision

The full implications of the ruling are still uncertain, but at least some suggest it could reverberate beyond political maps.

“In the past, when Michigan has seen action regarding the VRA, it has been with local towns, local municipalities, and how they have their elections structured,” Corwin Smidt, interim director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, told Votebeat.

One of the best examples is the city of Eastpointe, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit located in Macomb County. The Department of Justice sued Eastpointe in 2017 alleging that using at-large methods of voting in the city violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by preventing Black residents of the city from having an equal chance to elect councilmembers of their choice.

The city had never elected a Black councilmember, despite the city being more than one-third Black. Per an agreement with the federal government, the city switched to ranked-choice voting for the November 2019 election, and again to fill a council seat in 2020.

If Section 2 is harder to use to challenge election systems, Smidt also believes local jurisdictions are likely to move away from ward-based representation — used in many of the biggest communities around the state — and back to at-large voting.

“A lot of those wards are artifacts of VRA concerns and providing sufficient minority representation,” Smidt said. “Cities could more easily move away from a ward-based representation to an at-large representation without this provision in the VRA.”

What comes next for Michigan voting?

It is difficult to predict what Michigan’s maps will look like when they’re reconsidered after the 2030 census.

In much of the state, some experts don’t expect much to change. Steven Winter, a constitutional law professor at Wayne State University, said that the current maps do not have “a lot of weird districts,” although he noted that didn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable.

“The biggest problem is always in the urban areas,” he said. “It’s easy to draw a sensible-looking district in areas that are less well-populated, but in urban districts where things are dense” things can get more complicated.

That is especially true in and around Detroit. The city itself is more than 75% Black, according to Census Bureau estimates, and the surrounding communities are also more diverse than many other parts of the state.

The exact effects are difficult to predict, though.

“We took an evidence- and data-based approach ... to make districts where folks in minority communities could elect their candidates of choice,” Eid said Wednesday. “I think it’s likely that future commissions will probably have to do the same thing, but the VRA might look completely different in three years, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Melinda Billingsley, the communications director for Voters Not Politicians, which initially put forward the 2018 constitutional amendment that created the independent redistricting commission, said some language in the amendment could blunt the impact of the ruling in Michigan.

Specifically, the amendment protects “communities of interest,” including those with shared cultural or economic interests, but it explicitly excludes protection for political gerrymandering.

“Our expectation as of right now is that the other criteria that the MICRC have to follow will continue to protect Michigan voters from the worst kind of partisan or racial gerrymandering,” Billingsley said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court weakens Voting Rights Act, making it harder to challenge political maps for being racially discriminatory

2026-04-29T19:26:56+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a landmark decision significantly weakening the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Era law designed to limit racial discrimination in voting. While the ruling’s long-term impacts could be profound, it probably won’t change much for the 2026 midterms.

The immediate impact of the opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, will also make it harder to use the Voting Rights Act to get political maps thrown out for being racially discriminatory going forward.

The decision broke down 6-3 along ideological lines, with the court’s Republican-appointed justices in favor and Democratic-appointed justices against.

While the court did not outright strike down the act, as many voting-rights advocates had feared, it reinterpreted it to apply only in significantly narrowed circumstances. Previously, a map only had to have the effect of discriminating against minority voters, but under the new interpretation, the act outlaws only intentional discrimination in redistricting.

The part of the act at issue, Section 2, is violated “only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.

In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan argued that this heightened standard would make it nearly impossible to get maps struck down under the Voting Rights Act.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” she wrote. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

Redistricting experts agreed that the decision weakens one of voting-rights advocates’ best tools for forcing states to draw political maps that prioritize nonwhite representation.

“It’s a devastating decision that will make it much harder to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and in many cases impossible,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In a lot of ways, it sort of completes the cycle of attacks on the Voting Rights Act … There’s stuff that’s still left, but it really is quite devastating and breathtaking in its sweep.”

“If you’re an advocate for minority representation in Congress, you have to be happy that the Voting Rights Act isn’t gone,” said Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. “But in some ways that’s a bit of cold comfort, because the test that the majority put in place is really hard to meet in most circumstances.”

The Voting Rights Act has created more districts for nonwhite voters

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been revised and reinterpreted multiple times since its initial passage in 1965, but at its core, it says that members of a racial minority must have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. This has historically meant that, wherever possible, states must draw districts in which nonwhite voters are the dominant voting bloc, subject to a few conditions.

These conditions, known as the Gingles test after the 1986 Supreme Court decision that set them forth, include the fact that voting preferences must be polarized by race, meaning the minority group votes cohesively for one party and the majority group votes cohesively against that party. The minority group must also be large enough to constitute a majority in a relatively compact district. (Confusingly, a district didn’t have to be majority-minority to comply with Section 2 — it just had to be possible to draw it that way.)

This standard forced several states, especially in the South, to draw predominantly nonwhite districts, which tended to elect candidates of color and Democrats. The effect was felt at every level of government. For instance, the number of nonwhite U.S. representatives increased from 26 in 1983 to 90 in 2023 as the number of majority-minority House districts increased from 35 to 131.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … has been a major engine of creating districts that represent Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans and, in some settings, Asians,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has served as a special master and court-appointed expert in a long list of redistricting cases. “You cannot overstate the significance of the Voting Rights Act in creating districts in which minorities would have a real opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.”

As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court used the Voting Rights Act to compel states to draw new Black-opportunity seats in states like Alabama — and Louisiana. But the debate over Louisiana’s map was what led to Wednesday’s decision. After a court compelled the state to add a second predominantly Black congressional district, the Republican-controlled legislature responded by drawing an awkwardly shaped 6th District that zigzagged across the state (even though it was possible to draw a more compact, majority-Black seat along the Mississippi River). A group describing themselves as “non-African American” voters sued, arguing that the new 6th District violated the Constitution because it was drawn with race as the primary consideration.

The Supreme Court heard arguments about the district in spring 2025 but, in an unusual move, decided that they wanted to hear the case again — this time with arguments more broadly addressing the constitutionality of the requirement to draw minority-opportunity districts. That reargument led to Wednesday’s decision.

Callais decision could lead to more gerrymandering

Louisiana v. Callais is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that has made it harder for voting-rights groups to get gerrymandered political maps struck down in court. Most notably, the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering — the process of drawing maps for partisan gain — was permissible under federal law.

Rebecca Green, a law professor at the William & Mary Law School who co-directs the Election Law Program there, said the Callais decision opens the door for mapmakers to use partisan motives as a shield against claims that they were discriminating based on race.

If racial voting patterns “can be explained by partisanship, then that’s your out. That’s the explanation,” she said.

“If you can prove that partisanship is motivating line drawing, then you don’t have a Section 2 case,” she said of Alito’s opinion. “He’s basically just giving the legislature the benefit of the doubt by saying their intent was partisan.”

Multiple experts said they were struck by the opinion’s embrace of partisan gerrymandering. Citing the Rucho decision, the Callais opinion updated the criteria for proving a Voting Rights Act violation to include the fact that any remedial maps must also achieve the map-drawer’s “specified political goals,” such as partisan gain. Li called this “nonsense.”

Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, pointed out that the court’s decision in Rucho treated partisan gerrymandering as undesirable, but something federal courts didn’t have jurisdiction to address. In Alito’s Callais opinion, though, “it’s the opposite, and it’s like some protected right that legislatures have,” Gaber said. Alito “elevated it in importance over a statute Congress actually passed, pursuant to its constitutional authority, to prohibit racial discrimination in voting.”

The implications of the decision will take time to play out, and it doesn’t necessarily mean there are no longer any guardrails in redistricting. Partisan gerrymandering is still illegal under some state constitutions, and some states have independent redistricting commissions whose goal is to draw fairer political maps.

But efforts to depoliticize the map-drawing process, which Green noted had been gaining steam in the past couple decades, have hit a major roadblock with states’ 2025-26 decisions to redraw their congressional maps for partisan gain.

However, opponents of partisan redistricting are not entirely out of options. “This decision leaves some room for Congress — not much, but some — to correct the court’s understanding, to readjust the Voting Rights Act, and that will be an imperative,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.

Most states probably won’t redraw congressional maps for 2026 election

Wednesday’s decision could embolden states to gerrymander even more aggressively. For instance, Republicans control the redistricting process in several Southern states, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, that have predominantly nonwhite, safely Democratic seats that were thought to be protected by the Voting Rights Act. Those states could attempt to eliminate those seats, arguing they were doing so for partisan, not racial, reasons. Some Republicans began calling for them to do so within hours of the court’s ruling.

However, that is more likely to happen for the 2028 election, not 2026. It would be, practically speaking, very difficult for most states to redraw their maps at this stage. Mississippi, for instance, has already held its primary under the old lines, and Georgia’s primary is in just a few weeks. And the deadline for candidates to file to run has already passed in most states, including South Carolina and Tennessee.

With no Callais today, an update on what the primary landscape will look like by the end of next week. pic.twitter.com/aQKDXBJbEc
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) April 22, 2026

States could decide to postpone their filing deadlines or primaries, but they have very little time to do so. “In states with an August primary, you could probably make it work,” said Trende. “But I don’t think you’re going to see much [redrawing] this cycle.”

Louisiana is in the trickiest position. It is scheduled to hold its primary — for congressional districts just struck down as unconstitutional — on May 16, and mail voting has already begun. When a local reporter asked Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday whether the Louisiana Legislature would draw a new map for 2026, he said it was too early to say. If so, the state would need to reschedule the primary.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Chat: What lies ahead for redistricting and the Voting Rights Act?

2026-02-17T19:12:02+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Welcome to a new occasional feature at Votebeat: a chat with Votebeat staffers and outside experts on hot topics in elections. Today, we’re chatting about redistricting with Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, co-founder of the redistricting website PlanScore, and Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who runs the website All About Redistricting. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Nathaniel Rakich (managing editor, Votebeat): Redistricting usually happens in years ending in -1 and -2, as congressional districts are resized to account for the most recent population data from the U.S. Census (which happens at the start of every decade). But over the past year, several states have broken with precedent and decided to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of the decade.

Facing pressure from President Donald Trump to shore up Republicans’ chances in the 2026 midterms, Republicans in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina redrew their congressional maps to add more safe Republican seats. In response, Democrats successfully got a ballot measure passed to override California’s independent redistricting commission to add more safe Democratic seats, and they are currently attempting to pass new maps out of Virginia and Maryland as well. Two other states, Utah and Ohio, have also redrawn their congressional maps this cycle, but because they were legally obligated to.

First, let’s establish how weird this is. How unprecedented is it for this many states to draw new congressional districts mid-decade?

Nicholas Stephanopoulos (professor, Harvard Law School): It’s totally unprecedented in the modern era. You have to go back to the Gilded Age to see this much discretionary redrawing of maps.

Justin Levitt (professor, Loyola Law School): Agreed. Individual states have done this before, but not in the context of a national partisan war.

Carrie Levine (editor-in-chief, Votebeat): Is it possible to gauge whether this is an unusual blip, or whether it’s going to be the new normal?

Justin Levitt: I think it’s the new normal unless an adult in the room steps in.

Congress could fix this ... tomorrow.

The Supreme Court could fix this.

If they don’t, the war continues.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I agree. Now that this genie is out of the bottle, there’s no incentive for legislators to forgo this redistricting technique.

Witness Democrats’ glee at the prospect of squeezing 10 blue seats out of Virginia’s 11 districts.

Justin Levitt: I’ll add that the gerrymandering we’ve seen so far is relatively restrained, crazy as that sounds. California could have gone much bigger.

There’s no federal law saying that districts have to be connected to each other. If California Democrats had wanted to put Riverside in the same district as San Francisco, or Humboldt County in with West Hollywood, they could have.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Exactly. Why not draw a district in Illinois made up of two noncontiguous bubbles — one in Chicago, the other hundreds of miles downstate.

Justin Levitt: If they wanted to spell out an obscenity and the name of a political figure, that’s available. As bad as things are, the wasteland on the other side could be even more severe.

Carrie Levine: Sort of like runners who map out their routes to make interesting shapes on Strava?

Justin Levitt: Exactly. But screwing with democracy in the process.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: There’s also not much evidence that map-drawers are using statistical algorithms to maximize their partisan advantage. But that could be harnessed to win more seats in some places.

Nathaniel Rakich: Wowzer. I mean, I think most people would agree something like non-contiguous districts are beyond the pale. Do you think that kind of thing could actually impel Congress or the Supreme Court to step in?

So far, they’ve shown little interest in doing so.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I don’t think anything could change the mind of the current Supreme Court, which seems to see partisan gerrymandering as normal and good. (Most recently, they declined to block California’s new map in an order earlier this month.)

Justin Levitt: Yep. It’s hard to root for states to violate the Constitution. But if California was going to wade into this fight, I wanted them to go all out ... in part to inspire Congress to set reasonable rules.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I also think aggressive gerrymanders by Democrats are helping Republicans realize that both sides can play this game — Republicans aren’t guaranteed to have the advantage in a gerrymandering war, as they did in the 2010s when they controlled more state governments.

There was a time when ending partisan gerrymandering wasn’t a partisan issue. Former President Ronald Reagan deplored it. In the 1986 case Davis v. Bandemer, the Republican National Committee sided with Indiana Democrats in asking the Supreme Court to strike down a new map as a partisan gerrymander, while the Democratic National Committee told the court to stay out of this area.

And the justices in Bandemer crossed ideological lines in their positions. It’s only from the 2000s onward that the reform position came to be associated with Democrats.

But successful gerrymanders by Democrats could make Republicans more willing to consider federal action. For instance, Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California — who is very likely going to lose his seat because of the new map — has now proposed legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting. Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas has proposed a bill to do the same thing.

Carrie Levine: Going back to the Supreme Court for a minute … When the court ruled in 2019 (in the case Rucho v. Common Cause) that federal courts aren’t the right place for partisan gerrymandering claims, do you think the court meant for there to be no limit to partisan gerrymandering whatsoever?

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: If the court isn’t bothered by a 48D-4R map in California, or a 10D-1R map in Virginia, I think nothing will offend it.

Except maybe a large Democratic advantage in the aggregate, like in the ’70s and ’80s!

Justin Levitt: Agreed. Rucho was the perfect opportunity for the court to rein in partisan gerrymandering in an even-handed way (or to not get involved and just let lower courts do their thing). There was an obvious Republican gerrymander and an obvious Democratic gerrymander before the court at the same time. And the court chose cowardice.

It’s no more interested in wading in today than it was seven years ago.

Carrie Levine: What does all this mean for the push to create more independent redistricting commissions?

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: That’s a great option for state legislative and local redistricting.

Justin Levitt: Agreed. I think that’s on pause for congressional redistricting for now.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Redistricting commissions for congressional districts are concerning if done piecemeal due to the possibility of partisan asymmetry — for example, if all the blue states adopt fair maps via commissions while red states gerrymander.

Back in 2022, I wrote a column worrying about redistricting commissions in blue states, so I’ve been beating this drum for a while.

Justin Levitt: On the other hand, commissions aren’t totally dead, even for congressional districts — because they really do draw fair maps, which voters appreciate.

The California ballot measure that passed last year was carefully worded. It didn’t repeal California’s commission; it just paused it until after the 2030 census.

Nathaniel Rakich: Yeah, but are they really going to go back to using the commission? As you guys noted, the genie is out of the bottle. Are Democrats in California and Virginia really going to voluntarily sacrifice several Democratic-held House seats in the 2032 election?

Justin Levitt: Not without Congress putting rules in place to govern congressional redistricting across the country. But that could happen.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Yeah, congressional action seems really far away right now — but all it would take is a Democratic trifecta with a little wiggle room in 2029.

University of California Los Angeles law professor Joseph Fishkin has proposed pairing redistricting reform with expanding the House, which I think is a great combination. Then there’s no need to sacrifice California or Virginia Democrats!

Carrie Levine: Do you think a Democratic trifecta is likely to make that sort of change a priority?

Justin Levitt: Democracy reform will absolutely be a priority. Court reform could be well up there on the menu too.

Democracy reform was also a priority for Democrats in 2022, but their legislation to outlaw partisan gerrymandering and shore up voting rights couldn’t make it past a Republican filibuster in the Senate. (They were also two votes shy of advancing the package by changing filibuster rules, but lacked the support of former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who aren’t around anymore.)

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Yeah, I think this is like item 1 or item 2 on the Democratic agenda (the other biggie being guaranteeing access to abortion nationwide).

I don’t know exactly what shape electoral reform would take in this scenario, but I’m reasonably confident that Democrats would do something. They’re very, very aware of this issue, and I think the intra-party debate has largely been won by the reformers.

Nathaniel Rakich: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. The Supreme Court is currently considering Louisiana v. Callais, a case over Louisiana’s congressional map that could overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that bans racial discrimination in voting. (I should note that both Justin and Nicholas submitted amicus curiae briefs in the case.)

In the redistricting context, Section 2 of the VRA requires states to draw districts that give minority voters the opportunity to elect their preferred candidate whenever practicable. But if the Supreme Court strikes it down, dozens of predominantly Black and Latino districts across the country could be eliminated.

What’s your guys’ read on that case? What are the range of possible outcomes here?

Justin Levitt: It’s a HUGE range. From nothingburger to effectively declaring a portion of the Constitution unconstitutional.

I like to remind folks that, in 2023, we were awaiting similar potentially giant news in Allen v. Milligan (another case that threatened the VRA) and Moore v. Harper (a case that could have ended state judicial review of congressional redistricting) — and the court backed away from the cliff’s edge in both cases.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I still find it so, so objectionable that this is the potential vehicle for hobbling the VRA.

Justin Levitt: Yeah, Nick, Callais should have been the easiest case ever. I still think it’s the easiest case ever. Justice Clarence Thomas thinks so too, but in exactly the opposite direction, and that’s made it weird.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Callais is a constitutional racial gerrymandering case! It’s not a VRA case! The VRA is only relevant as a potential justification for the district in Louisiana that’s being challenged. (The 6th District, which was redrawn in 2024 to be predominantly Black after the Supreme Court maintained the status quo for VRA claims in Allen v. Milligan.)

But Louisiana is no longer offering that justification. It will just take the court so many contortions to reach the issue of the VRA’s constitutionality here.

And there are several actual VRA cases floating around. So I really don’t know why this is the big one.

Carrie Levine: So where does that leave us on this unusually complicated case? Are there any tea leaves to read?

Justin Levitt: There are nine people who know what the court will do in Callais. And I’m not one of them.

As Nick says, the question should have been whether Louisiana drew its lines predominantly based on race or predominantly based on politics. And literally all of the evidence says that it drew its lines predominantly based on politics.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: The fact that the case was reargued — i.e., it was originally part of the court’s 2024-2025 term, but the court wanted to hear it again — is the biggest tea leaf. The court didn’t need to do that to decide the racial gerrymandering issue, and the court’s (read: Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s) focus at the reargument was on the “temporal” critique of Section 2 of the VRA — the idea that it’s somehow outdated or obsolete.

Oral argument was also a bit of a mess, but Kavanaugh, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts all said things that suggested skepticism of the current interpretation of the VRA.

I also want to flag the U.S. solicitor general’s devious proposal in Callais.

The solicitor general says, “Hey, no need to strike down Section 2 — just add one teensie new requirement for plaintiffs: that their sample maps achieve states’ political objectives.” Like advantaging a certain party.

That one little tweak would effectively doom just about every Section 2 case. Because the new predominantly nonwhite district required by a successful Section 2 case would essentially always change the political composition of the map. So if the state just says it wants to maintain that political composition, the plaintiff would lose.

Justin Levitt: The court could take a few different statutory interpretation paths that look small but practically would be really really big. That’s one of them. And, as Nick said above, absolutely none of them are necessary to decide this case.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I can see the court’s conservatives being drawn to the solicitor general’s proposal because its impact would be so huge — but it would seem much more modest than a sweeping ruling declaring the VRA unconstitutional.

Justin Levitt: The only mild blessing in a statutory interpretation decision is that Congress could adjust the statute in response.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: More provisions for the 2029 omnibus election reform bill!

Justin Levitt: Yep. And that would also unquestionably be on the menu for a democracy-friendly Congress.

Carrie Levine: So we’re back to a huge range of options in terms of how the justices could rule, and the potential effects.

Justin Levitt: Correct.

And as with redistricting commissions, it’s really important not to focus only on Congress when discussing Callais. The biggest impact of an adverse VRA decision would be on local government.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: At least last year (before reargument), my guess was that the court would just strike down the challenged Louisiana district as a racial gerrymander, in which case Louisiana would have to draw a different, less funny-looking Black-opportunity district, and the case wouldn’t affect any other states.

Nathaniel Rakich: Same.

Justin Levitt: And that would have been one of the other easy outcomes!

The district Louisiana drew after the Supreme Court upheld the VRA in Milligan wasn’t even close to the district plaintiffs were asking for.

Nathaniel Rakich: Basically the exact same district got struck down in the ’90s for being a racial gerrymander.

Justin Levitt: And/but the reason this time was different.

The reason this time was to preserve a bunch of Republican-held seats, including Speaker Mike Johnson’s.

Nathaniel Rakich: It would have been very easy to draw a more compact second Black-opportunity district. It’s just that doing so would’ve endangered Republican Rep. Julia Letlow, which Republicans didn’t want to do.

Justin Levitt: Right. WHICH IS WHY IT WAS PREDOMINANTLY POLITICS.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Well, if she wins a Senate seat they can do that!

Justin Levitt: Sorry — this case makes me shout.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: And very little makes Justin mad. 😉

Carrie Levine: Well, given the reargument, everyone has had a lot of time to get worked up about it.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I want to flag the historical context here, too. A maximal Callais decision — one in which the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2 — could lead to the biggest drop in minority representation in Congress since the end of Reconstruction. So the stakes are pretty high.

Justin Levitt: A maximal Callais decision would also declare the 15th Amendment unconstitutional.

Which is a pretty nifty trick. And would be really hard to write.

(That’s in part why I’m guessing the majority of the court won’t go there. Leaving Thomas once again to write for himself.)

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: The court’s conservatives seem to believe this narrative that Section 2 of the VRA is this all-powerful sword that plaintiffs are using left and right to draw new maps. One of the goals of my amicus brief was to show how wrong this narrative is.

Justin Levitt: Yeah, Thomas in particular has this stereotyped view that it’s easy to win Section 2 cases. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Most Section 2 cases lose, and the vast, vast majority of district maps are never challenged (let alone struck down) on this basis. The court’s conservatives are over-indexing based on a tiny number of cases in the Deep South.

Nathaniel Rakich: You guys mentioned that there are other VRA cases still floating out there — including a few on whether private citizens have the right to sue over the VRA, as well as VRA-based challenges to the congressional maps in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. What happens to those cases after Callais?

Justin Levitt: Some of them might continue on, some of them might change course, some of them might stop dead. Depends entirely on what the court decides, and how it decides, in Callais.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: At least some of those cases — like the ones in North Carolina and Texas — also didn’t look likely to win anyway, I think.

Justin Levitt: Oh, we might agree to disagree on Texas.

North Carolina was a much harder case. Texas had an awful lot of evidence stacked up. (At least in some parts of the state.)

Carrie Levine: Does the fact that those cases are in limbo tell us anything important?

Justin Levitt: I’m not sure how much to make of that fact, Carrie. The Supreme Court often holds cases that seem related to something they’re considering even when the result isn’t all that significant.

There were a bunch of cases held for Allen v. Milligan two years ago, and that decision didn’t change the law at all.

And people forget Milligan also upheld the constitutionality of the VRA! (Again, this case makes me shout.)

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Yeah, an additional crazy thing is that the court just addressed the operation of the VRA two years ago, in Milligan. Nothing has changed since then! Not even the court’s composition.

Justin Levitt: RIGHT.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: It really supports the most cynical views of the court — i.e., that it upheld the status quo in Milligan because the court wanted to avoid another big race-related blockbuster that term (the other being the case that struck down race-based affirmative action at most colleges).

Nathaniel Rakich: When are you guys expecting a decision in Callais? And what’s the latest that we could get a ruling and still have it affect the 2026 elections?

Justin Levitt: If the court is planning to make significant changes to the VRA, my money’s on a decision in late June. It’s going to be hard to write, and there will be some vigorous responses.

If it essentially just says “stick with current law,” could be any day now.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: One slightly humorous question is whether a dissenter can unilaterally delay the decision so it’s less likely to affect this election. I think the answer is yes.

I can imagine Justice Elena Kagan coming up with all kinds of excuses for why she’s not done with her opinion yet. “Sorry, guys, my computer crashed.” “I had to travel for a while.” “You almost convinced me, but then I went back to dissenting.”

Justin Levitt: And all of that means that if the decision is a big deal — and it might not be! — the court is likely to rule too late to affect any districts in 2026.

Nathaniel Rakich: Right, because candidate filing deadlines will have already passed by late June — and many states will even have held their primaries by then.

Carrie Levine: So does that mean that the longer this takes, the more likely it’s a big deal? Or not necessarily?

Justin Levitt: Not necessarily. The reverse is true — it only comes quickly if it’s not a big deal. But a late opinion could be big potatoes or small potatoes.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I agree. Because reaffirming the status quo is also very controversial in this area. Milligan took forever but just reaffirmed the status quo.

Nathaniel Rakich: Right, the same point about a dilatory dissenter holds if liberals are in the majority. It could be Thomas or Alito who drags his feet.

Carrie Levine: And sometimes, the justices’ thinking evolves through the process of writing rulings, right? (And dissents and concurrences.)

Justin Levitt: 100%.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Although I tend to think that happens more in less familiar, less ideologically charged cases.

Nathaniel Rakich: OK, this has been a great discussion! We’ve already covered a lot of ground, but do you guys have any closing thoughts before we wrap — either on Callais or redistricting at large?

Justin Levitt: I’d just make the point that a party can’t fully insulate itself from electoral backlash through redistricting.

Redistricting is a seawall. It stops modest tides. An electoral tsunami comes in right over top of that seawall.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: I like to mention (1) state voting rights acts and (2) multi-member districts with proportional representation.

Justin Levitt: Both super important.

And both available to the states (at least for the state legislature) without any congressional action.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos: State VRAs are a big new trend (in blue states at least), and they go well beyond the federal VRA. They might be the wave of the future after Callais, or they might be imperiled by Callais.

And as my colleague Guy Charles stresses, proportional representation may be the only route forward for proponents of minority voting rights if Callais neuters the VRA.

Compared to race-conscious districting, proportional representation has the big advantage that it achieves even greater minority representation without any race-based lines at all.

Carrie Levine: That’s so interesting! We may need to have a whole second separate chat on it.

Nathaniel Rakich: Haha, we’ll have to have you guys back. Thanks so much for joining us!

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos is the Kirkland & Ellis professor of law at Harvard Law School and the co-founder of the redistricting website PlanScore. Contact Nicholas at nstephanopoulos@law.harvard.edu.

Justin Levitt is a professor of law and the Gerald T. McLaughlin Fellow at Loyola Law School. He runs the website All About Redistricting. Contact Justin at justin.levitt@lls.edu.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Why many Texans are still waiting for their voter registration cards

2026-02-05T19:16:15+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas’ unusual mid-decade redistricting and problems with the state’s new voter registration system have delayed the mailing of voter registration certificates, the documents that give voters information about their polling place and their assigned districts, state and local officials say.

Under state law, the certificates should have been issued by Dec. 6, though there’s no penalty for a late mailing. With early voting for the March 3 primaries set to begin Feb. 17, the delay has confused some voters who were expecting to have received the certificates by now, and multiple election officials said they have been fielding calls and questions about the missing certificates for weeks.

The certificates are small postcards that counties send to registered voters every two years, listing the voter’s local voting precinct, their congressional, state Senate and House districts, county precincts, and city and school districts.

Voters don’t need the cards to vote, but election officials say the cards can serve as an additional form of ID and help voters identify their new congressional or legislative district if it has changed. They also help election officials conduct voter list maintenance: When a card is returned as undeliverable, it signals that the voter may have moved.

Redistricting puts added strain on TEAM

Most of the state’s 254 counties rely on the Secretary of State’s free election and voter registration management system, called TEAM, to produce the certificates. Local election officials have for months complained that they are struggling with the system, which was overhauled in July, and several election officials said that is contributing to the delay.

State election officials said they also didn’t anticipate the system needing to handle the unexpected mid-cycle redistricting lawmakers undertook last year, and the redrawn boundaries are creating additional complications. Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said the state is still working with “several counties” to upload redistricting data, including Harris and Tarrant counties, which could not begin the process until they completed special runoff elections Jan. 31.

The system has lagged in producing reports containing large amounts of data and images that county officials need to print the certificates. Those reports are reviewed by both state and local election administrators to ensure voters’ information, including street addresses, cities, precincts, and districts, is accurate.

“This involves a massive upload of data to our system and then a careful review of voter data and validations at the county level to ensure accurate voter lists,” Pierce said. She did not respond to specific questions about election officials’ comments about TEAM.

Counties that use an outside vendor instead of TEAM to manage their voter rolls, including Collin County in North Texas and Nueces County in South Texas, mailed out the certificates to voters in late January.

Time is short for updating voter rolls

In Brazos County, which uses TEAM, election administrator Trudy Hancock counts on having time to update her voter lists after the initial mailing of voter registration cards. She typically gets more than 10,000 of them returned to her office as undeliverable. Brazos is home to College Station and Texas A&M University, and voters there are constantly moving either within the county or elsewhere.

The returned cards help election officials identify voters who may have moved and can be placed on the suspense list. Those voters have a chance to update their registration at the polls before they can vote.

But as of Wednesday, Hancock hadn’t been able to mail the certificates to her voters yet. She doubts she’ll have time to process returned certificates in time to flag voters before the March 3 primaries.

“Even if voter certificates went out this week, we’re not going to get that done in time to update the pollbooks,” Hancock said.

Tandi Smith, the Kaufman County elections administrator, also has not yet been able to mail out certificates to voters and said she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to. Kaufman has more than 117,000 registered voters.

“For us, especially in a growing county with a smaller staff, we’re having to adjust when a system should be functional and meeting our needs,” Smith said. “So we’re just trying to work through those growing pains until there’s a better way.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

The biggest voting stories in 2025 could shape important aspects of the midterm elections

2025-12-22T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

From Carrie Levine, editor-in-chief:

The Trump administration moved to exert unprecedented federal authority over elections this year in ways that continue to raise important constitutional questions. Federal judges have blocked major provisions of the president’s sweeping executive order on elections, but that court fight isn’t over yet, and the administration has already said it is working on a second such order. What will be in it? It isn’t clear.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is suing a slew of states in a bid to obtain personal information on millions of voters in what appears to be a new attempt to build an unprecedented national voter database, and the federal government is quietly planning a more muscular role for itself in vetting people trying to register to vote. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in a major voting rights case. All of this has big implications for this year’s midterm elections and beyond.

From Jessica Huseman, editorial director:

As we head into 2026, I’m struck by how many of this year’s problems will continue unsolved: Redistricting is somehow still underway, election funding isn’t getting better, and election conspiracy theories continue. All this means election administrators are still struggling — a challenge made sharper by Trump’s renewed attacks and early claims that next year’s results can’t be trusted. Their job satisfaction worries me, even as I’m encouraged by how steadily the field is professionalizing.

From Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor:

Is it too obvious if I say redistricting? Dare I say the biggest electoral story of 2025 was the unprecedented rush — mostly, but not exclusively, by red states — to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of the decade for partisan gain. Six states, representing over a quarter of the nation’s House seats, enacted new maps this year, and a few more (lookin’ at you, Florida and Virginia) may do so in the months to come.

And of course, all of 2025’s fights over lines on a piece of paper will become very real in 2026, when those lines will actually dictate the terms of the elections to one-half of an entire branch of government. The results could include voter confusion, extra work for election officials, less competitive elections, and a U.S. House of Representatives that is less representative of the will of the voters.

From Natalia Contreras, Texas reporter:

Although it’s true that Texas’ redistricting battles took up most of the news cycle this year, Republicans’ ongoing push to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls will continue to affect Texans’ access to the polls in 2026.

During the regular legislative session earlier this year, Texas lawmakers tried to pass a law that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Voting rights advocates warned the move could disenfranchise eligible voters. The proposal ultimately failed, but the Texas Secretary of State’s office’s use of a federal database to verify registrants’ citizenship prompted it to flag 2,724 potential noncitizens on the rolls. Election officials raised questions about the accuracy of the data. U.S. citizens were among those flagged by the state in multiple counties, and election officials are still identifying more. In addition, the use of the federal database is being challenged in court, and a ruling may not land until next year.

From Hayley Harding, Michigan reporter:

As we gear up for the mega-election here in Michigan — the governorship, the secretary of state, every statehouse seat, an open U.S. Senate seat, and much, much more — I expect we’ll continue to see a battle between Jocelyn Benson and the GOP.

She remains the Democratic frontrunner in the gubernatorial race, which means attacks on her are an easy way for Republicans to shore up their own base. But will that hurt her with her fellow Democrats too, as her reputation is called into question? And what does that mean for her successor in the secretary of state’s office, regardless of their party?

Every political decision will have direct implications on at least the next four years of election administration in the state. Legislators from both parties feel like they’re struggling to make headway on their election priorities, and a reset of partisan power in any direction could make that even more difficult.

From Alexander Shur, Wisconsin reporter:

Ahead of every election year, Wisconsin clerks lobby the Legislature with the same request: pass a bill to let them count ballots on the Monday before an election. Time and again, they realize it’s easier said than done. This year was no exception.

Typically, legislators introduce a GOP or bipartisan Monday count bill, and it gets stalled somewhere in the Legislature. This year, after extensive infighting, there wasn’t even a GOP bill.

Why is this so important? Well, Wisconsin likes elections, and in 2026 there are four statewide ones. Barring sudden legislative action early next year, that means Wisconsin will remain among a select few states that can’t process ballots before Election Day.

From Carter Walker, Pennsylvania reporter:

Ballot dates. Ballot dates. Ballot dates. It is a perennial issue here in Pennsylvania: Should voters be required to handwrite a date on their ballot return envelope?

But we may have finality before the midterms. A case before the state Supreme Court could finally resolve it. It has been fully briefed and argued, and now we are just awaiting a decision. That said, who is to say some new legal theory, challenge, or piece of legislation won’t change the playing field again for 2026?

A big question looming over future redistricting: Who should count?

2025-12-11T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The impacts of the latest fight over Texas’ political maps are still reverberating around the state, but there are other debates on the horizon.

Future political representation could hinge on President Donald Trump’s renewed push to exclude at least some noncitizens from the population counts that help determine how political power is distributed in the U.S.

In Texas, where Republicans pushed through a rare midcycle redistricting this year to try to maintain their advantage in Congress after the 2026 midterm elections, experts say that excluding noncitizens when drawing districts could open another way for the GOP to tighten its grip on the state Legislature and congressional delegation.

In addition, many experts and critics worry it could ultimately place some Texas communities into larger, less cohesive districts, while diluting the political influence of Latinos and other minority groups who have accounted for much of the state’s population gain in recent decades. Adding questions about citizenship to the U.S. census could also lead to more undercounting of Latinos, they warn, a problem that has plagued previous censuses.

Read the full story.

How the unprecedented redistricting war is harming election officials, politicians, and voters

2025-12-08T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The redrawing of states’ congressional districts typically happens only once per decade, following the release of new U.S. Census data. But we’re now up to six states that have enacted new congressional maps for the 2026 midterms; that’s more than in any election cycle not immediately following a census since 1983-84. Even more are expected to join the fray before voters head to the polls next year. Ultimately, more than a third of districts nationwide could be redrawn, threatening to confuse and disenfranchise voters.

The truly unusual thing, though, is that four of those states passed new maps totally voluntarily. Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina all redrew their districts after President Donald Trump urged them to create more safe seats for Republicans to help the GOP maintain control of the House of Representatives next year, and California did so in order to push back against Trump and create more safe seats for Democrats. (The other two states redrew for more anodyne reasons: Utah’s old map was thrown out in court, and Ohio’s was always set to expire after the 2024 election.) To put that in perspective, only two states voluntarily redistricted in total in the 52 years from 1973 to 2024, according to the Pew Research Center.

So the current “redistricting wars” are truly unprecedented in modern politics — and that’s had some chaotic consequences. In Texas, for instance, voter advocacy groups sued over the new map, arguing that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. They scored a temporary win on Nov. 18 when a panel of federal judges struck down the new map and reinstated the old one. That ruling, though, came less than three weeks before Texas’ Dec. 8 filing deadline, sending candidates and election officials scrambling to readjust their plans.

But that wasn’t even the end of the story: The state appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which for two weeks left Texans hanging about which map would be in force. Finally, on Thursday — four days before the filing deadline — a majority of the justices stayed the lower-court ruling, putting the 2025 map back in place for the midterms.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, lawmakers are considering whether to pass their own new map under the less than ideal conditions of threats to their physical safety. A proposal to eliminate the state’s two Democratic-held seats passed the state House on Friday, but there’s genuine suspense over whether the plan can pass the state Senate, where at least 14 Republicans are against mid-decade redistricting. (Sixteen Republicans would need to join with the chamber’s 10 Democrats to block it.)

The pressure on these GOP holdouts has been intense, with Trump calling out several of them by name on social media and threatening to support their primary challengers. But in the last few weeks, things have gotten much darker: 11 state senators — most of them redistricting opponents or fence-sitters — have been the targets of swatting attempts, bomb threats, or other threats. Although it’s not confirmed that the threats were motivated by redistricting, many of the lawmakers receiving them have decried them as intimidation tactics meant to make them toe the line.

Finally, of course, the push to draw more congressional districts scrupulously engineered to vote a certain way threatens to make Congress less representative of the electorate.

Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, a panel of federal judges declined to issue a preliminary injunction against North Carolina’s new congressional map, clearing the way for its use in the 2026 election. Although the judges did not find sufficient evidence that the Legislature had drawn the map with the intent to racially discriminate, they did come away convinced that the map would have a “disparate impact on black voters.”

That’s because the map’s goal is to flip the 1st District from the Democratic to the Republican column, and since race and partisanship are so closely correlated in the South, that meant watering down its Black population. Since 1992, the northeastern North Carolina-based 1st District has been configured to enable Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice, but the new map decreases the district’s Black share of the voting-age population from 40 percent to 32 percent. As a result, there are no longer enough Black voters in the district to reliably pull their candidates over the finish line. A political scientist attested in the case that Black voters’ preferred candidate would have carried the new 1st District only seven times in 63 recent statewide elections.

None of this, though, may run afoul of the law. Federal courts have set a very high bar for proving racial gerrymandering claims — and in 2019, they decided to stop trying to umpire partisan gerrymandering altogether. That, as much as anything else, has opened the door to the rash of mid-decade redistricting we’re currently experiencing. Virtually all of the states that have taken the plunge so far have drawn maps with extreme partisan biases that make congressional elections less responsive to the will of voters. For an unprecedented arms race that has caused no shortage of angst, that could be the most indelible impact.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court lets Texas keep new congressional map while legal battle continues

2025-12-05T01:01:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas can use its new, GOP-friendly congressional map while a legal challenge plays out, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, temporarily pausing a lower court ruling that had blocked the map from going into effect.

With the Dec. 8 candidate filing deadline fast approaching, the high court’s decision likely means Texas’ new map will be used for the 2026 midterm elections.

Justice Samuel Alito ruled that it was “indisputable” that Texas’ motivation for redistricting was “pure and simple” partisan advantage, which the court has previously ruled is permissible. A federal judge had previously ruled that the state likely engaged in racial gerrymandering, a claim Alito rejected. The three liberal justices dissented.

The ruling is a major win for Republicans in Texas and nationally. President Donald Trump had pushed Texas to redraw its map over the summer, hoping to secure five additional GOP seats to shore up the party’s narrow majority in the U.S. House through the midterms.

Earlier this month, two federal judges barred Texas from using the new map for 2026, saying there was evidence state lawmakers had racially gerrymandered in redrawing the lines. Galveston District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, authored the opinion ordering Texas to return to its 2021 map, while 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith vociferously dissented.

The state asked the Supreme Court to overturn Brown’s ruling entirely, but that could take weeks or months to proceed through the court system, especially if the justices decide they want to hear arguments in Washington, D.C. With Thursday’s ruling, the justices have temporarily paused Brown’s ruling while that longer legal process can play out.

The new map, approved by the Texas Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in August, is engineered to give Republicans control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts, up from the 25 they currently hold under the 2021 map. Numerous Republican candidates have stepped forward to run in the newly favorable districts, while several Democratic incumbents were pushed into nearby districts already occupied by another Democrat, forcing them to contemplate primaries or retire.

Brown’s ruling upended those calculations. But in restoring the new map, the Supreme Court likely ensured that Republicans running for redrawn districts will get to campaign under the new lines in 2026.

Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling, saying it was a win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits.”

Texas Democrats, meanwhile, condemned the outcome, with House Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Gene Wu of Houston saying the high court had “failed” Texans.

“This is what the end of the Voting Rights Act looks like: courts that won’t protect minority communities even when the evidence is staring them in the face,” Wu said.

U.S. Supreme Court temporarily restores Texas’ new congressional map

2025-11-22T03:21:50+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas is back to using its 2025 congressional map, at least temporarily, after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito granted the state’s request to pause a court ruling that would have required using the lines legislators drew in 2021.

The high court has not yet decided what map Texas should use while the court battle over the legality of the map plays out over the coming weeks and months; Friday’s ruling is a short-term pause while they make that decision.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the step as a victory, and said his office would “look forward to continuing to press forward in our case on the merits.”

President Donald Trump pushed Texas to redraw its map over the summer, hoping to secure five additional GOP seats to shore up the party’s narrow majority in the U.S. House through the midterms. On Tuesday, a federal court barred Texas from using the new map for 2026, saying there was evidence state lawmakers had racially gerrymandered in redrawing the lines.

Galveston District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, authored the opinion ordering Texas to return to its 2021 map, while 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith vociferously dissented.

Alito requested that the plaintiffs respond to the motion by the end of the day Monday. The Dec. 8 candidate filing deadline is fast approaching, which the state made clear to the justices in its petition.

Do you know how redistricting works? Take this quiz and find out.

2025-11-20T17:56:20+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Redistricting is unexpectedly in the news again, as President Donald Trump has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw their congressional districts with the goal of electing more Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

Some Democratic-controlled states are fighting back by passing new maps of their own; in total, six states have adopted new congressional maps so far this year, although Texas’ is currently on hold amid a court battle.

And it looks like this fight is far from over. Lawsuits are pending against the new maps in California and North Carolina, and voting rights advocates are hoping to force a referendum on the new map in Missouri. Meanwhile, states like Florida and Virginia are contemplating joining the fray.

While the parties are locked in a tug-of-war over redistricting, it’s a good time to brush up on what you know about the process. There are a lot of rules, norms, and procedures involved. Do you feel confident you know how it all works? Take the quiz below and find out!

→ Take the quiz!

Lauren Aguirre is Votebeat’s engagement editor, focused on connecting people to information they need about voting in their state. She is based in Philadelphia. Contact Lauren at laguirre@votebeat.org.

Court order on Texas redistricting forces election officials, parties to scramble — again

2025-11-20T16:06:15+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

For months, election officials across Texas have been hustling to redraw precinct boundary lines and secure polling locations and workers for the March primary election, all based on new congressional maps Republican state lawmakers drew in a rare mid-decade redistricting this summer.

County party chairs have accepted applications from candidates for precinct chair — the parties’ neighborhood-level representatives — and, beginning this month, from candidates seeking congressional seats based on the newly drawn districts.

Now, they’re scrambling to revert to the previous congressional maps after a federal court on Tuesday blocked use of the newly drawn districts for next year’s midterms — right in the middle of the filing period for candidates seeking to run in the March primary.

Counties such as Harris and Travis, where the new boundaries changed the shape and makeup of multiple districts to help Republicans, have a lot of work to do under tight deadlines, mindful that the state’s planned appeal of the court’s order to the U.S. Supreme Court means things could change again. The stream of changes is also confusing to voters.

Officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told election officials in large jurisdictions that they should currently operate the 2021 congressional maps, as the federal court ordered, Chris Davis, the Travis County voter registration division director, told Votebeat Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the office, Alicia Pierce, said that state officials also told county officials the order will be appealed, and counties must pay attention to what is happening in the courts.

“Whatever ultimately happens, it’s going to have to be done quickly,” Davis said, noting the looming March primary.

Cindy Siegel, chair of the Harris County Republican Party, said some candidates may now have to consider withdrawing their application or filing again. With the filing deadline on Dec. 8, she’s worried there won’t be enough time for her office to process the applications of candidates who withdraw and refile for new offices.

“You could title your article ‘HELP!’” she told Votebeat.

Siegel also said people are wondering whether the primary election might be pushed back because of the court battle over congressional maps. If that happens, it would throw off all the Harris County GOP’s planning, she said, including hiring workers and securing hundreds of polling sites.

“It’s just crazy,” Siegel said. “Everyone right now is just wondering what’s going to happen. No one knows.”

Texas election administrators have faced redistricting-related election scrambles and delays before.

In 2012, the Texas primary election was delayed until the summer due to months of disagreement and litigation over the state’s congressional maps. The date was changed twice, filing periods for candidates were pushed back, and campaigns were left in limbo without maps.

Because the current dispute involves a congressional election, only a federal court could delay the election or extend the filing deadlines, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

Rottinghaus said the courts have ways to move quickly in cases like this, so a change to the primary election date is unlikely.

“They can actually have an outcome pretty quickly that may or may not be the final result, but that will get us through this election,” he said. But meantime, he noted, there’s uncertainty for candidates over what the lines will look like and when the primary will happen.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas’ gerrymandered congressional maps are blocked. What happens now?

2025-11-19T20:29:51+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

This story was first published byThe Texas Tribune,a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

After a panel of three federal judges ruled Tuesday that Texas cannot use its new congressional map for next year’s election, all eyes turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will decide whether to allow the ruling to stand.

The judges ordered Texas to instead use the map it drew in 2021, which favors Republicans but not as aggressively as the 2025 map.

What happens next will likely unroll in two key steps. First, the state is expected to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily pause the ruling, which would allow Texas to use the more recent map while the appeal plays out.

Then, they will ask the high court to rule on the merits of the case — did Texas disenfranchise voters of color when redrawing its maps this year?

With the Dec. 8 filing deadline approaching quickly, an initial short-term pause could still have significant implications for which map Texas holds its 2026 elections under.

The request will go first to Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative member of the court who handles emergency petitions from Texas, but it would likely take a majority of the court to decide to pause the court’s ruling.

Whatever happens, it will need to happen quickly. Texas’ 30-day candidate filing period began on Nov. 8, meaning candidates have less than three weeks to decide what seats they are running for. To do so, they need to know whether the state will be using the map drawn over the summer, or the map drawn in 2021.

During the nine-day hearing in El Paso, the state tried to argue that there was not enough time for the court to overturn the maps, an argument the panel rejected.

“The Legislature — not the Court — redrew Texas’s congressional map weeks before precinct-chair and candidate-filing periods opened,” they wrote in the ruling. “The State chose to ‘toy with its election laws close to’ the 2026 congressional election, though that is certainly its prerogative.”

Pressing Pause

Most federal lawsuits go before a single district judge and are appealed to a circuit court. That ruling can then be appealed to the Supreme Court, where the justices decide whether or not they want to hear the case.

Redistricting cases are different. They start before a three-judge panel, made up of two district judges and one circuit judge, and are appealed directly to the Supreme Court. The court must respond to the appeal, even if it just affirms or rejects outright.

In 2022, after a three-judge panel found that Alabama’s map violated the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed the maps to remain in effect while they considered an appeal.

More than a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in the appeal that the initial findings were correct: Alabama’s map was discriminatory and should not be used. The state redrew its maps, which were again rejected by a court as discriminatory; this time, the Supreme Court did not intervene.

That same year, after a federal judge and appellate court ruled that Louisiana’s map violated the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court did not pause that ruling while it considered an appeal. The map remained on ice and Louisiana redrew its lines to add additional majority-Black districts.

That redraw prompted a new lawsuit, in which the Supreme Court did temporarily block a lower-court ruling. That case has since evolved into a venue in which the conservative justices seem poised to undermine key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in that case last month, and a ruling is expected this summer.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School, said the justices have become increasingly reliant on emergency orders in recent years, and less communicative about why they grant some and not others.

“What the Supreme Court decides to do with all this is a profoundly open question,” he said. “I wish that it would clarify a lot about its jurisprudence of when it steps in and presses pause.”

Appeal on the merits

After the short-term question about granting a stay comes the long-term question of whether Texas likely engaged in racial gerrymandering in drawing the 2025 map. Every time Texas has redrawn its maps since the creation of the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, at least one of its proposals has been shot down for being racially discriminatory.

In 2012, a Texas district court rejected Texas’ proposed maps and submitted its own; the Supreme Court struck that ruling, and the court drew a new map that was more similar to Texas’ original proposal. While this was going on, Texas election officials moved the March primary to April and reopened candidate filing for an additional day.

The Supreme Court ultimately sided with Texas — six years later — and upheld the bulk of the maps.

The Legislature’s next stab at redistricting, in 2021, is still under legal review, before the same three-judge panel that just ruled on the 2025 maps. The month-long trial over those maps was held in El Paso just weeks before the Legislature decided to redraw the maps.

Tuesday’s ruling from the three-judge panel is preliminary; it says only that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail after a full trial, and that they will face irreparable harm if this relief isn’t granted.

While the state argued repeatedly at the nine-day hearing that the redraw was done only to add additional Republican seats, the judges pointed to numerous instances where lawmakers relied on racial data to justify their actions.

“It wasn’t enough for the map to merely improve Republican performance; it also needed to convert as many coalition districts to single-race-majority districts as possible,” Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in his ruling. “The bill’s main proponents purposefully manipulated the districts’ racial numbers to make the map more palatable. That’s racial gerrymandering.”

In the 160-page ruling, the judges lay out extensive evidence that Gov. Greg Abbott and state lawmakers relied on racial motivations in redrawing coalition districts to appease the Department of Justice.

They also unpack the evidence to the contrary, noting that the 2025 map scores better than the 2021 maps on certain redistricting metrics, like compactness,, and pointing out that the plaintiffs have failed to provide the court with a map that produces the same political outcome without the same racial influences.

Neither of these issues are fatal to the plaintiffs’ claims, the judges conclude, and without an injunction, voters “will be forced to be represented in Congress based on likely unconstitutional racial classifications for at least two years.”

Federal court blocks Texas from using new congressional gerrymander in 2026 midterms

2025-11-18T21:55:45+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas cannot use its new congressional map for the 2026 election and will instead need to stick with the lines passed in 2021, a three-judge panel ruled Tuesday.

The decision is a major blow for Republicans, in Texas and nationally, who pushed through this unusual mid-decade redistricting at the behest of President Donald Trump. They were hoping the new map would yield control of 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts — up from the 25 they currently hold — and help protect the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the ruling striking down the new lines. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

Brown ordered that the 2026 congressional election “shall proceed under the map that the Texas Legislature enacted in 2021.” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement that his office would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the ruling and allow the map to go into effect. But time is short: Candidates only have until Dec. 8 to file for the upcoming election.

Candidates change plans

The map cleared the GOP-controlled Legislature in August and was quickly signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott. Several advocacy groups sued over the new district lines, saying lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black and Hispanic Texans and drew racially gerrymandered maps. Over the course of a nine-day hearing in El Paso last month, they aimed to convince the judges that it was in voters’ best interest to shelve the new map until a full trial could be held.

“A federal court just stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen,” Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu, D-Houston, said in a statement. “Greg Abbott and his Republican cronies tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing.”

It was not immediately clear if the state still has a legal path to restoring the new map in time for 2026. Unlike most federal lawsuits, which are heard by a single district judge and then appealed to a circuit court, voting rights lawsuits are initially heard by two district judges and one circuit judge, and their ruling can only be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tuesday’s decision came from a three-judge panel made up of Brown; U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, a Barack Obama appointee; and Judge Jerry Smith, who was appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Ronald Reagan. The ruling comes 10 days into the monthlong period when candidates can sign up for the March primary.

In the meantime, the ruling has set off a cascade of political maneuvering among members of both parties who had been operating under the notion that the Republican map would stick. Democrats, rather than facing retirement or primaries against fellow incumbents, are now freed up to run in their current districts. The bevy of Republican candidates who had signed up to run in districts newly drawn to favor them will now have to hope for an intervention from the Supreme Court or face far less favorable election prospects.

Austin Democrats Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett had engaged in a shadow primary over the summer over who would represent the remaining Austin Democratic seat, an amalgamation of their two current seats. Doggett announced he would retire if the maps were upheld, clearing the way for Casar.

But after the court’s ruling, Casar said in a statement that he would run in his old district, Texas’ 35th Congressional District, provided the decision stands, clearing the way for Doggett to remain in Congress in the 37th Congressional District.

“The Trump Abbott maps are clearly illegal, and I’m glad these judges have blocked them,” Casar said. “If this decision stands, I look forward to running for reelection in my current district.”

The map ruling would also resolve an emerging primary in Texas’ 18th Congressional District, where Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards are competing in a Jan. 31 runoff to finish out deceased Rep. Sylvester Turner’s term. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, had filed to run in the newly drawn 18th Congressional District, setting up a clash with either Menefee or Edwards. But Green could now run in his current district, the 9th Congressional District, and avoid that scenario.

Ruling cites racial motives

This is just the opening gambit in what promises to be a yearslong legal battle over Texas’ congressional map. A lawsuit over the state’s 2021 redistricting — including its state legislative and education board seats — went to trial earlier this summer and remains pending before the same three-judge panel. The judges have indicated they may want to see how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a major voting rights case before issuing their full ruling on Texas’ maps.

But for Trump, and many of his Republican supporters in Texas, the short-term goal of having this map for the 2026 election was as important as the long game.

“I’m convinced that if Texas does not take this action, there is an extreme risk that [the] Republican majority will be lost,” Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, said on the floor of the state Senate before the new map passed. “If it does, the next two years after the midterm, there will be nothing but inquisitions and impeachments and humiliation for our country.”

The state had argued that the entire redistricting process was based on a partisan goal, which the U.S. Supreme Court has previously said courts cannot intervene to prevent. But the plaintiffs pointed to a letter sent from the U.S. Department of Justice directing Texas to redraw its maps to eradicate four majority non-white districts, arguing that was the original sin that cast a racially discriminatory pall over the whole process.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Brown said it was difficult to analyze the DOJ letter because it contained “so many factual, legal and typographical errors.” But the fact that state leaders had pointed to that letter repeatedly as the impetus for redistricting was enough, the judges said.

“The Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns. In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Brown wrote on behalf of the judges. “In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.”

Abbott said in a statement that it was “absurd” to say the maps were drawn with discriminatory intent.

“The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences — and for no other reason,” he said. “This ruling is clearly erroneous and undermines the authority the U.S. Constitution assigns to the Texas Legislature by imposing a different map by judicial edict.”

Chad Dunn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he felt the state would have limited success at the high court.

“Everyone involved said they were drawing the lines on the basis of race,” he said. “I don’t see how the Supreme Court sets that aside.”

Tuesday’s ruling comes two weeks after California voters greenlit the state’s retaliatory map that aimed to offset Texas’ GOP gains by carving out five new Democratic congressional districts in the Golden State. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spearheaded the plan, traveled to Houston earlier this month for a victory lap to celebrate his state’s passage of Proposition 50, which cleared the way for the California Legislature to approve new congressional boundaries.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom said in a statement Tuesday. “This ruling is a win for Texas and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”

Voters in Texas’ 18th District waited months for an election. They’ll soon have two more.

2025-11-14T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Voters in Texas’ 18th Congressional District, who have been without representation in Congress since March, now face back-to-back elections for the seat, to be held only weeks apart next year.

Voters this month finally got to vote in a special election to decide who would finish the term of Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who died eight months ago. But none of the candidates won a majority, so the top two candidates — acting Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards, both Democrats — must now go to a runoff.

Under deadlines in state law, Gov. Greg Abbott could schedule the runoff for no later than the end of January. His office told Votebeat only that he would announce the timing “at a later date.”

But a new race for the seat would open up on Feb. 17, 2026, when early voting begins for the March primary election, and candidates for Congress will once again be on the ballot.

What’s more, since the state recently redrew its congressional district maps in a rare midcycle redistricting, many voters who vote in the runoff are likely to be in a different district for the primary, with a different field of candidates.

The timing could turn into a confusing deterrent for voters, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

“Turnout for runoffs is already pretty low, but the fact that this is such a temporary, kind of placeholder election means that you may have very low voter interest,” he said.

Before Abbott can announce the date for the runoff, he has to conduct the canvas for the Nov. 4 constitutional amendment election, which he can do on Nov. 19. The runoff has to be held between 70 and 77 days after the canvas, Rottinghaus said.

That would put the runoff date at the end of January. Because those deadlines are in state law, Abbott would not be able to postpone it, as he was permitted to do for the special election, Rottinghaus said. That period of time between the election and the runoff is required as part of a federal law that gives election officials time to count military and overseas ballots.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Elections went smoothly on Tuesday despite setbacks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania

2025-11-10T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Millions of Americans voted in state and local elections on Tuesday, and for the most part, it went smoothly. In many high-profile cases, including closely watched gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, it appears the powers that be granted what is jokingly known as the election administrator’s prayer: “Please, let this election not be close.”

Election signs outside Salem Civic Center in Salem, Virginia, on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2025.

Voters and election officials still had to contend with bomb threats in New Jersey, as well as one in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania — a harsh callback to the rash of bomb threats around the country that marred the 2024 election.

In Chester County, Pennsylvania, as Votebeat’s Carter Walker has reported, a pollbook error means that more than 12,000 independent and unaffiliated voters had to cast provisional ballots, and their eligibility must now be verified before those ballots are tallied.

Voting on elections

In some places, voters were asked to make decisions about future elections. In Texas, voters approved a constitutional amendment specifying that voters must be citizens. In Maine, voters rejected a referendum that would have put new voter ID requirements and new restrictions on absentee voting in place (Voting Rights Lab has a helpful tracker of voter ID requirements in different states).

And, of course, in California, voters overwhelmingly approved new congressional district maps, part of a wildly unusual midcycle redistricting push around the country. California’s new maps, an attempt to offset new Texas maps favoring Republicans, will open opportunities for Democrats to pick up seats in the U.S. House.

Following up on federal election monitors

In last week’s newsletter, Jessica Huseman wrote about the U.S. Justice Department’s plans to send federal monitors to some locations in New Jersey and California, and how, in the context of President Donald Trump’s efforts to exert more control over elections, the news had made many people uneasy.

So this week, I followed up with some election officials in both states to ask how it went. State election officials in New Jersey didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In an emailed response, the California Secretary of State’s Office said the election “was secure and transparent,” adding, “the U.S. Department of Justice has not informed the State of any details about their observation.”

Election offices in Los Angeles and Orange counties, two jurisdictions the Justice Department had said it planned to monitor, confirmed nothing disruptive happened during the election, and the Fresno Bee reported all was quiet in Fresno, too.

On Wednesday, Michael Sanchez, a spokesman for the chief elections official in Los Angeles County, said his office was “unsure of whether federal observers visited vote centers in Los Angeles County,” and had not received reports of them actually doing so. Sanchez said monitors could still choose to observe post-election processing at the ballot processing center.

Bob Page, the registrar of voters in Orange County, also said he had not heard of any issues. Page said one of two Justice Department monitors assigned to the county had been observing operations at its central ballot processing facility this week, at one point asking for clarification on vote-by-mail ballot signature verification procedures.

What will happen next?

There continues to be concern about what the Trump administration will do next on elections and he sent some signals on that this week. He continued to level unsupported accusations against California’s elections on social media.

At a White House press briefing Tuesday, in response to a question from PBS reporter Elizabeth Landers, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the White House is working on a forthcoming executive order “to strengthen our elections.”

Trump issued a first executive order on elections in March, though major provisions have been halted by the courts. He has since said he plans a second one, though it isn’t clear exactly when that will come or what it will include.

Since Tuesday’s election, Trump has also repeatedly pressured senators to eliminate the filibuster, saying it will allow Congress to pass new election laws, including national voter ID requirements eliminating mail voting, except for members of the military.

So far, key senators have said no.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

These cases could give the Supreme Court an opening to reshape election law

2025-10-20T11:43:29+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Election officials and voters preparing for next year’s midterm elections face disruptions on multiple fronts, including President Donald Trump’s efforts to influence voting procedures, a rare midcycle redistricting push in several state legislatures, and activity in the U.S. Supreme Court, whose election-related docket could have a big impact.

This month, the justices heard arguments in two cases with potentially profound implications for elections and redistricting — and at least two more significant election-related cases are seeking a spot on the court’s docket.

The highest-profile case, Louisiana v. Callais, was before the justices this week for a rare reargument. It’s a complex and long-running dispute over political maps in Louisiana, and voting rights advocates have warned it could allow the conservative majority to erode or strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, further limiting the use of race as a factor in redistricting as a remedy for past discrimination.

Most analyses have found striking down Section 2 would give Republicans a path to solidifying control of the U.S. House.

How the justices will rule remains unpredictable — even the timing of the ruling could affect whether states can redraw maps before the 2026 midterm elections if they have to. After oral arguments Wednesday, at least some experts said some of the justices’ questions suggested that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is in trouble.

Federal law allows lawmakers to use race-based criteria in drawing political maps to remedy past patterns of discrimination against minority groups and to ensure that their political power isn’t unfairly diluted. Some conservative justices have long favored prohibiting this practice, but as recently as two years ago, a majority of these justices reaffirmed the law in another case, Allen v. Milligan.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, viewed as a key vote in the Louisiana case, voted with the majority in the Allen case, but signaled then that he was open to considering in the future whether race-based redistricting should be subject to a time limit. He picked up on that thread during the argument Wednesday, saying “race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time,” but should not be indefinite.

Other pending cases could also reshape election rules. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in an Illinois case involving candidates’ legal right to challenge election laws in court. Civil rights groups, including the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union, urged the justices to find that candidates do have the standing to sue. Such a ruling that could open the door to more election lawsuits.

In a case out of North Dakota, Native American plaintiffs sued over state legislative maps they said diluted Native American voting power, and a federal court ruled in their favor. But the state appealed, and the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private citizens cannot file lawsuits under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, going against decades of precedent. In July, the Supreme Court stayed the 8th Circuit decision, and lawyers for the tribes have petitioned the court to take the case.

A case from Mississippi concerns whether to reinstate a five-day grace period for mail ballots arriving after Election Day that a federal appeals court struck down. In an executive order on elections issued in March, Trump cited that decision and told the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day. He also ordered the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to withhold federal funds from states that did not comply with it. A group of states challenged provisions of the executive order and a federal judge blocked that provision in June, but the Justice Department is appealing.

The Supreme Court’s docket is the ultimate destination for more and more of these election law cases, but even the justices appear to be wrestling with how hard it is to settle some questions once and for all.

“A couple of years ago when we decided Milligan, the party there, the state there, made several arguments that we specifically rejected,” Justice Elena Kagan said to Louisiana’s solicitor general, Ben Aguiñaga, during oral arguments Wednesday. “And in the answers that you just gave to me, it seems to me that you repeated each and every one of those arguments that we rejected.”

Just two years after the decision in Allen v. Milligan, the justices are again grappling with similar questions. This time the answers may be different, and they may end up reshaping how Americans vote.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Texas redistricting trial: Plaintiffs say new map was drawn with race-based motives

2025-10-02T20:17:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

EL PASO, Texas — When Texas first proposed redrawing its congressional map earlier this summer, critics decried it as a political power grab to appease the president, while state leaders claimed it was necessary after the Department of Justice raised concerns about some majority non-white districts.

But now that the map is in federal court, the two sides have swapped stances.

The state now claims it acted for purely partisan gain, which the U.S. Supreme Court has said is lawful, while a group of individuals and advocacy organizations argue the Department of Justice’s involvement reveals an unconstitutional racial motivation.

These plaintiff groups, who are also suing over the 2021 maps, have asked a district court in El Paso to block the maps from being used in the 2026 election. The nine-day hearing kicked off Wednesday, with state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso, testifying that his Republican colleagues absolutely had partisan goals.

“But how you get there matters,” he said. And in this unusual mid-decade redistricting, the Legislature’s path to gain more Republican seats in Congress “depressed the ability of Black and Hispanic voters to elect their candidates of choice,” he said.

Moody testified alongside state Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat who spoke about the impact of the changes on her city’s historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Other state legislators are expected to testify for the plaintiffs’ side over the next four days, before the state presents its witnesses.

Justice Department letter is a point of contention

The plaintiffs claim that state lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black and Hispanic Texans by breaking up majority non-white districts at the urging of the Department of Justice.

This letter from the DOJ, which came after President Donald Trump began pressuring Texas to redraw its congressional map, has become a major conflict point. In the letter, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon directed Texas to redraw four “coalition districts,” in which multiple racial groups together form a majority.

Dhillon cited a 2024 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said an individual racial or ethnic group must make up a majority of a district to bring a voting rights lawsuit. The ruling did not direct states to redraw their existing districts where multiple racial groups combine to make up a majority. In fact, to do so would potentially violate the Constitution, several legal experts told the Legislature at various points during the process.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Steven Loomis, an assistant attorney general representing the state, rejected the letter as irrelevant, noting that Dhillon is not a lawmaker, that she didn’t play a role in drawing the maps, and that her claims “don’t bind the Texas Legislature.”

But Gov. Greg Abbott said in several television interviews that this letter, and the court ruling, was what pushed him to add redistricting to the special session agenda — interviews that the plaintiffs’ lawyers played repeatedly at the hearing. Moody testified that it was his understanding that the letter from the DOJ was “what set the special session,” as it gave state leaders the “checkbox” they needed to proceed.

The state maintains that it was motivated entirely by pressure from Trump’s team to add more Republican seats, and that race wasn’t a factor. Loomis pointed to statements from Democratic lawmakers who called the process “pure politics” and a “fascist power grab” to show they agree this was motivated by GOP goals.

The plaintiffs are also arguing that the state racially gerrymandered, meaning race was the predominant factor in how it drew some of the districts. They pointed to several districts that are now just barely over 50% of one race, claiming the state moved some people into certain districts based on their race to meet a performative threshold.

These districts were drawn as “window dressing,” to allow lawmakers to claim they were helping voters of color while actually diminishing their ability to elect their candidate of choice, Moody said.

Who drew the maps?

Throughout the summer, Republicans lawmakers again and again claimed that the entire process was race-blind, hoping to sidestep any concerns about unconstitutionally considering race in the redraw.

But the plaintiffs’ lawyers questioned the validity of those claims at Wednesday’s hearing, and homed in on a central question that’s hung over the entire process: Who drew Texas’ new congressional map? And did they consider race while doing so?

Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, drew Texas’ 2021 maps. Many assumed he would draw the 2025 map as well, but early on, Republican leaders sidestepped questions about his role in the process.

Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who carried the House version of the map, told colleagues he didn’t know whether Kincaid had drawn the map, while committee chair Rep. Cody Vasut said he didn’t know who Kincaid was.

Senate redistricting committee chair Sen. Phil King, a Weatherford Republican, faced blowback when he revealed toward the end of the process that he and Kincaid had chatted three times in recent months.

“We visited a few minutes,” King told lawmakers. “I specifically told him: ‘Don’t tell me anything you’re doing with regard to map drawing. Don’t tell me about the details of any map if you’re involved in it.’”

Moody and Alvarado both expressed frustration over not knowing who was drawing the map or what data they consulted in doing so. In the 2021 redistricting process, the state demographer and the attorney general’s office were on hand at all the hearings to answer questions, but no similar services were offered this time, they said.

Nina Perales, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who is representing some of the plaintiffs, said it was a “legislative shell game” to figure out who had drawn the map.

These questions may soon be answered: The state has said it will call Kincaid as a witness next week.

Lawsuit challenges Texas’ mid-decade redistricting as racially discriminatory

2025-08-27T18:02:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Hours after the Texas Senate approved a new congressional map early Saturday morning that more heavily favors Republicans — legislation Gov. Greg Abbott plans to “swiftly” sign into law — a lawsuit against the governor was filed, alleging that the redrawn districts are racially discriminatory.

The 67-page complaint against Abbott and Secretary of State Jane Nelson supplements legal action filed by the civil rights group LULAC in 2021 challenging the state’s original maps and argues that redrawing districts mid-decade is unconstitutional.

Redistricting usually happens at the start of the decade after U.S. census data comes out. The complaint argues that because the new map was drawn based on the same data used for the initial map passed by the Legislature in 2021, the measure was a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

“Even if racial and partisan considerations are an unavoidable part of redistricting, there is no need for legislatures to take those considerations into account a second time in a single decade,” the complaint reads.

Republicans defend partisan motives behind new map

The complaint, which is expected to be followed by others targeting House Bill 4, was filed by two law firms on behalf of 13 Texas residents collectively called “the Gonzales plaintiffs.” The bulk of their argument is that the new congressional map “dismantles majority-minority districts” by prioritizing Republican representation in Congress.

The NAACP, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Mexican American Legislative Caucus joined LULAC in two additional supplemental suits against Abbott on Monday and Tuesday, also calling the maps unconstitutional and “intentionally discriminatory.”

Abbott’s office defended the maps. They allow “more Texans to vote for the candidate of their choice,” Andrew Mahaleris, the governor’s press secretary, said Monday in a prepared statement.

“Voters, especially Hispanic Texans, are increasingly moving away from Democrats and deserve to vote for candidates who better align with their values,” Mahaleris added, later calling claims that the maps are discriminatory “absurd.”

On the Senate floor Friday, Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, who carried HB 4 in the upper chamber, said that the plan “meets the critically important goals of legality, of political performance for Republicans and of improved compactness,” and that he did not consider racial population data while crafting it.

Republicans pushed for the new map with their eyes set on gaining five more seats in Congress after pressure from President Donald Trump, who wants to preserve the GOP’s slim U.S. House majority in the 2026 midterms. But the complaint says that effort came at the cost of Latino and Black communities, which have largely supported Democratic candidates.

The new lines squeeze more Democratic voters in Houston and Dallas into districts the minority party already controls — a strategy known as “packing.” The Republican-backed map also “cracks” left-leaning communities by splitting voters who supported Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 into Republican districts, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune.

Lawsuit points to dilution of Latino political power

The complaint was filed by two law firms, The Law Office of Max Renea Hicks and the Elias Law Group, the firm of prominent Democratic attorney Marc Elias. They also allege that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act for not creating enough Latino-majority districts to match the growth of Texas’ Latino population.

For example, the complaint points to Harris County, where the new map carves out only one district that’s majority Latino, although the county is nearly half Latino, according to the latest U.S. census.

The census also confirmed that Latinos make up the largest share of Texas’ population, and that Texans of color made up 95% of the state’s population growth in the last decade — but that’s not reflected in the new congressional map, the complaint alleges.

With the new district lines, the lawsuit charges, lawmakers are “intentionally destroying majority-minority districts and replacing them with majority-Anglo districts.”

Democratic lawmakers have waged a lively battle to fend off the GOP’s proposed map since Abbott announced that the first special session in July would include redistricting. House Democrats fled the state halfway through the first session, breaking the lower chamber’s quorum and halting all operations. But the members returned to Austin at the start of the second session.

And on Friday, state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, signaled her intention to filibuster the map well into Saturday. Republicans, however, ended the debate on HB 4, killing her effort. Lawmakers also listened to hours of hearings from Texans across the state who pleaded with them to leave their districts alone.

The complaint and others that are sure to follow are a sign that Democrats and civil rights groups will continue to fight the implementation of the maps ahead of the 2026 election.

The National Redistricting Foundation, which brought LULAC’s initial lawsuit, is also directing this new case.

“Texas’s existing map already dilutes the voting power of communities of color,” Marina Jenkins, the foundation’s executive director, said in a news release.

“In spite of that, the state has doubled down with an even more extreme racial gerrymander that goes even further to pack and crack communities of color and minimize the number of congressional districts where minority voters have the ability to elect candidates of their choice,” she later said. “The court has already agreed to consider expediting this case, and we are confident that justice will be delivered for Texans.”

Texas Senate approves GOP congressional map, sending plan to Gov. Abbott’s desk

2025-08-23T11:42:17+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The Texas Senate early Saturday morning approved a new congressional map gerrymandered to maximize Republican representation, sending the plan to the governor’s desk after weeks of intense partisan clashing.

Republican lawmakers pushed the plan through over fierce Democratic opposition, launching a national redistricting war from Albany to Sacramento while positioning the GOP to net up to five additional seats in Texas.

The Senate adopted the new lines on a party-line vote, 18 to 11, just after 12:30 a.m. Saturday following more than eight hours of at times tense debate.

Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, had planned to filibuster the map well into Saturday as a last stand against the effort, but a rare procedural motion by Senate Republicans just after midnight ended the debate and killed the filibuster, moving the chamber straight on to the final vote. Some observers in the gallery were removed for shouting “shame,” and “fascist,” shortly after the vote.

The map, demanded by President Donald Trump to fortify the GOP’s U.S. House majority in next year’s midterm election, hands up to five additional U.S. House seats to Republicans by dismantling Democratic bastions around Austin, Dallas and Houston, and by making two Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder. The new lines also keep all 25 seats already held by Republicans safely red.

The plan “meets the critically important goals of legality, of political performance for Republicans and of improved compactness,” said Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford and House Bill 4’s sponsor, while repeatedly insisting under questioning from Democrats that he did not consider racial population data in his role shepherding the map through the upper chamber.

The pickups are meant to help the GOP hold onto its razor-thin congressional majority in a midterm election year that is expected to favor Democrats — potentially making the difference between a continued Republican trifecta in Washington, or a divided government with one chamber intent on investigating Trump and bottlenecking his agenda.

That has put Texas lawmakers at the front lines of an issue with national stakes. Republicans earned kudos from Trump for pushing the new boundaries through the state House, while Democrats won support from national party figures, including former President Barack Obama, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

In his closing statement, King made clear that the case for the map rested purely on maintaining Republican control of the federal government — and that if Texas did not push the gerrymander through, the GOP would likely lose control of the U.S. House in next year’s midterm election.

The “amazing progress that’s been made in just eight months — all of this will end if the Republicans lose the Congress,” King said after citing a list of policy achievements he attributed to a Republican trifecta. “I’m convinced that if Texas does not take this action, there is an extreme risk that that Republican majority will be lost. If it does, the next two years after the midterm, there will be nothing but inquisitions and impeachments and humiliation for our country.”

Republicans justify a partisan gerrymander as legal

Though congressional lines are typically redrawn once every 10 years following the decennial census, Republicans justified the aggressive and unusual move to do so in the middle of the decade by saying it was legal to craft new boundaries at any point and for purely partisan gain. They also pointed to the party’s margins of victory in 2024 and the need to counter blue-state gerrymandering to further support their push.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the lines cannot diminish people’s voting power based on race.

Democrats argued that the new map increased Republicans’ advantage by unconstitutionally suppressing the vote of Black and Latino Texans. They framed the push as a power grab by Trump meant to stack the deck in next year’s election.

“Today, the majority will prevail, but the rights of minorities were ignored, outnumbered, outvoted and outgunned,” said Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo and dean of the Senate. “Democrats will go down fighting, having used every available legislative tool. My prayer is that the pendulum will swing sooner rather than later, and that when it does, Democrats will respect all minorities, including political.”

Texas’ approval of the map has set off a tit-for-tat redistricting push in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a map voters would have to approve that could yield five new Democratic-leaning seats, effectively offsetting GOP gains in Texas. Other blue-state governors and national Democratic leaders are backing retaliatory gerrymandering as the Trump administration also pushes GOP-controlled Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio to draw more red seats.

Democratic plan for filibuster falls through

Alvarado, with assistance from other Senate Democrats, had planned to filibuster the map Friday, donning sneakers and receiving a catheter in preparation. Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, had compiled over 12 hours of testimony from constituents on the map to read from during the marathon speech.

But after a three-hour dinner break called by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and objected to by Democrats, Republicans returned late Friday night with a procedural motion up their sleeves. Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, moved to cut off debate early. He cited a campaign email Alvarado sent out promoting the filibuster Friday afternoon, calling it “potentially unlawful,” and “at least unethical,” for ostensibly using state resources, such as staff and Capitol facilities, for fundraising purposes.

“It’s disrespectful. It violates the decorum of the Senate, and personally, I’m offended by it,” Perry said. All Republicans signed on to the motion.

Democrats condemned the explanation as an excuse to kill the filibuster and move the vote along, noting that senators routinely drew from their legislative work in their fundraising campaigns and that lawmakers were not under a fundraising moratorium as they are during the regular session.

“When they do it, it seems to be fair game, and when other people do it, then it’s a gotcha,” Alvarado said after the vote. “It was a mechanism to shut down the discussion, the debate on this issue.”

Republicans dragged Democrats back for special session

The filibuster would have delayed the map’s passage, but almost certainly would not have blocked it. Alvarado would have to had to sustain the filibuster for three weeks straight to run out the clock on the Legislature’s special session.

The new Texas map cleared its biggest hurdle Wednesday when, after more than eight hours of tense debate, the state House adopted the plan along party lines.

Lacking the votes to stop the map in the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature, more than 50 House Democrats staged a two-week walkout earlier this month, grinding the lower chamber to a halt by denying the quorum needed to conduct business.

Republicans unleashed an unprecedented response to drag them back to Texas, issuing civil arrest warrants, asking a court to extradite them from Illinois, seeking to declare over a dozen Democrats’ seats vacant and clamoring for legislative punishments upon their return.

After most Democratic lawmakers returned to Austin Monday, Republican Speaker Dustin Burrows, seeking to maintain a quorum, required each of them to agree to a police escort to leave the Capitol building. Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, refused and was confined to the Capitol for the next 54 hours, prompting a national media frenzy.

Democrats portrayed the walkout as a victory for sparking a national movement in support of retaliatory redistricting, and as just the first part of a longer fight against the map. In the House on Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers pressed their Republican colleagues on the plan’s impact on voters of color, working to establish a record they could use in a legal challenge seeking to kill the lines before next year’s election.

“This fight is far from over,” Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said after the map’s passage in the lower chamber. “Our best shot is in the courts. This part of the fight is over, but it is merely the first chapter.”

Texas House approves GOP-devised congressional map to help fulfill Trump’s wish

2025-08-21T13:57:43+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday approved a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP, over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as a racially discriminatory attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.

The House adopted the map, 88 to 52, along party lines. A Senate panel advanced a similar map Sunday, and the full chamber was expected to send the new lines to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk later this week.

Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state’s congressional map following the 2020 census.

Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws to their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map.

Republicans have said the new districts were drawn purely to maximize their partisan advantage, arguing that the GOP’s margins of victory in 2024 supported new lines that entrenched their hold on power. They have also framed the effort as a response to Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere.

Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, the map’s sponsor, emphasized in laying out House Bill 4 that Republicans were legally permitted to pursue redistricting in the middle of the decade and to maximize partisan gain.

“Redistricting can be done at any point in time,” he said. “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.”

To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas, and Houston and makes Democratic-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the map cannot diminish the voting power of people of color.

Democrats condemned the plan, arguing it widens Republicans’ partisan edge by unconstitutionally packing people of color — who are driving almost all of Texas’ population growth — into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates.

“This bill represents one of the most blatant assaults on fair representation we have seen in Texas,” Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston, said. “Diversity is our greatest strength. It is what makes our neighborhoods vibrant, our workforce dynamic and our communities resilient. HB 4 silences that diversity instead of celebrating it.”

Among the first points Democrats sought to make Wednesday was that the congressional map was the first piece of legislation the House was voting on, rather than flood-related bills responding to the devastating Hill Country floods. Several Democrats wore dark green in honor of the flood victims.

“Why was House Bill 1, the flood relief bill that is the House’s answer to the deadly July 4 flooding that killed over 135 people, not the first order of business of this special session for the Texas House?” Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, asked on the floor.

Republicans reject all 12 Democratic amendments to congressional map

Republicans shot down 12 Democrat-proposed amendments Wednesday, including measures to block the map’s implementation until the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, until the establishment of an independent redistricting commission, and until a federal court found that the plan would not suppress the vote of people of color.

The GOP-led House also rejected amendments to use the state’s current congressional map if the new lines are held up in court, and to only implement the new map within two years of the decennial census.

In proposing each amendment, Democrats sought to stretch out the debate and press their Republican colleagues on how race was considered in drawing the lines, in an effort to establish a record that they could bring to court in challenging the map on constitutional grounds.

Democrats tried to highlight the plan’s possible impact on people of color — who they argued will see their vote diluted under the new lines — and the fact that Republicans were redrawing the map in the middle of the decade, using five-year-old census data.

The map is “a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution,” said Rep.Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, after raising an amendment to sink the map. “This body has no business passing this bill. We need to kill it and get on with the real business of the people of this state.”

Republicans sink amendment seeking to tie map to release of Epstein files

An amendment from Democratic Rep. Gene Wu of Houston that sought to tie the implementation of the new congressional map to the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files was found to be not germane to the redistricting bill after another representative contested it, effectively killing the attempt to put Republicans in a political bind.

Wu said Wednesday morning he planned to introduce the amendment to force Republicans “to choose between their loyalty to Trump and their obligation to expose sexual predators.” But members ultimately did not debate the amendment or vote on it following the procedural challenge from Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, that was sustained by the House parliamentarian.

“The bill changes the composition of districts for the election of members to the United States House of Representatives,” Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows said, reading the parliamentarian’s ruling. “The Wu amendment makes the effective date of the bill contingent on a matter that is not even remotely related to the congressional redistricting.”

House rejects amendment saying the map complies with the Voting Rights Act

The House voted down an amendment offered by Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, to add a section to the bill saying that the map complies with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against voters on the basis of race.

The vote to reject the amendment was 87 to 51, along party lines.

Hunter, the map’s Republican sponsor, opposed the amendment, saying that the bill already complies with the Voting Rights Act.

“It’s unnecessary, and guess what? It’s incorporated in this bill,” he said.

The debate over the amendment grew heated at times, as Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, pressed Hunter on the lack of public input allowed on the map and its impact on Black and Latino voters.

“You own the walkout,” Hunter said to applause from Republicans, referring to Democrats’ two-week departure from the state to block action on the map. “But don’t come into this body and say we didn’t involve you. You left for 18 days, and that’s wrong.”

Martinez Fischer argued that if the map’s proponents were certain it complied with the Voting Rights Act, they should have no problem voting in favor of the amendment.

“It just says that we are going to follow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “That’s it. There are no tricks. There are no hidden words. That’s all it does. It shouldn’t be controversial.”

Protesters gather in Capitol rotunda

As the Texas House began its debate on congressional redistricting, dozens of protesters gathered in the Capitol rotunda and their chants at times seeped into the chamber, albeit faintly.

The demonstrators rallied support for Rep. Nicole Collier, a Fort Worth Democrat who had been on the floor of the Texas House since Monday afternoon after she refused to sign a permission slip allowing members to leave the chamber only if they agreed to be shadowed by state law enforcement officers.

Collier was among the Democrats who participated in the two-week walkout.

“Let her out,” the protesters chanted, some holding a giant banner that read “Put Texans First.”

How Texas’ mid-decade redistricting could affect voters in one Houston community

2025-08-19T18:30:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Adrian Izaguirre grew up in Houston’s South Park neighborhood, a historically low-income community tucked between Interstates 610 and 45, south of downtown. He still calls that place home.

For years, he has seen his neighbors struggle to find affordable housing and access to quality education. On any given day, Izaguirre and other residents in the predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood would have a hard time quickly accessing a local hospital. There are few nearby.

If a disaster were to happen, “the community would have a hard time trying to recover,” the 31-year-old said in an interview.

This is why he says it’s crucial that voters in the community, which is part of the state’s 18th Congressional District, have someone to represent them in Congress. But that seat has been vacant for months. Gov. Greg Abbott has called a Nov. 4 special election to fill the seat, but a mid-decade redistricting that Texas lawmakers are considering could force the winner of that race to run again in March — or leave voters in an entirely different district.

“It’s very discouraging to see it happen, and it also makes me feel powerless, like I have no say in how I get represented,” said Izaguirre, who’s been an active voter since he turned 18 and works for the NALEO Educational Fund, a nonprofit organization that seeks to elevate Latino political participation.

Some voting rights advocates are concerned about the prospect that a mid-decade redistricting, new district lines, and back-to-back elections will together lead to disaffection or confusion for low-income and minority voters in areas like the 18th District. They warn that such disruptions could diminish voter turnout and effectively disenfranchise some of the state’s most vulnerable voters.

18th District was shaped by legacy of Voting Rights Act

The 18th Congressional District, which includes inner Houston and surrounding Harris County areas, is home to more than 760,000 people. It was shaped by redistricting that followed the 1965 Voting Rights Act — signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson — and deliberately crafted to strengthen minority representation in Houston. Its creation and preservation over decades are themselves reflections of battles over race-based redistricting.

After her election in 1995, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee carried forward Johnson’s legacy, making the seat a hub of Black political influence nationally.

After Jackson Lee died last year, Rep. Sylvester Turner won election to the seat. But Turner died in March. Abbott set a special election to fill the seat for Nov. 4, leaving the seat vacant for months and giving Republicans an advantage in Congress in the meantime.

The 18th District is the only congressional seat on the ballot that would also be affected by the mid-decade redistricting that Republicans are pushing through now in a special legislative session. It’s one of the districts that would be reconstituted as Republicans aim to flip five Democratic-held seats in their favor following a push by President Donald Trump’s advisers to shore up the GOP’s advantage in the U.S. House after next year’s midterms.

The latest map proposal moves its boundaries east and south of Houston and shifts more Democratic voters into the district, giving Republicans an advantage in a neighboring district.

In the typical redistricting cycle that happens once a decade after the census, the process of creating, reviewing, and approving new maps takes six to nine months. That timeline takes into account weeks of debate among lawmakers from both political parties and public input during multiple hearings. And even then, court challenges can extend the process and force more changes.

For this year’s proposed mid-decade redistricting, Republicans, who dominate both houses of the Legislature, are driving to compress that timeline to the 30-day length of a special session.

Democrats tried to stall the GOP effort by leaving the state for two weeks and breaking quorum. But they returned to Austin Monday after Abbott called another special session and threatened to keep doing so until the redistricting passed.

If lawmakers agree on new maps in coming weeks, the 18th District winner in November could be on the ballot again during the March primary election.

Candidates for the seat have led public town halls in the past few weeks to hear from voters, and hundreds of other voters have gathered at the capitol to testify in front of lawmakers in opposition to the proposed maps. But lawmakers have moved quickly to approve them anyway

That type of response to the public feedback is likely to lead to voter apathy, warned Joyce Lombard, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, which has been mobilizing to educate the public about redistricting and how people can voice their opinions.

“We’re not taking the voters into account with this process,” Lombard said. “We’re taking the politics into account. It can’t help but to disenfranchise communities of color.”

How redistricting creates new divisions

In a place like the 18th District, a politically driven redistricting would change more than just the boundaries on a map, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

“Communities can really take a hit” when tight-knit groups are split through redistricting, Rottinghaus said. “Social capital that has been built up over all of these years” is dismantled.

For instance, he said, members of a community advocacy group who have long histories working together for a common solution could end up in different districts, or individual families who may live in close-by communities could be split apart in separate districts and lose voting power.

The risk is especially acute in the 18th District, which is now entering its fifth month without representation in Congress. Communities there have struggled to recover from various natural disasters and threats to public health such as the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, Hurricane Beryl, a Category 1 storm that left parts of Houston underwater last year.

Izaguirre, the activist in South Park, said some of his neighbors are still trying to rebuild their homes and the damage left from that storm. That’s why he wants federal and state elected officials to consider the potential effects of the mid-decade redistricting battle on communities.

“It’s more than just a political party’s advantage,” Izaguirre said. “They literally have people’s lives on the line in different ways.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Why Trump’s proposed changes to the census could have lasting effects beyond elections

2025-08-18T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump wants to run a new census before next year’s midterms — and leave undocumented immigrants out of the count. That wouldn’t just reshape political maps. It would warp the data that governments, businesses, and researchers rely on for the work they do and the investments they make. An incomplete or rushed count means flawed decisions, with consequences that last far beyond one election.

The census gives the government its most complete snapshot of the country. The federal government uses it to decide where to send billions of dollars for Medicaid, food assistance, school lunches, and disaster relief. States use it to plan hospitals and roads. Businesses choose store locations based on it. Public health officials track disease outbreaks with it, and emergency managers map evacuation routes using it. Even insurance companies rely on it to set rates.

If we give the Census Bureau less time to plan and execute what amounts to an extraordinary logistical challenge, we undermine its ability to do this work reliably and well. And if we undercount certain communities — a risk that grows if the process gets shortened or harder to join — those places lose representation in Congress and the Electoral College. They also lose money and services they would otherwise qualify for.

What Trump is calling for with the census fits into a bigger pattern of changes in how the federal government collects data. Trump’s 2026 budget axes funding for NASA satellites that track carbon and monitor plant health — tools scientists use to study climate change, plan for disasters, and help farmers know when to plant. Kill the satellites, and we’re flying blind on what’s happening to our planet.

Last month, after a weaker-than-expected jobs report, Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He claimed the numbers were wrong but offered no proof. Economists warn that moves like that can shake confidence in the agency’s independence and make people doubt whether they can trust official jobs and economic data. He’s appointed a new head of the agency that he likes better.

Together, these examples show how politically motivated decisions can shape — and sometimes distort — the data we all rely on. That matters because so many everyday but critical decisions depend on accurate information. Grocery supply chains use population numbers to predict demand. Emergency managers need precise maps of where people live to plan evacuations. Cities and states depend on complete counts to qualify for funding.

Other presidents have clashed with federal data too. George W. Bush faced accusations of downplaying or doctoring reports on climate science, and other administrations have shifted how unemployment or inflation is measured. But those were narrower fights. Trump’s approach covers more ground and acts more directly. He is proposing to change the census, cutting climate satellites, and intervening in jobs data all at once. Some of that may aim to limit information that could work against him or to align the numbers with his preferred message. Cutting certain data programs also makes it harder to measure the effects of policy choices later.

When politics starts shaping how data is collected or shared, the damage doesn’t end with one administration — it lingers. Once trust in official statistics is broken, it can take years to rebuild, and in the meantime, every plan and policy is built on shaky ground. Keeping these systems accurate and independent isn’t a partisan issue; it’s what keeps communities safe, the economy steady, and government accountable to the facts.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Texas redistricting standoff complicates preparations for March 2026 primary

2025-08-08T09:55:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

With Texas legislators locked in a standoff over Republicans’ push to redraw the state’s congressional districts mid-decade, time is running out for election officials to prepare for next year’s primary without major disruption.

Planning for the March primary election is already underway, but election officials say they can’t move forward without finalized maps — and the first key deadline, mandated by the state, is coming Sept. 9.

Democratic lawmakers have pledged to remain out of the state in protest of the Republicans’ proposed congressional map, making an agreement unlikely by the end of the special session Aug. 19. The proposed map could still change, and if Gov. Greg Abbott calls another special session, the debate could extend well into the fall.

Without knowing where the boundaries will be drawn, election officials won’t be able to finalize decisions about polling locations or the number of election workers needed. Voters whose polling location changes will also need to be informed, and candidates who want a spot on the primary ballot also need the new boundary lines well in advance in order to familiarize themselves with the district and campaign. Candidates have to be residents of the district they seek to represent.

In a typical redistricting cycle year, the process of adapting to new maps is labor-intensive for election officials and takes months.

“Who knows if we’ll have enough time?” said Chris Davis, the voter registration director in Travis County. He said the Sept. 9 deadline is when county precinct chairs — who represent their political party in a precinct within their neighborhood — can begin filing to run in the primary. A new map could shift precinct boundaries entirely.

Candidates “need to know now which precinct they’re filing for,” Davis said. “If we have to split a precinct into two, they may end up being the chair of a new precinct.”

All other primary candidates can begin filing for a spot on the ballot Nov. 8. The filing deadline is one month later.

Election officials across the state have for months been updating precinct boundary lines to account for population growth, as required by state law in odd-numbered years. But that work is now on hold due to the redistricting battle, multiple election officials told Votebeat. If and when new maps get approved, they’ll have to start over.

Redistricting delayed a past Texas election

The push to redraw Texas’ congressional maps outside the normal 10-year cycle follows a push by President Donald Trump’s advisers to help Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House in the 2026 midterms. Historically, the party in control loses seats in midterm elections, and Republicans currently have a slim majority.

The Republican-proposed map targets Democratic districts in the Austin, Dallas, and Houston metro areas as well as in South Texas.

Texas election administrators have faced redistricting-related election delays before.

Election officials worry the same thing could happen now — and say they may lose access to polling locations and workers they’ve already secured for April and March if delays persist.

“We secure polling locations at least six months in advance,” said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County election administrator. “We are making sure workers have enough time to plan for the dates of the election. If the dates change, those workers may not show up. The work for us is going to have to start all over again.”

Differing impact for vote centers vs. precinct-based polling sites

In some counties, it’s more urgent now to know the exact number of polling locations they’ll need.

Nearly 100 of Texas’ 254 counties use vote centers, which allow voters to cast their ballot anywhere in their county on Election Day. Vote centers reduce the number of locations officials have to staff and equip on Election Day.

The rest of the state’s counties assign voters to specific precincts. The number of precincts determines how many polling locations they’ll be required to have and whether they’ll need more workers. The new maps are key to figuring out that step of the process.

Denton County, in North Texas, has precinct-based voting, and must make sure voters know well ahead of Election Day which location they’re assigned to.

Frank Phillips, the county’s elections administrator, said he needs the final map soon to assess whether voters need to be reassigned or if more polling sites are required. Without that information, both voters and candidates will be in the dark about their districts — and what races will appear on their ballots.

“They may show up at the polls expecting to vote for District 33 and now they’re voting for District 26,” he said. “That’ll create confusion like something’s not right on their ballot.”

Phillips and other election officials are also watching key deadlines for sending absentee ballots to overseas and military voters, which has to be done more than a month ahead of the election. They must also program and test the voting equipment — a process that hinges on knowing which precincts and races are in play.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Republican redistricting push in Texas triggers a political arms race

2025-08-04T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Redistricting — the art of drawing the district boundaries that determine representation — is messy, opaque, confusing, and inherently political. It typically happens only once a decade in each state, after the census produces new demographic data.

But that once-a-decade cadence now looks like the next political norm to fall.

It’s customary for the party in control of redistricting to draw maps that weaken the voting power of the opposition while maximizing its own political advantage. Gains in technology and data have made it possible to draw lines ever more precisely. “I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today,” said the late Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting consultant — in 1991.

Even so, recent events suggest the current no-holds-barred political climate could take the partisan machinations of redistricting to a higher level.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited constitutional concerns when he called a special session of the state Legislature to draw new congressional maps, but there is also a clear political motive that Republicans haven’t been shy about discussing. Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. The midterm elections are nearing, and the party in power typically loses seats. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has said that the Texas GOP should seek to redraw the lines in a way that allows them to add as many as five seats to the Republican column. A proposed map released this week aims to fulfill that objective.

Trump is reportedly also urging other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, to consider redistricting in a way that would boost the GOP’s chances of picking up seats, though that could mean some incumbents will have to run in more competitive districts. Ohio is engaged in a legally mandated redistricting that Republicans, who control the process, also hope will yield more seats.

This has set off a sort of redistricting arms race, with Democratic leaders in other states saying they could redraw lines to offset Republican gains. Importantly, leaders in some states that have tried to make redistricting less partisan — by shifting control to commissions or adopting other limitations — are suggesting they intend to sidestep them.

For example, California has used an independent redistricting commission for decades, but Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the heavily Democratic state must respond to the push in Texas by drawing new maps that benefit Democrats.

They’re not screwing around,” Newsom said. “We can’t afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire.”

Newsom and other Democratic leaders have said they’re seeking workarounds that would allow a midcycle redistricting in the state. For example, the state attorney general said he believes lawmakers could draw new maps that would be put before voters in a special election.

Democratic governors in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey have also said they’re exploring options, but the barriers are higher than in Texas.

In most of the states under Democratic control, maps already heavily favor Democrats — as in Illinois — or the legislature has limited authority over redistricting. Changing that on a timeline that would allow new maps for the midterms would be difficult.

One thing is certain: Any new maps are likely to face court challenges over how political power is distributed among districts. Those will come at a time when the Supreme Court may be poised to consider another challenge to the landmark Voting Rights Act.

At the end of the last term, the justices didn’t rule on a high-profile Louisiana redistricting case, instead announcing they would hear new arguments on it during the 2025-26 term.

Other redistricting cases, too, could be headed to the court. In the end, it’s hard to tell what will happen, except that voters — who have packed Texas legislative hearings on the redistricting proposal, even before proposed maps were released — may not have much say.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Texas House Democrats flee the state in bid to block GOP’s proposed congressional map

2025-08-03T23:21:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state Sunday in a bid to block passage of a new congressional map designed to give the GOP five additional seats in the U.S. House next year, raising the stakes in what’s poised to be a national fight over redistricting ahead of next year’s midterm election.

The maneuver, undertaken by most of the Texas House’s 62 Democrats, deprives the Republican-controlled chamber of a quorum — the number of lawmakers needed to function under House rules — ahead of a scheduled Monday vote on the draft map. The 150-member House can only conduct business if at least 100 members are present, meaning the absence of 51 or more Democrats can bring the Legislature’s ongoing special session to a halt.

“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” state Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement, in which he accused Gov. Greg Abbott of “using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”

Most House Democrats left Texas Sunday afternoon en route to the Chicago area, where they’re expected to hold a press conference with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Some also headed to New York to meet with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has condemned Texas’ mid-decade redistricting effort and entertained the idea of retaliating with new maps in her state. A third contingent of lawmakers also departed for Boston to attend the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual legislative summit.

Some Senate Democratic lawmakers were also in Boston Sunday for the summit — which is scheduled to run from Monday through Wednesday — according to a source familiar with the plans.

The 11-member Senate Democratic Caucus released a statement Sunday backing their House counterparts for “taking courageous action to defend the voting rights of all Texans.” It was not immediately clear how many Senate Democrats had left the state, and the caucus did not indicate any plans to deny quorum in the upper chamber.

There are just over two weeks left of the Texas Legislature’s special session, during which Abbott has also asked lawmakers to take up measures responding to the deadly July 4 Hill Country floods, stiffer regulations for consumable hemp, and contentious GOP priorities such as cracking down on abortion pills and the bathrooms transgender people can use. The prospects for those items, along with the new redistricting maps, were immediately thrown in doubt by the Democrats’ departure.

In his statement, Wu said Democrats “will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”

“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” he said. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”

Democrats have excoriated the mid-decade redistricting plan — which was demanded by President Donald Trump ahead of a potentially difficult midterm election for Republicans — as a political power grab that would unconstitutionally suppress the votes of people of color.

But locked out of power in the Legislature, Democrats have few tools at their disposal to fight the effort, even as they promised to delay the map’s adoption and to use that extra time to educate Texans on what they framed as an attack on democracy.

Preventing a quorum was the nuclear option, coming just before the map was set to reach the House floor. Republicans advanced the redistricting plan out of a House committee Saturday morning and later scheduled it for a floor vote Monday. Democrats could skip town long enough to run out the clock on the current session — which began July 21 and can last up to 30 days — but Abbott can continue calling lawmakers back for subsequent sessions.

Texas House rules adopted by Republicans in 2023 impose a threat of arrest and a $500-per-day fine on each lawmaker who absconds from the state. House rules also prohibit lawmakers from using their campaign funds to pay the fines, making the decampment a potentially expensive move. But Democrats have been raising money in recent weeks in anticipation of the quorum break, and those involved in the fundraising say they have found a way to circumvent the campaign restrictions.

Among those fundraising to support Democrats is Powered by People, a political group launched by former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke in 2019. The group raised over $600,000 in 2021, the last time Democrats deprived the House of a quorum, to help cover the costs associated with staying out of state, and an O’Rourke spokesperson confirmed the group is again supporting this year’s effort.

The new punishment rules came in response to the 2021 episode, when Democrats fled Texas in an unsuccessful attempt to block new voting restrictions. That effort failed after Democrats on the lam splintered, and enough returned to Austin and granted Republicans the numbers needed to resume business.

Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on social media Sunday that Democrats “who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.”

Other Republicans called for House Speaker Dustin Burrows to take aggressive action against members who were not present when the chamber gavels in Monday at 3 p.m.

Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, posted on X that he doubted all the Democrats participating in the quorum break had actually left the state, and said Burrows, R-Lubbock, should send the House sergeant-at-arms or state law enforcement after anyone who wasn’t on the floor Monday. He also suggested that Abbott — who controls the agenda for special sessions — allow lawmakers to redraw the lines of state House districts to penalize absent Democrats. Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, added that any participating Democrats who serve as House committee vice chairs should be stripped of their positions.

On social media, the speaker said if the House lacked a quorum Monday, “all options will be on the table.” He did not elaborate on what those options might be, and his spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

National Democrats have offered their support, with U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, visiting Austin last week to strategize with state Democrats and vowing to stand with them in trying to block the new map. Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin said in a statement that the party would fight alongside Texas Democrats, as well as take aim at Republican-held seats nationwide in 2026.

Texas’ redistricting effort is also poised to set off a broader redistricting arms race, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom telling aides that he will move to redraw his state’s congressional lines to advantage more Democrats if Texas Republicans pass their map, The Tribune previously reported.

Trump’s political operatives had pressured state leaders to draw Republicans up to five new seats in Texas to help buffer the GOP’s slim majority in the U.S. House against potential losses in a midterm election next year expected to favor Democrats. The first draft of the map was unveiled Wednesday, targeting Democratic members around Austin, Dallas, Houston and South Texas.

On Friday, at the lower chamber’s only public hearing since the map’s release, Texas Republicans made explicit their political motivations for pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting, dispensing with a legal rationale offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and cited by Abbott in adding the effort to the special session agenda.

“I’m not beating around the bush,” Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican carrying the redistricting bill, said about the goal of the map. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”

While federal law permits redistricting for partisan gain, the Voting Rights Act prohibits diluting the votes of people of color. Democrats argued that the proposed map unconstitutionally packed voters of color into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates.

U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, whose seat would be partially dismantled under the new lines, noted at a committee hearing Friday that his district was drawn by a federal court “to ensure that communities of color, Black and brown Texans, could finally have a voice in Congress.”

“Now, that voice is again under threat,” he said. “This is a map that was drawn behind closed doors — as we’ve heard here today — to dismantle representation and weaken our power in turn.”

Texas Republicans’ redistricting map targets five Democratic-held House seats

2025-07-30T19:52:38+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas GOP lawmakers released their first draft of the state’s new congressional map Wednesday, proposing revamped district lines that attempt to flip five Democratic seats in next year’s midterm elections.

The new map targets Democratic members of Congress in the Austin, Dallas, and Houston metro areas and in South Texas. The draft, released by Corpus Christi Republican Rep. Todd Hunter, will likely change before the final map is approved by both chambers and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Democrats have said they might try to thwart the process by fleeing the state.

New lines could force contests between Democrats

This unusual mid-decade redistricting comes after a pressure campaign waged by President Donald Trump’s political team in the hopes of padding Republicans’ narrow majority in the U.S. House.

Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats. Trump carried 27 of those districts in 2024, including those won by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen.

Under the proposed new lines, 30 districts would have gone to Trump last year, each by at least 10 percentage points.

The districts represented by Cuellar and Gonzalez — both of which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and anchored in South Texas — would become slightly more favorable to Republicans. Trump received 53% and 52% in those districts, respectively, in 2024; under the new proposed lines, he would have gotten almost 55% in both districts.

Also targeted are Democratic Reps. Julie Johnson of Farmers Branch — whose Dallas-anchored district would be reshaped to favor Republicans — and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, whose nearby district would remain solidly blue but drop all of Fort Worth — Veasey’s hometown and political base. That seat, now solely in Dallas County, contains parts of Johnson’s, Veasey’s and Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s current district, raising the prospect of a primary between Veasey and Johnson.

The map’s newly proposed GOP seat in Central Texas also triggers the prospect of Austin Democratic Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett facing each other in a primary for the area’s lone remaining blue district. To avoid that scenario, one of the two would have to step aside or run an uphill race for a new Central Texas district, based in San Antonio, that Trump would have won by 10 points.

In the Houston area, the proposed map would remake four Democratic districts. The biggest upheaval would be in the 9th Congressional District, a majority-minority seat represented by Rep. Al Green that currently covers the southern part of Harris County and its direct southern neighbors. It would shift to the eastern parts of Houston, where no current member of Congress lives. Instead of being a seat that Vice President Kamala Harris won by 44 percentage points under the current boundary, it would be one that Trump would have won by 15 points.

Republican-held districts would remain safely Republican

Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature last drew these maps in 2021, with an eye toward protecting incumbents by making their seats as safe as possible. Trump won every Republican-held Texas district in 2024 by double-digit margins, as did every GOP incumbent who had a Democratic opponent. Edinburg Rep. Monica De La Cruz’s 14-point victory was the closest of any winning Republican.

To pick up new seats, Republicans have proposed to pack more Democratic voters into districts in the state’s blue urban centers, giving Democrats even bigger margins in districts they already control, such as those represented by Crockett, Rep. Joaquin Castro in San Antonio, and Rep. Sylvia Garcia in Houston. And they’re looking to disperse Republican voters from safely red districts into several districts currently represented by Democrats, such as the ones held by Johnson and Casar.

No Republican incumbents’ districts were made significantly more competitive.

The map-drawers managed to move more Republican voters into Democratic districts around Dallas and Houston without imperiling the nearby seats of GOP Reps. Beth Van Duyne of Irving and Troy Nehls of Fort Bend. Both faced competitive races in 2020 before their districts were redrawn in 2021 to become solidly Republican, and neither was made to sacrifice those gains in the state House’s initial map.

How new maps would change districts’ racial makeup

The changes would create two more districts in which white residents make up a majority of eligible voters, or citizens who are old enough to vote, hiking the number of such districts from 22 under the current map to 24. Hispanic residents — the state’s largest demographic group, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates — currently form the majority of eligible voters in seven districts, a total that would rise to eight under the new plan.

Four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn with the intention of flipping are now majority-Hispanic — though the Hispanic populations in the new seats in Houston and Central Texas are almost exactly 50%.

The proposed map would also create two majority-Black districts, where previously there were none. Among them is the Houston-centered 18th Congressional District, which has been represented by a decades-long run of renowned Black Democratic members, including Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland, Sheila Jackson Lee and, most recently, Sylvester Turner, whose death in March left the seat vacant. The map proposes to pack even more Democratic voters into the solidly blue seat: Harris won the district with 69% in 2024 and would have carried it with 76% under the new boundaries.

Crockett’s Dallas district would also become majority-Black.

The 18th District was among Texas’ four majority-minority congressional seats flagged by the U.S. Department of Justice as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, a charge Texas Republicans have alternately denied in court and cited as the basis for pursuing a mid-decade redistricting.

Any new map will inevitably be challenged in court. Courts have found that at least one of Texas’ maps violated the Voting Rights Act every decade since it went into effect in the mid-1960s. The current map is still being challenged in federal court in El Paso, with no verdict yet reached.

Texas contradicts itself in explaining redistricting move

2025-07-11T20:53:18+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

At first, the question of whether Texas would take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional maps in the middle of the decade was just a political calculation — would Gov. Greg Abbott go along with President Donald Trump’s plan to try to squeeze a few more GOP seats out of the midterms, despite concerns from congressional Republicans?

But then, the Department of Justice offered Texas a legal justification to pursue this long-shot strategy, warning the state in a letter Monday that four majority-minority congressional districts in the Houston and Fort Worth areas are unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Soon after, Abbott set a special session agenda calling for mid-cycle redistricting “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

This comes just weeks after the conclusion of a trial over Texas’ current maps, in which representatives for the state argued repeatedly that a race-blind process was used to draw the boundaries of the existing districts. Critics say the apparent reversal — with Abbott now acknowledging concerns that some districts were drawn “along strict racial lines” — suggests this is a ploy to provide Texas with political and legal cover to try and add more Republican seats.

“They contended that what they drew was completely satisfactory, so now that they are acquiescing in some concocted allegation of illegality from the Trump administration is astounding,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is part of the legal challenge.

Any new maps would inevitably face a legal challenge. Federal courts have found at least one of Texas’ maps to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act every decade since it went into effect in 1965. But these court battles can take years to resolve, and the candidate filing deadline for the 2026 midterms is just months away.

Even one cycle under a new map carries high upside for Trump, whose legislative agenda rests on Republicans maintaining their slim 220-212 majority in the U.S. House. A Democratic majority could mean obstruction, investigations, and talk of impeachment.

With Texas lawmakers drawing a new map so close to the midterms, “even if it violates the law, it might be left in place for one election,” Saenz said.

Justice Department targets ‘coalition districts’

Texas’ current maps were drawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature in 2021 with an eye toward protecting incumbents and ensuring that two congressional seats Texas gained due to population growth would be held by the GOP. The maps worked as intended, with Republicans winning 25 of 38 congressional seats in 2022 and 2024.

The map was immediately challenged in court by a group of plaintiffs alleging that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits election and voting practices that disadvantage minority groups, including drawing boundaries that dilute their ability to elect their preferred candidate by packing them into a single district or dispersing them throughout multiple districts.

The nearly 4-year-old legal challenge went to trial in May and has yet to be decided.

At trial in El Paso, representatives for the state and its map-drawers repeatedly testified that they were blind to race when crafting the maps and said they did not draw “coalition districts,” where different minority groups are combined to constitute a majority, which the state maintains are unconstitutional.

But in its July 7 letter, the DOJ argued that four of Texas’ districts should be redrawn, three because they are coalition districts and one because it is a majority Hispanic district created as a result of neighboring coalition districts.

All four seats are held by Black or Latino Democrats, or were until recently — Texas’ 18th Congressional District is currently vacant, but was previously represented by Sylvester Turner, who died in March.

That seat and the adjacent 9th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Al Green of Houston, are plurality Hispanic districts with sizable Black populations. The letter says those districts gave rise to Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s neighboring 29th District, where a majority of residents are Hispanic. The 33rd District, held by Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, is also an unconstitutional coalition district, the letter says.

The DOJ cites a 2024 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections do not apply to racial or ethnic groups that have combined their ranks to form a majority in a district. The case, which involved a challenge to Galveston County’s commissioners court map, reversed years of precedent, including by the 5th Circuit itself, putting the appellate court for Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana at odds with most other circuits.

“Although the state’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 … decision, that interest no longer exists,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, adding these districts are “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutionally racially based gerrymandering past, which must now be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas.”

In his proclamation announcing the July 21 special session, Abbott referred to “constitutional concerns” raised by the DOJ, apparently alluding to Dhillon’s letter. And on Friday, House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Republican Senate leader, released a joint statement that said both chambers were “aligned in their focus to ensure redistricting plans remain in compliance with the U.S. Constitution.”

Chad Dunn, one of the lawyers challenging the state’s current maps, said Texas’ swift acquiescence to the DOJ letter contradicts legislators’ testimony.

“During the trial we had in El Paso, ‘blind to race’ was used by a member of the Legislature more times than I can count,” said Dunn, who was previously general counsel for the Texas Democratic Party. “Now the Department of Justice is saying that the Republican legislators who authored this plan weren’t telling the truth, and actually were drawing it on the basis of race. It’s going to be interesting to get to the bottom of that.”

Several of the plaintiffs asked Thursday to reopen the case for new testimony, saying the DOJ letter and the state’s testimony are “flatly contradictory.”

An emerging trend of Texas ceding to Trump administration

Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert who served in the DOJ under former President Barack Obama, said the agency misinterpreted Petteway in its letter. That 2024 decision, Levitt said, did not rule on what constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — it just asserted that the Voting Rights Act does not let individual racial or ethnic groups join together to claim that political boundaries dilute their votes.

The argument laid out in the letter, he added, is not befitting of DOJ’s typical quality, in both Democratic and Republican administrations — especially on a topic so familiar to the agency.

“It’s sloppily dashed-off work,” Levitt said. “It looks like the sort of thing I’d expect from an AI engine that didn’t know how to do law.”

The DOJ declined to comment. Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Texas does not need legal justification to craft new maps in the middle of the decade. The Legislature did so in 2003 at the behest of then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But if the DOJ letter is meant to establish a legal basis for the redistricting process’ political intent, Levitt said it’s a poorly reasoned attempt.

“Nothing in this letter is going to convince Texas to redraw lines that it wasn’t planning on redrawing anyway,” Levitt said.

This is the second time in just over a month that Texas has swiftly surrendered to a request from Trump’s DOJ. In early June, the agency sued Texas over its policy granting in-state tuition to undocumented students, just days after the Legislature adjourned without undoing that longstanding law. Texas immediately agreed to a consent judgment striking down the statute, raising questions about whether the lawsuit was legitimate or “collusive.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed credit for working with the Trump administration to end what he called a “discriminatory and un-American provision.”

Saenz’s group has asked a judge to allow it to intervene in that case, as well, and he said the echoes are eerie — and frustrating.

“It’s a disturbing pattern, frankly, of collusion between the Department of Justice federally and the state of Texas, and that collusion should alarm everyone who believes in democratic processes at the state level,” Saenz said.

For Texas Republicans pushing mid-decade redistricting, history has some red flags

2025-07-10T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

As Texas Republicans prepare to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, cautionary tales loom from past redistricting efforts that saw the state’s rapid demographic change collide with far-reaching partisan gerrymandering.

The move to carve out more GOP seats in Texas was unveiled Wednesday by Gov. Greg Abbott, who included redistricting in a sweeping 18-item agenda for the Legislature’s upcoming special session. The announcement ended weeks of speculation over whether Texas Republicans would follow through on demands from President Donald Trump’s political advisers, who have been pushing for the rare mid-decade redistricting gambit to improve the GOP’s chances of retaining its slim majority in Congress.

Some Republicans, including members of Texas’ congressional delegation, oppose the idea over concerns about jeopardizing their own seats if they miscalculate with the new districts.

A recent test case unfolded after the 2010 U.S. Census, when Republicans who controlled the Texas Legislature looked to maximize their party’s seats across the map by drawing reliable GOP voters into nearby Democratic districts and turning them red.

But by 2018, a Trump midterm election year, that aggressive approach came back to bite them. With a favorable national climate and explosive population growth driven almost entirely by people of color, Texas Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state House, ousted two longtime GOP members of Congress and narrowed their losing margins in statewide races.

“What looked like a solid gerrymander by the end of the decade had become almost a dummymander,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said. “The lesson from 2010 is that you can stretch yourself too thin, that you can be too smart for your own good. And when the politics change, you get bitten in the you-know-where.”

The Texas Legislature last redrew the state’s maps in 2021, this time with an emphasis on shoring up Republican support in already red districts. Each state’s political maps must be redrawn once a decade after the U.S. census to account for population changes and to ensure each congressional and legislative district encompasses roughly the same number of people.

But with a minuscule margin in the U.S. House and anticipated midterm backlash against the party in power next year, Trump’s political team wants to buttress the Republican majority against losses across the country by creating up to five new GOP seats in Texas — a proposal that critics say would almost certainly dilute the voting power of communities of color, and that Republican skeptics worry could stretch GOP voters too thin.

That was what happened several years ago in Dallas County, where Republicans in 2011 opted to extend the number of GOP seats instead of creating a Black and Hispanic majority district and reinforcing their support in red districts. GOP lawmakers may look to avoid similar overreach when they redraw Texas’ maps this year, but they will have to do so with outdated and less reliable data than the fresh census figures they typically use at the start of each decade, further complicating their efforts.

“History gives a lot of flashing red light signals about how this might not be wise,” Li said. “It’s not wise both for political reasons but also for legal ones.”

Some Republicans are nervous about a mid-cycle redistricting

Under the current maps, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 congressional seats, most of which lean heavily to the right. The 2021 state legislative and congressional maps are still on trial in El Paso in a long-running challenge arguing that the maps intentionally discriminate against some Black and Latino voters.

Some Texas Republicans are nervous about trying to squeeze more red seats out of the map by moving their voters to now-Democratic districts. Instead of flipping Democratic seats, those members fear, the new lines could create an opening for Democrats and threaten Republican incumbents by taking away too many GOP voters — as played out in 2018.

“I don’t know how you create five districts out of that,” said one Texas Republican member of Congress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the Trump advisers’ redistricting push.

“I think it’s a bad idea myself, personally,” state Rep. Drew Darby, a San Angelo Republican and former chair of the House Redistricting Committee, said at an event last month hosted by The Texas Tribune. “We did it according to the law, and I think we need to live with it and the effects until we have the next census.”

Still, responding to follow–up questions this week, Darby acknowledged he could see some merits in the idea, noting that redistricting could reflect recent gains Republicans have made statewide and correct any legal issues with the existing maps.

“The main takeaway is that redistricting is always a political fight — contentious, personal, and hard to get done,” he said in response to written questions. “This year will be no different.”

The 2011 cycle, for some, offered lessons that mapmakers should heed this year.

“You can’t cut the districts so thin that it gets you through 2026 but puts those seats in jeopardy for the future,” said John Colyandro, a former senior adviser to Abbott and the former executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, a public policy think tank. He called 2011 “the cautionary tale.”

Still, he argued that there were a few Republican seats to be gained in a mid-decade redistricting effort.

“The important thing is to be prudent about it,” he said. “Texas can certainly have a bit of a firewall against losses elsewhere.”

Predicting future political patterns is hard in Texas

Experts said that maximizing a certain party’s seats over several election cycles becomes more challenging in the middle of the decade, when lawmakers will have to rely on likely outdated and less reliable data, and in a fast-changing state like Texas.

The 2020 U.S. Census remains the most precise data set that mapmakers can use, experts said, with more recent numbers from the 2024 election outcomes and the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey offering less durable and less specific insights.

“When you gerrymander, you’re making a bet on what the politics of the future look like,” Li said. “Predicting the politics of the future is really hard in a state like Texas. … You hope that those margins that you’ve left yourself with are big enough, but they may not be.”

Redistricting this year will likely home in on South Texas, where Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen won reelection in 2024 by narrow margins. Both represent districts centered on the border and made up of Hispanic-majority populations that swung to the right in 2024 — gains that the GOP hopes are enduring, but that Democrats are desperately trying to claw back.

A more aggressive redistricting approach would almost guarantee legal backlash and spark concerns that communities of color, which are driving population growth in Texas, would see their voting power diminished.

“It’s very hard to maximize seats without undermining the political power of communities of color,” Li said. “That is especially hard now that Texas is that much more diverse.”

Overhauling the state’s maps this year is unusual for another reason, too: Republicans were the ones who crafted the existing districts. Some insist they already maximized their advantage when they drew the maps five years ago, having exhausted avenues to add any GOP seats beyond the current 25.

“If we could have done it in 2020, we would have,” former state Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican who chaired the Senate Redistricting Committee in 2011 and left office in 2023, said. He noted that some may now see an opportunity to push more aggressive maps past the courts, whose benches have been reshaped by Trump.

How would Democrats respond to a redistricting attempt?

The last time Texas redrew its maps later in the decade was 2003, when the state’s politics were shifting in favor of Republicans and then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Sugar Land Republican, launched a multistate redistricting plan to amass GOP seats.

The bold move to consolidate GOP power came two years after the Texas Legislature — then split between a Democratic-controlled House and Republican-majority Senate — left it up to the courts to draw new lines following the 2000 census. When Republicans won a majority in the lower chamber in 2002, giving them full control of the Legislature, DeLay moved to scrap the court map in favor of one that would cement the Texas delegation’s GOP majority.

Democrats fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum, and decried the effort as a partisan power grab. A Democratic senator later defected, arguing that the caucus did not have an “exit strategy.” The Legislature eventually passed new maps favoring Republicans.

“We felt we had no alternative to just hold it up so that people could get a better look at what’s going on,” former state Senator Gonzales Barrientos, an Austin Democrat who decamped to New Mexico at the time, said. “We were using the rules. And underneath the rules is representing the people who elected you.”

Democrats have denounced the Trump administration’s redistricting push this year, with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Democrats’ national arm to contest state GOP mapmaking, calling the proposal “yet another example of Trump trying to suppress votes in order to hold onto power.” California Democrats are weighing a retaliatory redrawing of their maps if Texas goes through with the effort.

It was unclear if there was appetite among state Democrats to break quorum this year, especially with flood infrastructure and recovery on the agenda after the devastating flash floods that killed over 100 people in the Hill Country this month.

Some Democrats pointed to a potential upside if Republican mapmakers spread their voters too thin and created swing seat opportunities for Democrats.

“The way in which the Texas map has been drawn is already an extreme partisan gerrymander,” U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader from New York, said last month. “There are several Democrats who have looked at it who perhaps may welcome changes.”

He added: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Abbott calls on Texas lawmakers to consider new congressional maps in special session

2025-07-10T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on state lawmakers to consider a rare midcycle redrawing of the state’s congressional maps during a special legislative session this month, following a push by President Donald Trump’s advisers to help Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House.

Abbott said he was asking lawmakers to consider redistricting now “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

Neither Abbott’s office nor the Justice Department responded to a request for additional information about the concerns. But in a July 7 letter to Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, said four of the state’s congressional districts are so-called coalition districts that the Justice Department believes are “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Dhillon’s letter was first reported by the political news site The Texan.

Coalition districts refer to districts where multiple minority groups with similar political interests combine to constitute a majority, as a way to preserve the political influence of voters from those groups.

For decades, some courts held that under the Voting Rights Act, different groups of minority voters could join forces to challenge new district boundaries on the grounds that they diluted minority voting power — as long as they were groups that tended to vote the same way and could show that their political interests aligned.

But in 2024, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews cases from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, overturned a longstanding precedent permitting such claims in those states, ruling that districts formed this way are unconstitutional. Dhillon’s letter cites that ruling.

The four congressional districts highlighted in the letter are the 9th District, south of Houston; the 18th District, which includes inner Houston and surrounding areas; the 29th District, east of Houston, and the 33rd District, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. All four elected Democrats in 2024. Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who represented the 18th District, died in March; a special election to replace him is scheduled for Nov. 4.

Michael Li, a redistricting expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said it isn’t clear that the districts Dhillon singled out are coalition districts that were formed for reasons prohibited by the 5th Circuit ruling. The statement “is not clearly supported by any evidence in the letter,” Li said.

Redistricting is always politically fraught. Midcycle redistricting is rare, though not unprecedented, and Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation have expressed doubts about the idea, which could make some of their districts more competitive.

Li also said that a rushed redistricting process could create more legal challenges for the state by limiting public hearings and potentially creating fuel for legal challenges.

In addition to the redistricting, Abbott wants lawmakers to consider proposing a constitutional amendment that would give the Texas Attorney General authority to prosecute election crimes, an effort that has failed in the previous two regular sessions.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Trump aides want Texas to redraw congressional maps to aid the GOP. What would that mean?

2025-06-11T10:00:00+00:00

This story was reported in partnership with The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Republicans representing Texas in Congress are considering this week whether to push their state Legislature to take the unusual step of redrawing district lines to shore up the GOP’s advantage in the U.S. House.

But the contours of the plan, including whether Gov. Greg Abbott would call a special session of the Legislature to redraw the maps, remain largely uncertain.

The idea is being driven by President Donald Trump’s political advisers, who want to draw up new maps that would give Republicans a better chance to flip seats currently held by Democrats, according to two GOP congressional aides familiar with the matter. That proposal, which would involve shifting GOP voters from safely red districts into neighboring blue ones, is aimed at safeguarding Republicans’ thin majority in Congress, where they control the lower chamber, 220-212.

The redistricting proposal and the Trump team’s role in pushing it were first reported by The New York Times Monday.

Without a Republican majority in Congress, Trump’s legislative agenda would likely stall, and the president could face investigations from newly empowered Democratic committee chairs intent on scrutinizing the White House.

Here’s what we know about the plan so far:

How do Texans in Congress feel about the proposal?

On Capitol Hill, members of the Texas GOP delegation huddled Monday night to discuss the prospect of reshaping their districts. Most of the 25-member group expressed reluctance about the idea, citing concerns about jeopardizing their districts in next year’s midterms if the new maps overextended the GOP’s advantage, according to the two GOP aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.

Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, was skeptical of the idea.

“We just recently worked on the new maps,” Arrington told The Texas Tribune. To reopen the process, he said, “there’d have to be a significant benefit to our state.”

The delegation has yet to be presented with mockups of new maps, two aides said.

Is a midcycle redistricting like this legal?

Each state’s political maps must be redrawn once a decade, after each round of the U.S. census, to account for population growth and ensure every congressional and legislative district has roughly the same number of people. Texas lawmakers last overhauled their district lines in 2021.

There’s no federal law that prohibits states from redrawing district maps midcycle, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Laws around the timing to redraw congressional and state district maps vary by state. In Texas, the state constitution doesn’t specify timing, so the redrawing of maps is left to the discretion of the governor and the Legislature.

Lawmakers gaveled out of their 140-day regular session last week, meaning they would need to be called back for a special session to change the state’s political maps. Abbott has the sole authority to order overtime sessions and decide what lawmakers are allowed to consider.

If Texas redraws its maps, what would it mean for the ongoing lawsuit over the existing maps?

A trial is underway in El Paso in a long-running challenge to the state legislative and congressional district maps Texas drew after the 2020 U.S. Census.

If Texas redraws its congressional maps, state officials would then ask the court to toss the claims challenging those districts “that no longer exist,” Levitt said. The portion of the case over the state legislative district maps would continue.

If the judge agrees, then both parties would have to file new legal claims for the updated maps.

How would this move affect Texas voters?

It isn’t clear how much maps could change, but voters could find themselves in new districts, and Levitt said redrawing the lines in the middle of the redistricting cycle is a bad idea.

“If the people of Texas think that their representatives have done a bad job, then when the [district] lines change, they’re not voting on those representatives anymore,” Levitt said. “New people are voting on those representatives.”

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Democrats’ national arm for contesting state GOP mapmaking, said the proposal to expand Republicans’ stronghold in Texas was “yet another example of Trump trying to suppress votes in order to hold onto power.”

“Texas’s congressional map is already being sued for violating the Voting Rights Act because it diminishes the voting power of the state’s fast-growing Latino population,” John Bisognano, president of the NDRC said. “To draw an even more extreme gerrymander would only assure that the barrage of legal challenges against Texas will continue.”

Why does Trump’s political team view Texas as a prime target to pick up seats for House Republicans via redistricting?

When Republicans in charge of the Legislature redrew the district lines after the 2020 census, they focused on reinforcing their political support in districts already controlled by the GOP. This redistricting proposal would likely take a different approach.

As things stand, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. Democrats hold 12 seats and are expected to regain control of Texas’ one vacant seat in a special election this fall.

Most of Texas’ GOP-controlled districts lean heavily Republican: In last year’s election, 24 of those 25 seats were carried by a Republican victor who received at least 60% of the vote or ran unopposed. The exception was U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, who captured 57% of the vote and won by a comfortable 14-point margin.

With little competition to speak of, The Times reported, Trump’s political advisers believe at least some of those districts could bear the loss of GOP voters who would be reshuffled into neighboring, Democratic-held districts — giving Republican hopefuls a better chance to flip those seats from blue to red.

The party in control of the White House frequently loses seats during midterm cycles, and Trump’s team is likely looking to offset potential GOP losses in other states and improve the odds of holding on to a narrow House majority. Incumbent Republicans, though, don’t love the idea of sacrificing a comfortable race in a safe district for the possibility of picking up a few seats, according to GOP aides.

Has this happened before?

In 2003, after Texas Republicans initially left it up to the courts to draw new lines following the 2000 census, then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Sugar Land Republican, embarked instead on a bold course of action to consolidate GOP power in the state. He, along with his Republican allies, redrew the lines as the opening salvo to a multistate redistricting plan aimed at accumulating power for his party in states across the country.

Enraged by the power play, Democrats fled the state, depriving the Texas House of the quorum it needed to function.

The rebels eventually relented under threat of arrest, a rare power in the Texas Constitution used to compel absent members back to return to Austin when the Legislature is in session. The lines were then redrawn, cementing the GOP majority the delegation has enjoyed in Washington for the past two decades.

However, what’s at play this time is different than in the early 2000s, when Republicans had a newfound majority in the Legislature and had a number of vulnerable Democratic incumbents they could pick off. Now, Republicans have been entrenched in the majority for decades and will have to answer the question of whether there’s really more to gain, said Kareem Crayton, the vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington office.

“That’s the tradeoff. You can do that too much so that you actually make them so competitive that the other side wins,” Crayton said. “That’s always a danger.”

What comes next?

Texas Republicans are planning to reconvene Thursday to continue discussing the plan, according to Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, and Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, who said they will attend the meeting. Members of Trump’s political team are also expected to attend, according to Hunt and two GOP congressional aides familiar with the matter.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Voting-rights coalition quits challenge to Texas’ 2021 redistricting after court setbacks

2025-03-27T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Two months before a scheduled trial, a coalition of voting rights groups is withdrawing from a long-running challenge to the political maps Texas drew after the 2020 U.S. census, which the groups said diluted the voting power of Black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander Texans.

The outcome of the case, which has been making its way through the courts for nearly four years, will have implications for how much power Texans will have to decide who represents them in the state Legislature and U.S. Congress.

The voting-rights coalition said it decided against continuing the litigation after its claims were dismissed by a trial-court panel of federal judges in February, following a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that experts said upended longstanding precedents.

The withdrawal is the latest tangible effect of recent court rulings that experts say make it difficult for coalitions to bring claims on behalf of groups of historically marginalized voters.

The coalition that withdrew included Fair Maps Texas Action Committee, OCA-Greater Houston, the North Texas chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Americans Public Affairs Association, Emgage Texas, and 13 individual voters. They are represented by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the ACLU of Texas, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Their case had been consolidated with that of other plaintiffs who were also challenging the maps. The remaining claims are still set to go to trial beginning May 21.

The remaining plaintiffs in the case are organizations representing Latino and Black Texans, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Texas NAACP, and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, as well as individual Texans.

The 5th Circuit had decided long ago that different groups of minority voters could be combined to support a claim in such a redistricting case, as long as they were groups that tended to vote the same way. Essentially, if there aren’t enough Black voters or Latino voters, or voters of another protected class, to make up a majority of the district by themselves, they can join forces as plaintiffs if they can show that their political interests align. That’s how the coalition of groups came together to challenge the Texas voting maps.

But in 2024, the same court overturned that precedent, prompting the trial court judges to dismiss the coalition’s claims. As a result, “It’ll be much harder for plaintiffs to bring those claims in the Fifth Circuit in Texas and in Mississippi and Louisiana, than it is elsewhere in the country,” said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The current case began after Texas redrew political maps in 2021 for congressional and state legislative districts. The updated maps were meant to reflect the state’s population growth, which, according to the 2020 census, was driven almost entirely by Texans of color. However, the Republican-drawn maps diluted their political power, splitting up areas that had high minority populations and giving white voters even greater control. That sparked complaints from the federal government and other groups that the maps discriminated against voters of color.

Republican lawmakers and attorneys representing the state in court have denied that their work violated the Voting Rights Act or constitutional protections against discrimination.

Hilary Harris Klein, voting rights senior counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice representing the coalition, told Votebeat that for more than 10 years, Supreme Court rulings and state legislatures across the country have enabled the erosion of minority voting rights.

“It’s very clear that governments today are still not providing equal opportunity for all voters, particularly in the south, particularly in Texas and and I very much fear that we are going to continue to lose ground,” Harris Klein said. “The courts are not stepping up to protect voters, but I’m hopeful that Congress will see the necessity to step in to do that.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

U.S. drops its lawsuit against Texas legislative maps, continuing retreat from voting rights cases

2025-03-13T20:20:26+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

What happened?

The U.S. Justice Department withdrew from a lawsuit alleging that Texas’ legislative and congressional district maps drawn after the 2020 U.S. census discriminated against Latino and Black voters by denying them an equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process.

The department made the decision last week, according to court filings.

It’s the latest in a series of moves by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump to retreat from voting rights cases initiated by the Biden administration. In January, the department withdrew from a voting rights case it had brought last year against Virginia over the removal of names from voter rolls, and last month it withdrew a request to participate in a redistricting case in Louisiana.

What’s the dispute?

The case involves Texas’ 2021 redrawing of 2021 of political maps for congressional and state legislative districts after the 2020 census. The updated maps were meant to reflect the state’s population growth, which, according to the census, was driven almost entirely by Texans of color. However, the Republican-drawn maps diluted their political power, splitting up areas that had high minority populations and giving white voters even greater control. That sparked complaints from the federal government and other groups that the maps discriminated against voters of color.

Republican lawmakers and attorneys representing the state in court have denied that their work violated the Voting Rights Act or constitutional protections against discrimination.

Who are the plaintiffs?

The remaining plaintiffs in the case are coalitions of organizations representing Latino and Black Texans, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Texas NAACP, and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, among others, as well as individual Texans.

They had filed suits in 2021 arguing that the Texas Legislature discriminated against voters of color in the drawing of its political district maps. Their lawsuits were later consolidated.

What are they asking for?

The plaintiffs are calling for the court to rule that the maps are unconstitutional and unlawful, and to order that they be redrawn in a way that does not “dilute the strength of Latino voters in Texas,” court documents state.

The maps have affected communities of Latino and Black voters in North Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth area, in the Rio Grande Valley, and in Central Texas, near one of the nation’s largest military communities in Killeen.

Texas has been sued and found liable for violating the Voting Rights Act every previous redistricting cycle since 1973, said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who represents the coalition of Latino organizations in the case and has represented plaintiffs against the state since the early 2000s.

What happens now?

Such complex, long-running cases require a lot of resources, which the Justice Department has, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The federal government’s withdrawal leaves the private plaintiffs to pursue the cases on their own.

Perales said the Justice Department’s decision does not affect the remaining parties' stance in the case.

A trial has been set for May 21.

Read more coverage of the case and the Justice Department’s stance in voting rights cases from Votebeat and from our partner, the Texas Tribune:

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Trump’s Justice Department signals a retreat from voting rights cases

2025-02-17T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The government’s approach to voting rights is changing fast under the new administration, and a complex, closely watched redistricting case out of Louisiana shows just how fast.

On Jan. 16, the U.S. solicitor general, who represents the government in court, asked the Supreme Court to allow the federal government to participate in upcoming oral arguments in the Louisiana case.

But on Jan. 24, four days after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, the acting solicitor general withdrew that request. Her filing said the government no longer supported its earlier argument that the district court had erred in its ruling.

“Following the change in Administration, the Department of Justice has reconsidered the government’s position in these cases,” the Jan. 24 filing read. “The purpose of this letter is to notify the Court that the previously filed brief no longer represents the position of the United States.”

Two different positions. Eight days apart.

The case will continue regardless of the federal government’s participation, and as always, the justices are free to consider whatever legal arguments they choose. But the government’s shift under the new administration shows how quickly the legal ground is shifting on voting rights cases. As Votebeat reported in January, the Justice Department has also withdrawn from a voting rights case it had brought last year against Virginia over the removal of names from voter rolls.

Such about-faces aren’t unprecedented after a new president takes office — the first Trump administration and the Biden administration also changed the government’s positions on some matters before the courts. But they’re not common either, lawyers said.

“The solicitor general tries to maintain continuity, and has credibility with the justices based on that continuity,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert and a professor at Loyola Law School.

At this point, even judges are anticipating changing positions from the government on voting rights cases, and asking the Justice Department to clarify its intentions — something that Levitt noted is unusual.

Take a long-running redistricting case underway in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. In that case, the Justice Department alleged that Texas’ political maps violated the Voting Rights Act. But a week after Trump took office, judges noted that the department had ordered a pause on ongoing civil-rights litigation and asked the government to state whether it intends to pursue its claims. The Justice Department promised an answer by mid-March.

And after the new U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, was sworn in this month, she received a formal request from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking that the Justice Department drop an ongoing lawsuit over Georgia’s 2021 overhaul of its election laws.

Under Biden, the Justice Department had contended that the law “was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose” and violated the Voting Rights Act, Raffensperger noted. But he said record turnout in Georgia since the law was passed shows those allegations are untrue.

As in the Louisiana, Virginia, and Texas cases, there are private plaintiffs involved. If the Justice Department withdraws from the suit against Georgia, legal wrangling will continue.

And private parties, such as voting rights and civil rights groups, are frequently in the vanguard in such cases, notes Danielle Lang, the senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center and a lawyer who represents some plaintiffs in the Virginia case.

Under some previous administrations, the Justice Department has brought few voting rights cases, Lang said.

Still, she said, “it’s unusual for there to be such telegraphing that a department is going to make such about-faces.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump’s quick executive actions could redefine who counts in our democracy

2025-01-27T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The tense final days of President Joe Biden’s administration and the frenetic early hours of President Donald Trump’s second term muddied the waters on critical issues that could reshape our democracy.

First, Biden. News of his final days in office centered on his use of presidential pardon power and his announcement that he considered the Equal Rights Amendment to have been ratified by the states, a legally controversial opinion that still requires more steps before it goes into effect. The proposed constitutional amendment enshrining gender equity was approved by Congress and sent to the states more than 50 years ago.

Then Trump came into office, and immediately raised his own set of constitutional questions. He issued sweeping pardons to people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He also rescinded a raft of Biden’s executive orders, including one related to the census, signaling that he may revisit an abortive effort from his first term to alter the scope of the decennial count.

The 2021 Biden order had reaffirmed the U.S. Census Bureau’s longstanding practice of counting people “without regard to immigration status.” It cited the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which calls for representatives to be apportioned by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.”

“There are very few constitutional clauses that are as clear as that,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel in the democracy program of the Brennan Center for Justice. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts have long held this to clearly mean that every resident of a state must be included in the count, whether they’re citizens, legal permanent residents, or living in the U.S. under other circumstances.

The census numbers are used for many purposes, including allocating resources to states and determining congressional representation, which means that the Trump-Biden back-and-forth has high stakes.

During his first term, Trump had tried to use the 2020 census to ask questions and amass data on people’s citizenship status. That was seen as a step toward letting states draw voting districts based on the number of voting-age citizens rather than total population. In 2016, Li points out, the Supreme Court left open the possibility for states to use such alternative methods.

The Supreme Court shut down Trump’s effort to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census, but it didn’t preclude adding such a question in the future.

Trump’s second term won’t include a decennial census, but preparations for the next one must start long before 2030, and Trump’s revocation of Biden’s order signals that he intends to influence it, especially on the issue of citizenship.

Indeed, look at Trump’s move in the context of his own executive order limiting birthright citizenship to the children born to American citizens or legal permanent residents.

This order challenges the longstanding reading of the 14th Amendment, which says in the first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That amendment also guarantees equal protection of the law to “any person.”

Writing for the majority in the 2016 Supreme Court ruling Li referenced, Evenwel v. Abbott, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted founding father Alexander Hamilton as saying, “There can be no truer principle than this — that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.”

Naturally, challenges to the legality of Trump’s citizenship order are coming in fast. At least 22 states have signed on as plaintiffs in a wave of lawsuits. On Jan. 23, a federal judge temporarily blocked it, describing it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

It’s impossible to say how these presidential decisions and challenges will play out in the long term. But they will almost certainly cast Americans into renewed and crucial battles over who counts in our democracy. The outcome of these battles could reshape representation for everyone.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Turbulence in the 2024 elections has already started

2024-01-08T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Welcome to 2024! It is already quite spicy. I hope you are all well-rested.

Since we last delivered you an election news roundup, a lot has happened. Here are those things, in brief, and how I’m thinking about them.

First up:

Wisconsin Redistricting

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s heavily gerrymandered maps are unconstitutional and must be redrawn. It could result in earth-shaking consequences for the makeup of the Legislature in the particularly influential swing state. The decision hinged on new and controversial liberal justice Janet Protasiewicz joining the court, who’d rejected calls to recuse herself from the case after she was elected.

The Republican lawmakers who created the maps say they’ll take the case to the Supreme Court.

In related news, Wisconsin will officially be the next state in Votebeat’s coverage area. We’re currently searching for a reporter — interested journalists can apply here — and plan to have coverage of this and other key election issues in this highly contentious state.

This leads nicely to the next thing on this list: Michigan.

So much is happening there!

First, the state is also facing a pretty consequential court decision on redistricting. The day before the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued its ruling, a panel of three federal judges in Michigan ruled that 13 Detroit-area seats in the state Legislature must be redrawn because they were illegally based on race. “The record here shows overwhelmingly—indeed, inescapably—that the Commission drew the boundaries of plaintiffs’ districts predominantly on the basis of race,” the opinion reads. The lawsuit was brought by Black voters who said the map illegally diluted their ability to elect a candidate of their choice.

Also, one of the state’s fake 2020 electors regrets his actions. The New York Times got its hands on the transcript of James Renner’s interview with investigators from the Michigan attorney general’s office. He’s one of the Republicans who acted as a fake elector for Trump in the state, but charges against him were dropped last year after he agreed to cooperate with investigators. In the interview, he said he felt “betrayed” by the people who recruited him. “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”

In addition to Michigan, false electors are facing charges in Georgia and Nevada. Charges may also come this year in Arizona and New Mexico, where investigations are ongoing. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania also saw fake electoral votes submitted after Biden won in these states. The criminal fate of Wisconsin’s fake electors is as yet unclear, though a civil case against them ended in a settlement last month, with an agreement that they would acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and they would not serve as electors in 2024. And as we wrote last year, Pennsylvania’s fake electors included a small but crucial caveat in their submitted certificate that makes it unlikely they’ll face repercussions.

And finally, the Detroit News had a monster scoop. We’ll let the first paragraph of the story speak for itself: “Then-President Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time.”

Meanwhile, Trump is in the news for a bunch of other reasons, too — some election related, some not.

One that definitively is:

Trump could be off the ballot in Maine and Colorado. The Colorado thing happened shortly before our newsletter went dark. While we were out, though, the Maine Secretary of State said goodbye to 2023 in a pretty dramatic fashion: ruling that Donald Trump was constitutionally ineligible to appear on the state’s primary ballot. Uniquely, any Maine voter can challenge the eligibility of any candidate. Three voters had filed such challenges against Trump. By law, the secretary of state — currently Shenna Bellows — then holds a public hearing and renders a judgment.

“I did not choose to hold this hearing or issue a decision. I was duty-bound under Maine election laws and the Constitution,” Bellows said in an interview with NBC News. Trump’s campaign has already appealed the decision to the state’s top court, and state law gives the body less than a month to make a decision.

Ultimately, though, the final call in both Maine and Colorado will rest with the U.S. Supreme Court, which just announced it will hear the Colorado case on Feb. 8.

And finally:

Lol the Iowa Caucus is so soon.

Drink water! Don’t forget to eat lunch! Everything will be fine!

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

A long-shot challenge now presents a serious threat to the Voting Rights Act

2023-12-11T11:00:00+00:00

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about an argument that had the potential to undermine a key section of the Voting Rights Act: the contention that private parties couldn’t sue to enforce Section 2 of the landmark voting rights statute.

It “flies in the face” of how the law had been interpreted by federal courts for decades, I wrote at the time. Expert after expert stressed that it was a long shot, describing it with terms such as “far-fetched” and “Hail Mary pass.”

Except for one thing: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, had raised the question, in a one-paragraph concurring opinion in another voting rights case in 2020. Past cases, he wrote, “have assumed—without deciding— that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action under §2.”

No contention is too far out there if two Supreme Court justices want to parse it. That’s why defendants in voting rights cases, including the states of Texas and Georgia, began raising the argument, which, if successful, would mean only the U.S. Department of Justice could file suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (the provision of the law which prohibits discrimination in voting based on race or membership in certain language minority groups and has historically been most often used in redistricting cases). That’s a dramatic change that almost certainly would result in far fewer such cases.

Now, a federal appellate court has officially endorsed it.

“Did Congress give private plaintiffs the ability to sue under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act? Text and structure reveal that the answer is no,” a three-judge panel wrote for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in connection with an Arkansas case.

That means that for now, private parties can’t bring suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the seven states covered by the 8th Circuit: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. And almost certainly, Gorsuch, Thomas, and their fellow Supreme Court justices will eventually have to decide the question.

Voting rights advocates who have been bringing suit under the provision for decades say they’re flummoxed by the 8th Circuit’s decision. They point to a legislative record that clearly shows Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act knowing full well that private plaintiffs were suing under Section 2 of the VRA, and making it clear Congress expected that to continue.

“The Committee reiterates the existence of the private right of action under Section 2, as has been clearly intended by Congress since 1965,” reads a Senate report from 1982, according to research provided by the Campaign Legal Center’s Danielle Lang. “It is intended that citizens have a private cause of action to enforce their rights under Section 2,” reads a House report from the same year.

In a 1996 opinion, Morse v. Republican Party of Virginia, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens noted that Section 2 “provides no right to sue on its face,” but the Supreme Court has “entertained cases brought by private litigants to enforce § 2.”

The 8th Circuit panel was dismissive of both the legislative history (“there are many reasons to doubt legislative history as an interpretive tool”) and Morse, which it wrote “assumes that a private right of action exists under § 2.” The emphasis there is the 8th Circuit’s.

The 8th Circuit decision is already reverberating through ongoing cases. For example, in North Dakota, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe recently won a victory in a case over state political maps. Secretary of State Michael Howe, a Republican, cited the 8th Circuit’s ruling on the private right of action when he announced the state would appeal.

Lang points out the North Dakota case was also brought under a separate federal statute that isn’t necessarily affected by the 8th Circuit ruling on Section 2, but by her description, voting rights advocates like the Campaign Legal Center are playing something akin to whack-a-mole with the never-ending challenges to the VRA, and it’s “another way in which our resources are kind of being pulled away from doing our work just to maintain the status quo.”

The Supreme Court recently issued a strong decision upholding the Voting Rights Act — this summer’s 5-4 Milligan ruling originating from an Alabama challenge. That decision, points out Ruth Greenwood, director of the election law clinic at Harvard Law School, may have given new oxygen to arguments such as this as it became apparent the Supreme Court was not immediately going to strike down the law.

“This sort of collateral attack maybe wasn’t seen as the best way to get there, but having Milligan come out the way it did, the conservatives have decided to come at it from every angle until they find something that sticks,” Greenwood said.

We’re preparing to cover the 2024 elections next year. What issues in voting should we focus on? What’s missing in election news? Help us decide what to cover by filling out our survey here.

Back Then

Conservatives were not always this hostile to the Voting Rights Act, or the ways by which its powers could be brought to bear. The U.S. Senate unanimously reauthorized it in 2006, and several of the Republicans who voted for it remain in office: Susan Collins, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and John Thune.

Its passage in the U.S. House that year was more fraught with controversy. While House leaders had guaranteed Republican support for the renewal, conservative representatives forced the first vote to be canceled over their support for controversial changes that Democrats and even some Republicans said would gut the intent of the act. To placate them, the House held votes on four amendments (though ultimately none passed).

In the end, most House Republicans did vote for the bill (it passed 390-33), and even did so ahead of schedule.

In Other Voting News

So-called “false electors” in states won by President Joe Biden who attempted to wrongly cast those states’ electoral votes for former President Donald Trump continue to face legal consequences. The Washington Post reported Nevada is now the third state to criminally charge false electors. In Wisconsin, the 10 Republicans agreed to a legal settlement requiring them to withdraw their false certification, acknowledge Biden’s victory, and never serve as a presidential elector in any election that includes Trump on the ballot, the Post reported. (Read Votebeat’s story on why Pennsylvania’s “false electors” are likely to avoid prosecution.)
Columbia County in Georgia has become the first known county to contract with EagleAI, a voter information system endorsed by conservatives who have spread conspiracy theories about elections, the New York Times reports. Experts have warned against using the system, and Georgia state officials said it contained errors.
To support allegations that former President Donald Trump and his campaign intended to subvert the vote in the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in a court filing that an unidentified Trump campaign employee “encouraged rioting” to obstruct the tallying of ballots in Detroit, the Detroit News reported.
A prominent misinformation researcher, Joan Donovan, has filed a complaint against Harvard University, alleging it stopped supporting her work as it sought grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the charity of Facebook’s founder, the Washington Post reported. Donovan is now affiliated with Boston University.
Some Wisconsin Republicans want the state Legislature to dissolve the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission and give the secretary of state management of elections, with oversight from state lawmakers, but it’s unclear whether the proposal has enough support to pass, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Eligible voters are being caught up in a sweeping conservative effort to challenge voter registrations, forcing those voters to take steps to maintain their registrations and requiring election officials to spend hours evaluating the challenges, CBS News reported.
Former President Donald Trump and his backers are urging supporters to “guard the vote.” CNN looks at why that phrase troubles democracy advocates and experts.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

A case over Alabama’s political maps lays bare the ugliness of redistricting

2023-09-11T10:00:00+00:00

Redistricting is supposed to be a way to ensure equitable representation. Americans adjust political boundaries at all levels to make sure districts are equal, population growth is accounted for, and everyone’s vote is meaningful. But in practice the process is a bare-knuckled no-holds-barred political mishegoss that would shatter anyone’s ideals.

This week’s federal court ruling in Alabama, after nearly three years of rancor, puts this in sharp relief.

In 2021, Black registered voters from Alabama sued the state over its political maps, alleging intentional discrimination and racial gerrymandering. Alabama lost the case. Federal judges ordered the state to create a second congressional district in which Black voters comprised a majority, or nearly so.

Alabama appealed and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state lost there, too — resoundingly.

The case then went back to the lower court, which gave state lawmakers time to call a special session and take another crack at drawing political maps complying with the court’s orders.

But the Alabama Legislature, once again, produced a map that didn’t create that second majority-Black district.

So here we are, more than three-and-a-half years into the 2020 redistricting cycle, and these voters, who already decisively won their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, are back in federal court, still trying to get a fair map in place before the 2024 election.

Alabama — like so many other states before it — is running out the clock.

After all, the 2022 election was conducted based on an illegal map in Alabama, one that denied Black voters the representation they were entitled to under the law. Similarly, Ohio used a map the state Supreme Court had declared illegal after a federal court decided the state was out of time to put a fair one in place. The wrangling has gone on so long there, advocates who brought the lawsuit this week moved to drop the litigation and leave the current map in place because of “the continued turmoil brought about by cycles of redrawn maps and ensuing litigation.”

There’s a redistricting trial underway over Georgia’s map and a challenge pending over Louisiana’s. A state judge just decided Florida’s map doesn’t comply with the state constitution. In Wisconsin, a shift in the makeup of the state Supreme Court has Republicans threatening to impeach a newly elected justice who has yet to hear a single case, in hopes of preserving Republican-drawn state legislative maps. And that’s just a partial list.

This isn’t the first time, certainly, that a redistricting cycle has gone into what Michael Li, senior counsel to the democracy program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, describes as “extra innings.” But there are a lot of states still in flux, even if Alabama appears to stand out for sheer nerve.

And it matters.

Republicans narrowly won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, and small shifts — such as a second majority-Black congressional district in Alabama that’s likely to add a second Democrat to the state’s congressional delegation — could tip the balance next year.

It’s cynical, but it’s easy to see how that gives politicians a reason to drag out legal proceedings for as long as possible — and maybe keep a map in use for another election cycle, even if it’s eventually going to get thrown out.

“I think it can be disillusioning,” Li said. “People who are affected win things and then they don’t get them. It seems like it’s forever stalled in an appeal.”

The three-judge panel dealing with the Alabama case, all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents, including two by former President Donald Trump, clearly took note of the state’s intransigence in a 217-page order issued Tuesday.

“The State has explained that its position is that notwithstanding our order and the Supreme Court’s affirmance, the Legislature was not required to include an additional opportunity district in the 2023 Plan,” the judges wrote, sounding baffled at how, exactly, the state might have arrived at that particular conclusion.

“We discern no basis in federal law to accept a map the State admits falls short of this required remedy.”

The judges’ order, dotted with phrases such as “as we already said,” did not sound pleased. Far from it.

It’s clear Alabama’s legal strategy here isn’t landing, though the accompanying political strategy may be easier to understand. One state representative told the court that during the special session held earlier this year to draw a new map, he spoke with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. McCarthy, he told the court, “was not asking us to do anything other than just keep in mind that he has a very tight majority.” State lawmakers may have, indeed, kept that in mind.

The judges wrote that they are “deeply troubled” by the state’s actions and “disturbed by the evidence” that even though “we have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close,” the state simply is not going to do what it’s been ordered to do.

“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote.

Of course, as Li points out, evoking George Wallace and the South’s response to court orders to desegregate schools, there’s a long history of such recalcitrance (something also not lost on opinion columnists) and resisting orders from the federal government may be a sounder political strategy than a legal one.

The court is now appointing a special master and cartographer to draw a new map, since, as the judges note, election officials need one no later than early October.

For its part, Alabama has already appealed the order. The state attorney general issued a statement saying, against all available evidence, that “we strongly believe that the Legislature’s map complies with the Voting Rights Act.”

Alabama is also likely to appeal whatever map the court puts in place. Most experts expect the state to lose.

But the clock is ticking. And the Black voters who won in court have yet to win the representation federal courts found they’re entitled to have. So even though federal judges have made their position crystal clear, it’s hard to tell whether anyone is really winning here.

Back Then

Alabama has a long history — as many states do — of discriminating against Black voters. In its Sunday edition on Aug. 24, 1902 — one year after the state adopted its new Jim Crow constitution — The Montgomery Advertiser published the following: “One of the great desires of the patriotic Alabamian is absolutely fair elections, primary and general. Under the new Constitution and the elimination of the negro this result is of easy accomplishment. The things that were done in the past which the necessities of the case may have pardoned is generally admitted, but now, with practically white suffrage only, there can be no excuse of cheating at the polls or manipulation after they close.”

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In Other Voting News

Amid protests, North Carolina lawmakers delayed a vote on controversial legislation that would realign the composition of state and local election boards, evenly splitting members between political parties and giving state legislators the power to break deadlocks, WRAL reported. Republicans have unsuccessfully pushed similar changes in the past, but voters rejected a constitution amendment in 2018, and the state Supreme Court twice rejected them as unconstitutional.
Texas’ most populous county dismantled its election administrators office on Sept. 1 after a new law forced Harris County to transfer responsibility for elections to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector, the Houston Chronicle reported. The county sued the state to block it, but the state Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect, even amid preparations for this November’s elections.
Arizona Republicans rejected a plan to hold a presidential primary restricted to in-person voting on a single day with hand-counted ballots in favor of participating in the typical state-run primary, citing concerns about the money and manpower it would need but risking a potential backlash among a segment of the party who have pushed for such voting procedures, the Washington Post reported.
Voters seeking to disqualify former President Donald Trump from running for office under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which says anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after taking the oath of office is no longer eligible to hold office, sued in Colorado last week and also are seeking to keep him off the ballot in other states, the New York Times reported.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter.Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

“Am I actually awake?”: The lawyer whose redistricting litigation was instantly affected by SCOTUS’s Milligan surprise

2023-06-26T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

The Campaign Legal Center’s Mark Gaber had just wrapped up a trial over redistricting in Washington state, representing plaintiffs who argued that newly redrawn political maps diluted the strength of Hispanic voters, on June 7. There was not much time for catching his breath before he had to help argue a similar redistricting case the following week, in North Dakota.

Gaber woke up the next morning to a phone exploding with text messages. The Supreme Court had released an eagerly awaited decision, in Allen v. Milligan. The case had the potential to radically change the legal standards used in redistricting cases like the one he’d just argued.

The upshot: A majority of justices had essentially defied the expectations of pundits and upheld the status quo, preserving the Voting Rights Act and leaving decades-old standards for establishing racially discriminatory effects in place.

“Am I actually awake?” Gaber recalls asking himself. The decision couldn’t have been more important to his work. As it turns out, Gaber would help argue both the last redistricting case before Milligan and the first one after it. He was also part of a team of lawyers representing Native American plaintiffs challenging legislative boundaries in North Dakota. If the Supreme Court had decided Milligan differently, it could have upended both cases.

As it was, the pending opinion had cast a long shadow — the latest court case that had the potential to radically reshape the reach of the Voting Rights Act. He and his colleagues had crafted trial strategies based on the existing standards, wondering all along whether the Supreme Court was about to radically change them.

“No one really knew what the court was going to do, so we obviously weren’t going to take any super affirmative steps toward a guess,” said Michael Carter, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. Carter, along with Gaber, is part of the team representing the Spirit Lake Tribe and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, tribes suing over the North Dakota maps.

Gaber said he and his fellow lawyers had thought about whether they should wait for the Supreme Court’s opinion before proceeding. No one knew exactly when the Supreme Court would release its opinion.

In Washington state, Gaber was part of a team of lawyers arguing the state’s redistricting commission spread Latino voters across multiple legislative districts in the Yakima Valley, preventing them from being able to elect candidates of their choice. In North Dakota, the tribes also alleged that state legislative districts were drawn in a way that reduced their ability to elect candidates of their choice, pointing to the fact that in the wake of elections held under the new maps, the state Senate for the first time since 1991 had no member who was also an enrolled member of a tribe located within the boundaries of the state.

But a decade after the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, Milligan had the potential to limit the law even further. A majority of justices could have, for example, laid out a new test to determine whether maps had racially discriminatory effects, or, perhaps, required proof that those drawing the maps did so with a racially discriminatory intent. Instead, the opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld the so-called Gingles test, which has been in use for decades.

Some federal judges put redistricting cases on hold until the Supreme Court released its decision. In fact, lawyers representing parties in the Washington state case had asked the judge there to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court released Milligan, writing it “will inevitably impact this proceeding and will likely be determinative.”

But that trial went ahead, legal uncertainty notwithstanding, and so did preparations for the North Dakota trial.

“We sort of proceeded optimistically as if the Supreme Court was going to follow decades of precedent,” Gaber said. “And that’s the way we had to proceed. Otherwise, you’d be forgoing the chance of relief for these very meritorious claims for an additional election cycle,” because delaying the trials for the Milligan decision would likely mean there wouldn’t be enough time to put new maps in place in Washington and North Dakota before the 2024 election.

When the decision landed, Carter said it was “a relief.”

It “sent a really clear message that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is intact and [lawmakers] have to ensure that their maps don’t have the effect of discriminating against racial minorities,” said Molly Danahy, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center who is also part of the legal team representing the tribes challenging the North Dakota maps.

Gaber, Danahy, and Carter said they feel they have a strong case in North Dakota; the federal judge hearing the case said he hopes to rule as soon as possible. The North Dakota secretary of state’s office did not respond to a request for an interview about how Milligan affected the case.

Of course, the uncertainty isn’t over. Anyone who works on voting issues knows there’s always another case. Carter and others point to one out of Arkansas pending in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over whether private individuals have the right to sue under the Voting Rights Act, even though they’ve been doing so for decades.

“There’s always a possibility of something new happening that changes the legal landscape,” Carter said, adding, “and then we have to adjust and figure out what we’re going to do next.”

Back Then

One occasion on which the Supreme Court really threw voting cases off balance was, of course, the Shelby County decision in 2013. A quick tale of a lawyer who had to react much differently than Gaber:

Minutes after the Supreme Court announced that a preclearance requirement for new voting laws was, for at least the time being, no longer a thing, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott tweeted voter ID into law. Really. And the very next day, attorney Chad Dunn filed a lawsuit against the state on behalf of Rep. Marc Veasey and three voters. Dunn had been present at the Supreme Court when the decision was read — having previously successfully argued the federal government should block the law in preclearance — and saw Abbott’s tweet while standing on the steps of the courthouse. “I put my phone back in my pocket, and went straight to my hotel room and worked all night on a lawsuit,” he said.

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Republicans and activists are targeting disinformation researchers with subpoenas and litigation alleging an organized campaign to collude with government officials, with the intent of suppressing speech, the New York Times reported. Researchers say the effort is impeding their effort to conduct research and target disinformation as the 2024 election nears.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer has sued failed GOP candidate Kari Lake for defamation, alleging that she and her allies have falsely claimed without evidence that Richer, also a Republican, sabotaged her gubernatorial bid, the Washington Post reported. The lawsuit is an unusual effort to hold a candidate responsible for false claims that undermine trust in elections.
Ohio election officials around the state, already under pressure preparing for an unusual Aug. 8 election, must in many cases reprint ballots or reprogram machines after state officials sent them incorrect language for a ballot initiative, cleveland.com reported.
After years of bashing it, leading Republicans are now launching efforts to convince GOP voters to use mail voting, a popular method of casting ballots that former President Donald Trump and others had previously claimed compromised the integrity of elections, the New York Times reported.
Previously unreported emails and communications reveal new details about former President Donald Trump and his allies’ attempts to pressure Pennsylvania lawmakers into rejecting the results of the 2020 presidential election, showing how conspiracy theories circulated and revealing previously unreported doubts about the effort, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

A shift on the North Carolina Supreme Court sends tremors through the voting world

2023-05-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Elections have consequences, as people love to say, and the election of two new GOP justices to the North Carolina Supreme Court has shaken the voting world.

I know that sounds dramatic but, let’s consider all of the things this newly-shifted court made happen in a single day:

The photo ID mandate approved in late 2018 by Republicans in the legislature will be enforced in 2024.
The North Carolina Legislature will also have a freer hand in drawing legislative boundaries, reinforcing Republican majorities for at least the next decade.
The Supreme Court also overturned a trial court decision on the restoration of felon voting rights, leaving tens of thousands of people waiting until they complete probation or parole.

They rendered these decisions after revisiting rulings made by the very same court back in December, when Democrats held a slim majority. The choice to do that was basically unprecedented, and the state Supreme Court has taken full advantage of the opportunity, reversing nearly a decade of work by local activists to expand the franchise in the state in one go.

As you likely know, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s December decision to reject the maps as illegal gerrymanders led state legislators to race to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge their loss on the grounds of the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine” — until recently considered a fringe theory.

After the state Supreme Court announced it would rehear the cases, the U.S. Supreme Court asked parties in the case, Moore v. Harper, to submit briefs addressing this development by the end of March. Now that these same legislators have been handed a retroactive win, the case may well be moot, as legal experts have assumed for months.

You can read a wonderful tick-tock of the progression of this case here from UCLA legal scholar Rick Hasen, who also made this point: “If Republican state justices in North Carolina moot Moore, it might simply delay an outcome on an issue that should be resolved sooner rather than later.”

Indeed! A case out of Ohio — Huffman v. Neiman — is a possible vehicle to carry the argument forward, for example.

Republicans also show no signs of backing down on this issue, and some have even made it a central part of their campaigns this year.

For example:

Earlier this year, I spent quite a while talking to Mac Warner – the secretary of state in West Virginia and a Republican currently running for governor.

Unprompted during our conversation about his views on the 2020 election, he enthusiastically mentioned a “big case: Moore v. Harper coming out of North Carolina” that would surely uphold his view of the truth of the independent state legislature doctrine.

Pressed for more information, he took out a thick lawbook and flipped to the tiny portion of the U.S. Constitution on which this theory hinges — it was pre-highlighted: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

The idea that there was a different interpretation of implications of this single section — single word, really — of the Constitution appeared to genuinely puzzle him. He felt, it seemed, absolutely confident that his interpretation was the only possible correct one, and was prepared to defend it regardless of what I threw at him. He had a prop!

While the independent state legislature doctrine was referenced in a single Bush v. Gore concurrence and has been lightly batted around by the court’s most conservative justices during recent election cases, it is otherwise seen by legal experts as a radical departure from conventional interpretations of that clause. One amicus brief signed by a number of people with the rare distinction of being household names in the legal world argues the doctrine is invalid under “every tool of constitutional interpretation.”

A whole bunch of other people have said pretty much the same thing, but all of these people and the Mac Warners of the world cannot be right at the same time. Now, each side will simply be crossing its fingers, hoping that by the time the Supreme Court really does sort it out, the Justice Math might be more in their favor.

What does that mean for everyone else? Uncertainty remains the name of the game, for now.

Back Then

In 1899, North Carolina adopted a “multi-box law” for the first time, implementing it for a 1900 referendum on the makeup of the electorate. The system itself was a method of disenfranchisement. In this ballot-casting system, separate boxes were used for each race: president, governor, state representative, etc. If ballots were inserted into the incorrect box, they were not counted. The boxes were then moved throughout the day to prevent others from arranging tickets of illiterate voters in order on their behalf. While voters could ask the judge to read the names, there is wide speculation by historians that voters of color and illiterate voters received little help: all election offices were appointed by the Democratic governor. The boxes served as a de facto literacy test, at least for a time. If you know more about this, please reach out.

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A new law in Georgia makes it a felony for local officials to accept private funding for elections, the latest in a series of laws restricting such donations around the country in the wake of millions of dollars in grants from nonprofit groups given toward the costs of the 2020 election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Bipartisan legislation to update Alaska’s voting laws — establishing ballot curing, signature verification, and ballot tracking requirements, among other things — progressed out of a state Senate committee this week, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Several of the initial 20 arrests made by Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security have been dismissed or yielded plea bargains with no jail time, the Washington Post reported, but the arrests themselves have nonetheless resulted in job losses and other personal consequences for those charged with voting illegally.
The 2022 midterms had the second-highest turnout of any midterm election this century, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau released last week, and roughly half of voters cast ballots early or by mail, with Asian American voters the most likely to have done so and Black voters the least, NPR reported.
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Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Two debates show redistricting is really a fight for power

2022-10-17T10:00:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Good morning,

Two debates — one behind closed doors and the other in the most watched courtroom in America — are highlighting a stark truth about a poorly understood process that’s also a cornerstone of our democracy.

In a conversation behind closed doors that was secretly recorded and publicly released, three members of the Los Angeles City Council participated in an unusually blunt conversation about redistricting, featuring startlingly racist language.

In the Supreme Court, oral arguments in an Alabama redistricting case, Merrill v. Milligan, provided clues last week as to whether the justices’ eventual decision will further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act.

The redistricting process at the center of both conversations, of course, is the arcane process of redrawing political boundary lines every decade in response to population changes. To most people it seems like an esoteric exercise that doesn’t have much to do with their lives.

But redistricting, as these discussions made clear, is really about power — who has it and who doesn’t, who gains and who loses, whose voice is heard by politicians.

That brings us back to the racist comments in the recording of the three Los Angeles City Council members, all Democrats, in a conversation where one, Nury Martinez, referred to their colleagues (and, frankly, nearly everyone else) in revolting, racist language while discussing their goals for Latino districts.

The language this public official chose to use about their colleagues (and in a particularly repulsive instance, about a colleague’s young Black child) have rightly dominated the discussion about the audio, which has resulted in calls for the council members’ resignations.

By now, you’ve probably seen the most offensive comments from the audio recording. So for just a minute, let’s talk about the redistricting part. The council members were speaking, in unusually blunt terms, about how to maximize Latino clout and representation at the expense of Black voters and other diverse constituencies — who they saw as allies or adversaries, what they stood to gain from the maps.

Los Angeles is a diverse city with many communities of color — a growing Asian population, a Black population that has long wielded political clout, and Latinos making up the largest ethnic group.

What the secretly recorded conversation exposed is that the council members involved seemed to view redistricting as a zero-sum game, with communities gaining or losing power in the city at each other’s expense.

Martinez, the Los Angeles City Council president, wanted to keep economic assets like the Van Nuys airport in her district. “If you’re going to talk about Latino districts, what kind of districts are you trying to create?” she asked. “Because you’re taking away our assets. You’re just going to create poor Latino districts with nothing?” Martinez resigned Wednesday.

And at some base level, power and assets are what everyone was fighting about before the Supreme Court, too. Alabama’s voting-age population is about 27 percent Black, but only one of its seven congressional districts is majority Black. Black voters and advocacy groups challenged the state’s political map under the Voting Rights Act, saying it illegally diluted the Black vote. A panel of federal judges ordered Alabama to create a second district with a majority of Black voters, or close to it.

Alabama, for its part, appealed, essentially arguing that it had used race-neutral criteria to create its map and the Voting Rights Act was only meant to apply in cases of intentional discrimination — a pretty radical reading of the law that would further limit the application of the landmark civil rights statute, and one that not even the most conservative justices on the court seemed ready to embrace.

No less than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has said the lower court correctly applied existing law in ordering the creation of the second majority Black district. Nonetheless, many observers think Alabama is likely to win at least a narrow victory before this Supreme Court, which has, in recent years, issued decisions making it harder for plaintiffs to successfully bring cases under the Voting Rights Act.

The oral arguments often featured the kind of language that makes legal arguments — and redistricting — harder to understand. Redistricting typically takes into account commonly used criteria, such as “communities of interest” and “compactness,” that aren’t always clear to the general public.

Sometimes, the definition of such terms is in the eye of the beholder, and it isn’t always clear how the different criteria are balanced. For example, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out the state has been unwilling to split Mobile and Baldwin counties, arguing they’re a community of interest because many of the white residents share French and Spanish ancestry, but has split the Black Belt. During the back-and-forth, Alabama’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour Jr., arguing for the state, said, “I don’t think courts are very well-positioned to judge how — which community of interest should be weighed in which way.”

And Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted during an exchange over whether a proposed district was “reasonably compact” that he, too, was grappling with how to apply the concepts in practice.

“And I will be candid, for both sides, I don’t really know how to measure reasonably compact,” Kavanaugh acknowledged. “There’s been a lot written about it and I’ve read a lot. It’s very hard to measure.”

If Kavanaugh, who no doubt has the assistance of his able law clerks and rapid access to all relevant context, isn’t sure whether something meets the definition, it’s no wonder the public struggles. Most people have far less ability to parse this process, which ultimately decides how well represented they are at every political level.

But the recorded conversation between the Los Angeles City Council members made it clear that politicians know the deal.

Back Then

This isn’t the first time an Alabama redistricting case has required the Supreme Court to consider whether proof of discriminatory intent was required in order to overturn a political map. In 1980’s City of Mobile v. Bolden, the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional remedies were only available if the decisions were motivated by a discriminatory purpose. In response, in 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to make it clear discriminatory intent wasn’t required to establish a violation of Section 2.

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Republicans are complaining, and in some cases suing, over the party affiliations of poll workers, claiming local election officials are not taking steps to include enough GOP workers, the Washington Post reports. Local election officials, for their part, say they are following requirements that mandate a mix of partisan affiliations among poll workers, but they can’t guarantee, and aren’t required to have, equal numbers from each party in every county.
Social media accounts spreading misinformation are doing so in more languages and across a wider array of platforms, and social media companies are doing little to stop the spread of it, according to the New York Times.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order granting three counties affected by Hurricane Ian new flexibility in conducting elections. Among other things, the order allows Lee, Charlotte, and Sarasota counties to consolidate polling places, although it makes clear that any new locations would ideally be in the same precinct or close to it, the Miami Herald reports.
An election integrity effort in North Carolina is putting new burdens on local election officials and is closely linked to national efforts, according to this deep dive from The Assembly.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, worked behind the scenes with one of the GOP’s top redistricting lawyers and other partisan players to draw his redistricting map, a process that potentially violated state law, according to ProPublica.
The Colorado secretary of state’s office says a database glitch caused it to mistakenly mail roughly 30,000 noncitizens instructions on how to register to vote, according to the Associated Press. The office said it would ensure none of the noncitizens actually registered due to the error.
Pinal County, Arizona is paying its elections director $200,000 for four months of work if the county’s November election is successful after a troubled primary, the Arizona Republic reports. Elections Director Virginia Ross, previously the county’s recorder, agreed to step in to replace the elections director who was fired after the primary. (Read Votebeat’s coverage of the problems in Pinal County here.)

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Ohio’s redistricting mess threatens a smooth election in November

2022-05-09T11:04:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Tuesday was the Ohio primary — well, the first one.

If you’re curious why Ohio has to have two separate primaries this year (answer: the state’s ongoing redistricting disaster), then you’re probably wondering when the second one will be held.

So are election officials and Ohio voters! That’s right — no one really knows. The state Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled version after version of the congressional and state legislative maps unconstitutional, leaving election officials in limbo, and facing increasingly difficult-to-meet deadlines.

The past few years have proven that election officials bring order to chaos by having many, many backup plans, complete with checklists, color-coded calendars, and, when necessary, creative solutions manufactured from items purchased at a local dollar store. But there are limits.

Ohio is one example of what voters and election officials are dealing with around the country. In state after state, court cases and new voting laws — often crafted by lawmakers who don’t consider practical implications — are making elections even more complicated to administer and are confusing voters.

Ohio election officials and advocates for voters, reacting to the state’s slow start on redistricting, asked the Legislature to delay the primary in hopes of having maps in place for one single election, but legislators didn’t do it.

“All the challenges with timing could have been avoided if the redistricting commission and the Ohio General Assembly were proactive from the get go,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, which sued over the redistricting maps, “instead of intentionally running out the clock as a strategy for forcing gerrymandered maps on the people of Ohio.”

The May 3 primary was based on a congressional map that is still being disputed in court. Statewide races, unaffected by redistricting, were also on this ballot. State legislative maps are still in limbo, which is why the state will need to have a second primary, with the costs borne by Ohio taxpayers.

Election officials, and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, have said it will be extraordinarily difficult to schedule the second primary for any date other than Aug. 2, when some jurisdictions are already scheduled to hold special elections.

If the election isn’t Aug. 2, “this is going to get crazy and it makes my head spin thinking about it,” said Aaron Ockerman, executive director of the Ohio Association of Election Officials.

The state’s election calendar, based on its laws, calls for an election on Aug. 2 to be certified by Aug. 23 — just one month before military and overseas ballots for the general election have to be ready.

The state Supreme Court, for its part, pointed out that plenty of states have primaries after Aug. 2, and called it an “artificial deadline.”

A federal court then said that if Ohio doesn’t have a map in place by May 28, it will order the implementation of one the Ohio Supreme Court previously ruled unconstitutional and set the election for Aug. 2. The courts cannot wait longer “without jeopardizing the right to vote, overriding a host of state election laws and deadlines, and inviting the electoral chaos and confusion that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed lower courts to avoid,” a three- judge panel wrote.

The judges said they chose that map because nearly all 88 counties had already at least begun programming those new legislative districts into their systems.

The delays already have left fatigued election officials enmeshed in a series of overlapping elections, struggling to meet deadlines set by state law and waiting for certainty.

Montgomery County Board of Elections Deputy Director Sarah Greathouse color-codes her election calendar to keep her deadlines straight.

In Montgomery County, Ohio’s fifth largest, putting the new maps in place required a team of people working for days. All that work had to be scrupulously and repeatedly checked.

“We cannot make mistakes,” said Sarah Greathouse, deputy director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.

If Ohio ultimately adopts a different state legislative map than the one the federal court is preparing to put in place, that work will have to be redone. The difficulty of the task varies by county, depending on the number of changes and how many different districts the county is divided between.

Meanwhile, the tight timeframes for the May 3 election caused delays that foreshadow what election officials must contend with for the second primary.

Election officials are legally required to have ballots ready to send to military and overseas voters 46 days before the election date. With the disputed congressional maps coming down to the wire, they couldn’t finalize the ballots on time.

In Clinton County in southwest Ohio, which touts itself as the birthplace of the banana split, election officials crafted multiple versions of the ballot, based on old and new districts, hoping to be ready for any circumstance when finally allowed to move forward. “Voting started on Tuesday and on [the Friday before] we got notification from the secretary of state” to go ahead and place the ballot order, said Shane Breckel, the county’s elections director.

The state used grant money to pay the bill for express postage for military and overseas ballots this time, and some ballots cost more than $100 in postage, said Brian Sleeth, director of Warren County’s Board of Elections.

If the next election is Aug. 2, those military and overseas ballots must be ready for use by June 17 — just a few weeks after the deadline to finalize the May 3 election results. Early voting — which begins 28 days before the election in Ohio — would start July 6.

Finalizing ballots isn’t simple or fast. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s largest, there are 975 precincts, and each precinct essentially had its own distinct ballot for the May 3 election — for both parties — said Anthony Perlatti, director of the county board of elections.

When Cuyahoga County produced a test deck for the May 3 ballot, to ensure its machines could properly tally every possible ballot choice and flag design issues before ordering the full print run, it ran to more than 50,000 sheets of paper.

For the May primary, the 400 Cuyahoga voters who cast ballots during the first three days of early voting had to mark their choices on an unofficial copy of the ballot that was placed into a secure envelope because the actual ballots weren’t ready yet. A bipartisan team later opened the envelope and replicated the voter’s choices on a real ballot, so it could be tallied.

Meanwhile, Sleeth, president of the Ohio election administrators association, is concerned about lining up polling places and poll workers for the next election, which still has no certain date.

At least, he said, the county always tells polling places and poll workers there is the possibility of an election on Aug. 2, which means they are more likely to be available than on another random date.

If the county has to scramble for replacement polling places and notify voters over the summer, he said, “it just adds so much confusion.”

Even when polling places don’t change, Cuyahoga’s Perlatti said his office typically sends voters a card in English and Spanish that lists their polling place, the hours of early voting, and directions to request a mail ballot.

Not this time. Until late March, officials weren’t sure the courts would permit the May 3 election to go forward. That meant no card.

Usually, “we know when it hits people’s mailboxes because our website and our phones blow up” with people requesting mail ballots, he said.

In 2018 and 2014, Perlatti said, the county had around 70,000 voters request mail ballots for the primary. As of the Thursday before the May 3 election, the county had only about 32,000 such requests. Perlatti said he believes a “good portion” of the difference is because voters didn’t get that card.

Some of those voters cast ballots in person, he said. Others, he is sure, sat out this election.

Are overlapping deadlines, conflicting court rulings, or other issues affecting your ability to plan for a smooth election? Let us know at tips@votebeat.org.

Back Then

These days, voters take it for granted that they’ll receive a printed, government-issued ballot. But it wasn’t always so. Many of the earliest American elections were conducted by voice vote (a practice still in use at some Town Meetings in New England). When voters did start using paper, they often wrote their choices out themselves — hopefully legibly. In the early 19th century, candidates and parties began providing ballots, sometimes with eye-catching and colorful designs, The New Yorker reported. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that states began adopting the so-called “Australian ballot” or “blanket ballot,” a government-issued ballot that listed all candidates, regardless of party, and allowed for private voting, but presented barriers for voters who couldn’t read.

In Other Voting News

The dramatic leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn landmark abortion rights ruling Roe v. Wade is prompting fresh scrutiny of the Supreme Court confirmation process and whether past nominees were truthful about how they viewed precedents, the Washington Post reported. That’s something that could have implications for long-standing precedents concerning other rights.
A federal appeals court Friday struck down a lower court’s stay of certain provisions in Florida’s new election law, and also halted the portion of the order that had required the state to seek federal permission before enacting new laws regulating absentee ballot drop boxes, third-party voter registration efforts, and so-called “line warming.”
President Trump’s acting Homeland Security secretary, Chad Wolf, delayed an intelligence report on Russian targeting of Democratic presidential candidates before the 2020 election, creating a perception of politicization, an investigation by the Homeland Security inspector general found, Defense One reported.
It’s not just Ohio: New York will likely have to hold two separate primary elections, in June and August, after courts ruled redistricting maps violated a partisan gerrymandering ban in the state Constitution, creating confusion among voters and millions of dollars in costs to taxpayers.
CNN reports on how new voting restrictions around the country are making it harder for disabled voters to cast ballots.
The backlash against mail-in voting is even reverberating in deep-red Utah, where it’s the primary way to vote in most counties.
A special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, will weigh whether former President Donald Trump and his associates violated the law when pressuring election officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in connection with the 2020 election results, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Termites are threatening a historic Selma, Alabama church known for its role in the voting rights movement.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Pa. Republicans eye greater control over redistricting in response to new political maps

2022-04-18T21:09:26+00:00

This article is part of a yearlong reporting project focused on redistricting and gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. It is made possible by the support of Spotlight PA members and Votebeat, a project focused on election integrity and voting access.

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Republicans are moving to change how the state’s political maps are drawn after a redistricting cycle that could potentially diminish their party’s power in Harrisburg.

Among the proposals is one that would give the legislature more control over the final products. That goal directly opposes the wishes of advocates who have for years pushed to remove elected officials from the process and give the power to average Pennsylvanians.

The state recently finalized its new congressional and legislative maps after a months-long undertaking that saw thousands of citizens offer input and dozens of legal challenges. While the congressional and state Senate maps remain largely unchanged, the new state House map adds several seats that could be won by Democrats to account for population shifts that occurred over the past decade.

Every ten years, the state House and Senate maps are drawn by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, a five-member panel made up of party leaders from the General Assembly and chaired by a nonpartisan member typically selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

This cycle’s chair, former University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, became the target of intense criticism from Republicans who claimed the maps he approved were gerrymandered to benefit Democrats despite nonpartisan analysis that showed the maps had a slight Republican bias.

Among his critics is state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York), who has proposed replacing the panel with a new commission whose decisions could be overturned by the legislature, which is currently controlled by Republicans.

Grove’s proposal would require a voter-approved change to the state constitution and would trigger an immediate redo of the maps.

For many years, advocates for overhauling the redistricting process have lobbied for an independent citizens’ commission to draw the state’s political maps without input from elected officials.

Grove’s proposal would create a commission composed of eight registered voters chosen by leadership in the state House and Senate, two members chosen by county governments, and a member of the judicial branch selected by Commonwealth Court. Applicants would be disqualified from serving on the commission if they or their spouse have held public office, registered as a lobbyist, or ran as a political candidate in the past five years.

Any plan agreed upon by the new commission would go to the General Assembly for final approval — giving each chamber the final say on its own map. If the panel failed to send lawmakers maps they could agree on, the legislature would be empowered to draw its own maps and enact them without the approval of the governor.

Advocates for a nonpartisan redistricting process said such a change could result in partisan gerrymandering, the drawing of political lines to benefit one party.

“It’s a sham reform,” said Carol Kuniholm, director of Fair Districts PA, a nonpartisan redistricting advocacy group. “The specifics of how the commission is appointed puts a lot of power in partisan hands. In effect it’s giving even more power to the chambers, taking any hint of safeguard away.”

Grove’s measure has yet to be considered by the full state House, the next step in a lengthy process to get the proposal to the ballot. A spokesperson for the House Republicans said that there was no “specific timeline” to consider the amendment at this point.

State Sen. Dave Argall (R., Schuylkill) has his own ideas about changing how the legislative maps are drawn. He plans to propose a constitutional amendment that would force the state Supreme Court to select a chair, at random, from currently active senior judges from the lower appellate courts. He argues this change would make the decision less political.

Critics worry this would lessen the number of qualified candidates for the position given the busy schedule of judges, especially as the chair is often left with making final decisions in an otherwise evenly divided partisan commission.

Argall also intends to introduce an amendment that would prohibit counting people in state prisons at their last known address rather than at the facility where they are incarcerated, a practice known as prison gerrymandering. In a landmark shift, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission voted to make that change during this redistricting cycle over the objections of Republican members.

Pennsylvania’s congressional map is already drawn by the legislature and is subject to approval or rejection by the governor. This year, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a map sent to him by legislative Republicans, arguing it was biased in favor of the majority party.

Because of that impasse, the decision was sent to the state Supreme Court, which is currently controlled by Democrats. The justices considered more than a dozen maps submitted by Wolf, top lawmakers from both major parties, and citizen groups. The majority ultimately picked a map submitted by voters that closely resembles the current one.

Argall has already introduced an amendment that would limit the use of any congressional plan drawn or implemented by a court to the two-year election cycle in which it was put in place. He said his main goal is to “put some guardrails on the activist judges,” and he emphasized that the U.S. Constitution empowers the legislature to oversee redistricting.

“I think it could help to depoliticize the process,” said Argall, who this year worked with a Democratic senator to create a bipartisan map that never came to fruition. “Even the judges have said they don’t want to be as involved in the redistricting process.”

Kuniholm said putting time limits on court-implemented district lines would create confusion and chaos for county election directors. She said she believes the proposal is an attempt to remove the judiciary branch as a check in the redistricting process.

“Basically, [Argall and Grove’s amendments] are an attempt to say that the legislature is free to draw their own maps and any attempt to put metrics around that or to put guardrails around that is going to be fought by the current legislature,” Kuniholm said.

Kuniholm’s group was at the forefront of a push to reconstruct the redistricting process from the ground up by creating a randomly selected commission of citizens to draw congressional and legislative maps.

But despite widespread support for bills from state Sen. Lisa Boscola (D., Lehigh) and state Rep. Steve Samuelson (D., Northampton) — whose legislation at one point garnered 110 cosponsors from members of both parties, enough to pass the lower chamber — legislative leaders failed to advance the measures before the most recent redistricting process began.

Advocates in 2020 turned their attention to bipartisan legislation known as the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act, which would have increased transparency measures and standardized practices and metrics for the redistricting process. But that measure, too, went nowhere.

Kuniholm said General Assembly leaders are unwilling to give up their role in redistricting despite widespread support among voters for changing the process.

“What Sen. Argall and Rep. Grove are signaling is they’re going to do everything that they can to maintain legislators’ power over the redistricting process,” said Kuniholm. “We need to be moving in the opposite direction.”

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What makes a political map fair? What we learned during Pa.’s redistricting cycle.

2022-03-24T04:01:58+00:00

HARRISBURG — What makes a political map fair?

It’s a question the people in charge of drawing Pennsylvania’s congressional and legislative boundaries wrestled with over the past year — with some major disagreements emerging in the process.

There are four traditional redistricting criteria spelled out in the state constitution. The districts must be compact, contiguous, and made up of roughly equal population, with counties, municipalities, and wards kept together unless splits are “absolutely necessary.”

But beyond those basic measures, lawmakers and state Supreme Court justices differed on what other criteria they should consider and prioritize, with perhaps the most debate over what’s known as “partisan fairness.”

The term has no standard definition, but it has been used in Pennsylvania to mean a map that doesn’t dilute the voting power of a person based on their political affiliation.

Democrats and good-government groups argued that it must be considered in order to satisfy the state constitution, while Republicans said the four traditional criteria — as well as Pennsylvania’s political geography and the map-drawing process — should be the deciding factors.

Ultimately, the state Supreme Court decided the issue. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf rejected a congressional map sent to him by Republicans in the legislature, sending the decision to the high court. Those justices also had the final say on the constitutionality of the state House and Senate maps drawn by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission.

In the process, the majority endorsed partisan fairness as a key redistricting concept.

“Indeed, we conclude that consideration of partisan fairness, when selecting a plan among several that meet the traditional core criteria, is necessary to ensure that a congressional plan is reflective of and responsive to the partisan preferences of the commonwealth’s voters,” Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat, wrote in his opinion on the winning congressional map.

Below we break down the topic and lessons from this decade’s redistricting cycle.

What is partisan fairness?

Partisan fairness measures whether a map reflects the political leaning of a state using a combination of metrics. “Cracking” and “packing” — which describe when voting groups are broken apart and consolidated to manipulate voter power — are two ways to dilute a voter’s political power, and when this is done intentionally based on party affiliation, it is called partisan gerrymandering.

Take the Pennsylvania congressional map signed by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in 2011.

Despite statewide victories for Democratic candidates — like former President Barack Obama, who secured 52% of the vote in 2012 — Republicans consistently won 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional seats.

The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and a group of voters argued that the map was designed to “pack” Democrats into five districts and spread them out among the remaining 13.

The state Supreme Court threw out the map for that reason in 2018 and put in place a new one that created nine Democratic-leaning districts and nine Republican ones.

How is it measured?

Partisan fairness can be measured through an amalgamation of metrics that use past election data to predict results based on the proposed district lines.

Proportionality measures whether a map would produce a group of officials that reflects the state’s partisan divide. For example, if a party won 55% of the votes in a statewide election, then proportionally it would receive 55% of the seats.

Another measure assesses the difference between a party’s median vote share in each district and its average vote share. If a map is gerrymandered to pack one political party into a few districts where they win with high numbers while their remaining party members are spread across districts, comparing the average vote share to the median vote share will show a large difference. Typically, there shouldn’t be a large difference between the average and median numbers of votes a party receives across each district.

The efficiency gap measures how many votes each party wastes. If a district is packed or cracked, then a large number of a party’s votes will not contribute to its success, making the district inefficient. This number should be fairly similar for both parties. If one party has significantly more wasted votes than the other, that indicates gerrymandering.

Partisan bias looks at how many district seats a party would win if it receives exactly 50% of the statewide election. In a perfectly proportional map, a party would win 50% of the seats. If a party were to win 60% of the seats, then the proposed map would have a 10% bias in favor of that party.

These metrics are taking on an increasingly important role in rulings as state courts adjudicate disputes about gerrymandering.

In 2018 and 2022, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court accepted testimony from academics who measured partisan fairness using some of these metrics, as did high courts in other states like North Carolina and Ohio.

What is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s position on partisan fairness?

At the heart of the 2018 ruling throwing out a previous congressional map is the free and equal elections clause of the state constitution, which guarantees that each vote has the same amount of power.

“For our form of government to operate as intended, each and every Pennsylvania voter must have the same free and equal opportunity to select his or her representatives,” Justice Debra Todd wrote on behalf of the majority.

In the same ruling, Todd, a Democrat, wrote, “It is axiomatic that a diluted vote is not an equal vote, as all voters do not have an equal opportunity to translate their votes into representation.”

The exact term “partisan fairness” appears nowhere in the ruling, but some petitioners in the recent case over the congressional map argued that it must be considered to satisfy the elections clause and prevent vote dilution.

“The Supreme Court has mandated that, in addition to evaluating a plan’s compliance with the traditional redistricting criteria, the Court must also evaluate whether a plan will nonetheless operate to unfairly dilute the power of a particular group’s vote for a congressional representative,” counsel for the Gressman petitioners — a group of math and science professors from Pennsylvania — wrote in a filing. “The parties in this case refer to this principle as ‘partisan fairness.’”

That interpretation was essentially confirmed in Baer’s ruling.

“Partisan fairness metrics provide tools for objective evaluation of proposed congressional districting plans to determine their political fairness and avoid vote dilution based on political affiliation,” the justice wrote on behalf of the majority.

What does the GOP say about partisan fairness?

In legal filings concerning both the congressional and legislative plans, state Republicans argued that valuing partisan fairness amounts to gerrymandering and that the “natural political geography” of Pennsylvania favors Republican voters.

Because Democratic voters tend to live clustered in urban and suburban areas, district maps naturally have a Republican bias, they argued.

“Call it proportionality, call it responsiveness, call it partisan fairness,” said Matthew Haverstick, counsel for U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R., Pa.). “I believe these are all code words for another way of saying gerrymandering.”

House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) made similar arguments in his legal challenge to the state House and Senate maps. He voted against the plan as a member of the five-person Legislative Reapportionment Commission.

He described the maps as a “Democratic gerrymander” because they “carve[d] up the commonwealth’s cities to spread out Democratic-leaning urban voters into suburban and exurban areas to dilute the votes of Republican-leaning voters.”

“The commission cannot unnecessarily split counties or municipalities to artificially increase the number of Democratic-leaning districts, even if the alleged goal of doing so is to achieve a more ‘proportional’ or ‘symmetrical’ seat share relative to the statewide two-party vote share or to negate a natural geographic disadvantage,” his attorneys argued in a brief to the state Supreme Court.

Mark Nordenberg, the nonpartisan chair of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, defended the maps against accusations of partisan gerrymandering, saying they properly reflected changes in the state’s makeup.

“Most basically, a fair map should be responsive to voters’ preferences,” he wrote in a report to the state Supreme Court. “One party should not have entrenched political power that is so strong as to not reflect the actual votes of the citizens of Pennsylvania.”

The state Supreme Court rejected Benninghoff’s challenge, as well as several others, but did not explain its reasoning.

Pa. Supreme Court rejects legal challenges to state’s new legislative maps

2022-03-18T15:39:45+00:00

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s highest court has affirmed the state’s new legislative district maps and rejected final legal challenges to them, clearing the way for their use in the May primary.

In a brief order, the state Supreme Court on Wednesday said the maps were “in compliance with the mandates of the Pennsylvania Constitution and the United States Constitution.”

The state House and Senate maps were drawn by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, a five-member panel composed of Pennsylvania’s top legislative leaders and an independent chair, and were challenged by nine separate parties including lawmakers, former elected officials, and private citizens.

The high court on Wednesday also set a final primary calendar for legislative candidates, allowing county election directors and political hopefuls to begin preparing for the election in earnest. Candidates can begin collecting signatures March 18 to appear on the ballot and must be finished by March 28, a compressed timeline.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission released the final state House and Senate maps in early February. While the upper chamber’s map is unlikely to radically alter the composition of its members, the state House map creates several additional seats that could be won by Democrats. Advocates for the map say that’s because it undoes decades of partisan gerrymandering and reflects changes in population that benefitted Democrat-heavy areas.

The panel passed the maps in a 4-1 vote, with only House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) voting against them.

He later filed one of the legal challenges against the final plan, claiming the state House map infringed upon the Voting Rights Act by disregarding the traditional redistricting criteria outlined in the Pennsylvania Constitution — like ensuring equal population in districts — and considering race as a dominant factor.

Benninghoff also claimed the map was drawn to benefit Democrats and ignored Pennsylvania’s political geography, which he said naturally provides greater Republican representation in the General Assembly because Democratic voters are typically concentrated in a small number of areas.

“[The final map] subordinates the nonpartisan redistricting criteria for purely partisan purposes in doing so, it creates violence to the constitution,” Benninghoff said before voting against the final plan. “That is the very definition of the term gerrymandering. And frankly, it’s shameful.”

The panel’s nonpartisan Chair Mark Nordenberg, ex-chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, strenuously pushed back on Benninghoff’s claims, pointing to the House map’s superior scoring in the traditional criteria as compared to the current one.

In a filing to the state Supreme Court, Nordenberg argued the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees that no voter’s voice is diluted due to partisan affiliation or place of residence.

“Rather than arguing that a voter’s vote should not be diluted based on where the voter lives, Leader Benninghoff instead argues that voters who vote for Democratic candidates should have less of a say in the makeup of the General Assembly because those voters have chosen to pack themselves in cities,” he wrote.

Nordenberg went on to argue that, while the Voting Rights Act prohibits the use of race as the sole or predominant factor in redistricting, the Free and Equal Elections Clause permits the consideration of race.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny), a member of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, said in a statement he was pleased with the ruling “because not only were these maps fair, reasonable, and supported in a bipartisan way, today’s decision means we can proceed with our election calendar and folks can begin preparation to run for office or learn who their potential representatives will be.”

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The 4 reasons the Pa. Supreme Court picked the winning congressional map

2022-03-14T17:42:22+00:00

HARRISBURG — In February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court announced that it had picked a new congressional map for the state — but didn’t explain why.

Now, all seven of the high court’s justices have released opinions outlining their positions, revealing differing perspectives on the judiciary’s role in redistricting and what exactly makes a fair map.

The Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court took over the process after Gov. Tom Wolf rejected a map sent to him by legislative Republicans. The justices considered more than a dozen maps submitted by Wolf, top lawmakers, good-government groups, and voters.

In a 4-3 decision, the court picked the map put forth by the Carter petitioners, a group of Pennsylvanians who brought one of the original lawsuits asking the judiciary to intervene in the redistricting process.

Their map was drawn by Jonathan Rodden, a political science professor at Stanford University, and closely resembles the current one.

The majority opinion — written by Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat — outlined four reasons why the Carter map was chosen.

“There is no perfect plan, nor can there be, as many of the criteria work at cross-purposes to each other and require mapmakers to balance opposing criteria,” Baer wrote. “Our task is to discern which plan, in our view, best abides by the traditional core criteria with attention paid to the subordinate historical considerations and awareness of partisan fairness.”

Here’s a rundown of the justices’ arguments for and against the map:

The Carter map fulfilled traditional core criteria

In a monumental 2018 decision, the state Supreme Court threw out the Republican-drawn map passed in 2011, finding it violated the Pennsylvania Constitution.

In that ruling, the justices outlined four neutral redistricting criteria meant to provide a floor of “protection for an individual against the dilution of his or her vote in the creation of [congressional] districts.”

Those criteria are compactness, contiguity, minimal splits, and equal population. The Carter map fulfilled all of them, but it didn’t score as well on some of these metrics as other maps.

Baer acknowledged that the Carter map “is slightly less compact than some of the other maps,” but he said that was the result of a justified tradeoff to minimize the splits of political subdivisions.

The Carter map considers secondary criteria used in past redistricting cases

Past precedent allows the state Supreme Court to consider other criteria such as incumbency, communities of interest, and preservation of prior districts. However, these criteria are subordinate to the neutral criteria previously outlined.

The Carter map’s approach was to change as little as possible from the 2018 map that the Supreme Court put in place and previously deemed satisfactory. Nearly 87% of the population remained in the same district, despite the state losing one of its 18 congressional seats. The next closest plan kept 82% of the population in the same district.

Baer wrote that the Carter map sufficiently considered communities of interest, citing its decision to keep Pittsburgh whole and to unify Carbon County with the Lehigh Valley area in one district.

The Carter map intentionally considered incumbency in order to avoid “inadvertently double-bunking sitting congressional representatives in the same district,” Jonathan Rodden, the professor who drew the map, wrote in a report to the court. To account for significant population loss in rural areas and growth in the southeast, two incumbents were paired.

The Carter map doesn’t dilute a voter’s power

The Free and Equal Elections Clause of the state constitution, which guarantees that each vote has the same amount of power, was at the heart of the 2018 ruling and again played a significant role in this case.

In the same ruling, Todd wrote, “It is axiomatic that a diluted vote is not an equal vote, as all voters do not have an equal opportunity to translate their votes into representation.”

“Pennsylvania was one of the first that recognized that partisan gerrymandering as a violation of the state constitution,” Michael Li, senior counsel for the nonpartisan Brennan Center’s Democracy Program at New York University, told Spotlight PA.

To gauge if any group’s voting power had been diluted, the court considered a number of fairly new metrics including the efficiency gap, which indicates the number of “wasted votes” in each election or the number of votes that don’t contribute to a candidate’s victory.

The difference in efficiency between the two parties should be as small as possible to represent an unbiased map.

“The Carter Plan had the least biased score (-0.4%) on the average efficiency gap metric,” Baer wrote.

According to Rodden’s analysis, each major party is expected to win eight districts under the Carter map with the one remaining district a toss-up that has a slight Democratic lean.

The Carter Map appears to abide by the Voting Rights Act

The federal Voting Rights Act requires that maps do not dilute voters’ power based on race.

Baer wrote in his opinion that “formal Voting Rights Act assessments were not performed,” but he noted that the Carter map retained two existing majority-minority districts and that the current map has not been challenged for violating the law.

Why some of the justices dissented

Four justices ruled with Baer, while the remaining three dissented for various reasons.

Todd, a Democrat, argued that the Gressman map — drawn by a group of scientists and mathematicians from Pennsylvania universities — best fulfilled the traditional criteria outlined in the 2018 redistricting case. She disagreed with the use of “subordinate historical criteria,” saying there was no need to look beyond the neutral redistricting criteria.

“In my view, assessment of subordinate or secondary considerations such as partisan fairness, or whether a plan represents the least change from a prior congressional districting plan, is necessary only when a court must choose among various plans that are equal with respect to their compliance with the core criteria,” Todd wrote.

Justice Sallie Mundy, a Republican, also dissented, agreeing that the court should only use neutral redistricting criteria previously outlined to select a map in order to remove any perception of political bias.

“In addition to maintaining the appearance of neutrality, it helps avoid any subtle, unconscious influence that political considerations might otherwise bring to bear upon our decision-making,” Mundy wrote.

Justice Kevin Brobson, a Republican, cautioned that the court was overreaching in its selection of a reapportionment planning, advising it to “hew closely to nonpartisan standards or nonpartisan methods, eschewing partisan considerations or partisan approaches.”

Congressional map picked by Pennsylvania Supreme Court unlikely to dramatically alter partisan balance

2022-02-25T20:52:03+00:00

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has selected a new congressional map that closely resembles the current one, a ruling unlikely to dramatically change the partisan makeup of the state’s delegation.

In a 4-3 decision Wednesday, the high court picked a proposal submitted by a group of Pennsylvania voters that fulfills four traditional redistricting criteria and has a slight Republican bias.

The state Supreme Court agreed to assume control of the highly consequential process in early February, just weeks after Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a map sent to him by Republicans.

The five-page order does not explain the Democrat-controlled court’s reasoning. It notes that Justice Debra Todd, a Democrat, and the court’s two Republicans — Justices Sallie Updyke Mundy and Kevin Brobson — dissented to the selection of the Carter plan.

The state Supreme Court also announced Wednesday it will not move the date of the May 17 primary, opting instead to adjust some of the earlier deadlines for candidates.

The Pennsylvania legislature must redraw the state’s congressional boundaries every 10 years to account for population changes reported by the census. The governor has the ability to accept or reject the map.

The map approved by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in 2011 became a national example of partisan gerrymandering, or when political boundaries are drawn for unfair partisan gain. Despite statewide victories for Democratic candidates, Republicans consistently won 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional seats.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the map several years later for that reason and — after Wolf and the legislature failed to agree on a replacement — implemented one that is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

Because of sluggish population growth between 2010 and 2020, the state lost one of its 18 seats, raising the stakes in what is already an intensely political process.

The Republican-controlled legislature in January sent Wolf a map that nonpartisan analysis showed had a strong GOP bias. Wolf vetoed the map for its partisan lean, calling it “highly skewed.”

In a statement responding to the ruling, House GOP leaders said their map was the only one that “followed all constitutional guidelines [and] went through a deliberative legislative process.” They also noted that the map “was endorsed by a judicial body,” referencing a report by Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, a Republican.

At the state Supreme Court’s request, McCullough put together a document that recommended the legislative Republicans’ map on the basis that it was “functionally tantamount to the voice and will of the People.”

“Sadly, candidates and voters must now submit to a unilateral court that sees itself above every person in our commonwealth,” House Speaker Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) wrote in the statement.

On Wednesday, Wolf called the court’s pick a “fair map that will result in a congressional delegation mirroring the citizenry of Pennsylvania.”

The ‘least-change’ approach

The map selected by the high court was submitted by a group of voters known as the Carter petitioners, who brought a lawsuit in December asking the state courts to take over the process in anticipation of an impasse between Wolf and Republican lawmakers.

They were represented by several law firms, including one founded by Marc Elias, a well-known Democratically-aligned elections lawyer.

The Carter petitioners’ plan is very similar to the current congressional map, with nearly 90% of residents staying in the same district. One of their attorneys, Matthew Gordon, told the court last Friday that this approach of “least change” should be valued over other considerations.

Jonathan Rodden, a political science professor at Stanford University who drew the map, said in an expert report that his plan produces eight districts “where Democrats are expected to win,” another eight “where Republicans are quite likely to win,” and one district “that is a toss-up with a very slight Democratic lean.”

“This level of partisan balance and competitiveness is similar to that of the existing plan, reflective of Pennsylvania’s statewide partisan preferences, and consistent with changes in population as they relate to partisanship,” Rodden wrote.

PlanScore, a nonpartisan analysis tool, produced similar findings. Using past election data, it categorized six of the seats as Democratic and six as Republican, with two leaning Democrat and three leaning GOP.

Partisan fairness can be measured using several mathematical tools and metrics that are increasingly being embraced by the courts. One of those metrics is called the efficiency gap, which indicates the number of “wasted votes” in each election or the number of votes that don’t contribute to a candidate’s victory.

The difference in efficiency between the two parties should be as small as possible to represent an unbiased map.

The Carter map, according to PlanScore, has a 1.6% efficiency gap, representing a slight GOP bias. The map approved by the GOP legislature, on the other hand, has a 6.6% efficiency gap favoring Republicans. Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor who helped invent the efficiency gap metric, has said that he would consider a score of 7% or above indicative of gerrymandering.

In his report, Rodden said changes to the map largely reflect population shifts seen in the state over the past decade. While rural areas throughout the state lost residents, urban and suburban areas — especially in the southeast — grew.

Because of those trends, U.S. Rep. Fred Keller’s 12th District was eliminated and he was drawn into the 15th District with another Republican, incumbent U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson.

Pa. Supreme Court weighs what makes a fair congressional map as it prepares to pick new districts

2022-02-21T17:06:20+00:00

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s highest court heard arguments from lawyers for Gov. Tom Wolf, top lawmakers, and voters Friday as it began weighing what the state’s congressional districts should look like for the next decade.

The state Supreme Court agreed to take over the highly consequential process in early February following hearings held by a lower appellate judge on more than a dozen map proposals.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough recommended the justices pick the map passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and rejected by Wolf, who called it “highly skewed.” The high court asked for McCullough’s counsel but is not required to follow it.

During the hearing Friday, the justices asked the parties’ lawyers which factors they should prioritize when picking from among a group of maps that all appear to meet four traditional redistricting criteria: compactness, contiguity, minimal splits, and equal population.

The biggest differences emerged as the lawyers made arguments for and against considering whether a map is reflective of the partisan leaning of the state or if it was drawn with public input.

The court is working against the clock to pick new districts and keep the spring primary on track. Pennsylvania is unable to use its current map as the state lost one of its 18 seats due to sluggish population growth.

Already, the court has temporarily delayed the signature collecting process for candidates. On Friday, it signaled it could adopt an adjusted calendar put forth by the Wolf administration that keeps the May 17 primary date.

This is not the first time the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in on the state’s congressional districts. In 2018, it threw out the map approved by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in 2011, finding it to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Below are highlights from Friday’s hearing:

Senate Democrats

Clifford Levine, the counsel for Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) and the caucus, said all of the submitted maps fulfill the baseline requirements outlined in the high court’s 2018 ruling.

But the justices in that case, he said, also emphasized the principles of partisan fairness and responsiveness.

“It’s about having an equal opportunity to translate votes into equal representation,” said Levine.

Some justices pushed back on the map’s split of Pittsburgh, questioning why it was “absolutely necessary” and noting the plan is one of the least similar to the current map. Levine responded that the split may not be absolutely necessary, but is allowable in order to keep together communities of interest.

U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler

U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R., Pa.) and a group of former Republican members of Congress submitted two maps, which prioritize minimizing county splits over other traditional criteria. His counsel argued that partisan fairness should not be a priority as it uses unstable metrics.

“Call it proportionality, call it responsiveness, call it partisan fairness,” said Matthew Haverstick, counsel for Reschenthaler. “I believe these are all code words for another way of saying gerrymandering.”

Haverstick also argued against maps with geographically large districts. One justice pushed back, saying, “It’s not geography, it’s people. I am sure that I have more people on my block in South Philadelphia than” in some counties.

Carter petitioners

The Carter petitioners are a group of citizens who live in densely populated areas. They brought one of the two lawsuits asking the state courts to take over the congressional redistricting process.

Their proposed map, they say, is as similar as possible to the current congressional map, with 86% of residents staying in the same district. Matthew Gorden, their counsel, argued that this approach of “least change” should be valued over other considerations.

Gorden said the map was guided by that principle and not motivated by partisan intentions.

“We don’t have visibility into why most of the other maps ended up where they did,” he said. “We do for the Carter map.”

Gov. Tom Wolf

Wolf, a Democrat, released his own map in response to one embraced by General Assembly Republicans. He said his goal was to show that it is possible to draw a congressional map that fulfills traditional criteria previously outlined by the court and is “free of gerrymandering.”

Robert Wiygul, counsel for Wolf, said the map “is totally consistent with Pennsylvania’s geography” and does not sacrifice this to achieve partisan fairness.

The justices questioned the decision to split Pittsburgh, asking why it was necessary. Wiygul said that strict adherence to minimizing splits must be balanced with realizing other values such as compactness and protecting communities of interest, “which can be both smaller than and larger than political subdivisions.”

Gressman petitioners

The Gressman petitioners, who also brought one of the original lawsuits, are a group of math and science professors from Pennsylvania who created their map using “algorithmic constructions.”

Sam Hirsch, the group’s counsel, said their map has some of the best scores on three of the traditional criteria: compactness, minimal splits, and equal population. It also scores well on partisan fairness and creates new districts where minority populations have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.

“You need not choose between Republicans and Democrats, between the legislature and the governor. … You also need not choose between the best map on the traditional, neutral criteria and the most fair,” Hirsch said. “[This] map is both of those things.”

State House Democrats

The map proposed by state House Democrats has the strongest partisan lean favoring Democrats while still fulfilling traditional, neutral criteria.

David Senoff, counsel for the caucus, said the district lines were drawn using voter registration data to help guide partisan fairness, not past election results exclusively. Some justices pushed back on this choice, stating that voters don’t always choose candidates from their registered party.

Senoff spent much of his time arguing for the consideration of partisan fairness as one of the main factors, given that the maps score similarly in base, neutral criteria.

“I think we just have to come out and say that the way to break the tie is that partisan fairness needs to be elevated to what is otherwise a constitutional mandate requiring free and equal elections,” said Senoff.

‘Citizen-Voters’

This group of citizens from Butler County intervened with a primary goal to minimize splits and reunite counties — such as Butler, Cambria, and Washington — that are currently divided. Their counsel, Thomas W. King III, is being compensated by the Pennsylvania Republican Party.

The map does not split Pittsburgh, which was a major focus among the justices.

King said the group would also support the map known as Reschenthaler 1 or a map submitted by a group of Republican voters.

Draw the Lines

Draw the Lines, a project of the good-government group Committee of Seventy, encouraged people to get involved in the redistricting project by creating maps. The project assessed over 1,500 submitted maps to create the final proposal.

John Lavelle, counsel for the group, emphasized the collaborative process as compared to other maps that were drawn with input from only a few people.

“It reflects the values and judgments of ordinary Pennsylvania citizens who embraced the challenge and the opportunity of proposing a fair and balanced map,” said Lavelle.

Some justices again questioned the decision to split Pittsburgh. Lavelle responded that some sort of split is necessary in Allegheny County, and focusing on Pittsburgh prevents other, smaller municipalities from being divided.

Khalif Ali

This map was submitted by a coalition of good-government and redistricting advocates including Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause PA, and the League of Women Voters.

It is the only map that uses data that reallocates incarcerated people to their last known address, as the Legislative Reapportionment Commission did when it drew the state House and Senate maps.

Ben Geffen, counsel for the parties, said the map was based on Wolf’s proposal and altered to draw districts without attention to incumbency, among other changes.

Geffen rejected the idea that the high court should show deference to the map put forth by legislative Republicans just because it was passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough recommended that map, calling it “functionally tantamount to the voice and will of the People.” But Geffen said Wolf as governor also has a role in lawmaking and he exercised it by vetoing the map.

Legislative Republicans

The Republican leaders from both the House and Senate are urging the court to pick the map passed by the GOP-controlled legislature and vetoed by Wolf.

The map was originally drawn by Amanda Holt, a noted redistricting advocate and former Republican Lehigh County commissioner, and championed by state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York).

Anthony Holtzman, counsel for the Senate Republican intervenors, argued that rather than considering partisan fairness to pick from among several maps that all reasonably fulfill the traditional criteria, the court should focus on the process.

Holtzman said the map approved by Republican lawmakers included public hearings and feedback.

Robert Tucker, counsel for House leadership, said the court should “respect” the state’s political geography, which favors the GOP because Democrats live clustered in urban areas.

‘Voters of the Commonwealth of PA’

The final intervenors, a group of Republican voters who call themselves the “mirror image” of the Carter petitioners, submitted a map that fulfills the traditional criteria previously outlined by the state Supreme Court.

Kathleen Gallagher, legal counsel for the intervenors, said the court should not focus on considerations like partisan fairness when selecting a final map. Rather, it should take a closer look at the maps that meet the basic standards and question decisions such as whether splits made were absolutely necessary.

Is it really too late for the courts to change the congressional maps now?

2022-02-16T18:10:10+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

The Supreme Court decided last week that Alabama can conduct its 2022 congressional elections under a map that a lower federal court ruled was racially gerrymandered. The justices, in a 5–4 decision, allowed the map to be applied to this year’s midterms, determining that it was too close to the election to force changes to the map.

That’s not a very satisfying argument for the plaintiffs. In oral arguments, both Democrats and Republicans acknowledged that the plan was rushed given the delay in the release of population numbers from the Census Bureau. Alabama sued to get the data released sooner but ultimately wasn’t successful, pushing the finalization of the maps to the last possible moment allowed by the state’s Constitution. The governor signed off on the maps in late November after six days of consideration by the legislature, and the plaintiffs sued the very next day. Still, five of the Supreme Court’s conservatives ruled that the lower court’s decision on Jan. 24 would have forced changes to the map too close to the state’s primary, which is scheduled for late May.

The upshot of this is clear: If the Supreme Court has determined that the challengers cannot bring their case the day following the approval of the maps, then it is impossible to give any relief to minority populations who are discriminated against in redistricting. It would have been functionally impossible for the plaintiffs to bring the case sooner, meaning the Alabama legislature is being given a free pass on what the facts show is blatant discrimination. The lower court’s unanimous panel of three judges (two of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump) ruled that the maps unlawfully discriminated against Black voters by drawing only one majority-Black district, when there should have been two or, at minimum, a second district with a large number of Black voters. And that justification is not hard to see: While Census numbers clearly indicated that the minority population of the state rose while the white population of the state dropped, the number of minority opportunity districts (totaling one out of seven — despite a quarter of the state’s population being Black) was unchanged from the previous map passed after the 2010 Census.

The 7th District, encompassing the area around Birmingham and most of the state’s western Black Belt, holds the vast majority of the state’s Black voters. Plaintiffs argued that the map made it near impossible for Black voters to meaningfully participate if they live outside the district. Per the Montgomery Advertiser, the plaintiffs advocate the creation of “a 7th congressional district that would be 47% white and 45% Black, and a 6th congressional district that would be 51% white and 41% Black.”

The Supreme Court’s order last week was not a ruling on the merits of the case. The decision does not say that the map does not discriminate against Black voters, but instead puts the lower court’s decision to overturn the map on hold until the matter can be fully argued before SCOTUS. But, given the passage of time before those arguments can commence, the legislature’s map will be in effect during the midterms.

The decision was made as part of the court’s “shadow docket” — decisions made by the court without oral argument and largely without explanation by the justices. Still, Justice Brett Kavanaugh chose to explain his reasoning. “In short, the Purcell principle requires that we stay the District Court’s injunction with respect to the 2022 elections,” he wrote. “The Court has recognized that ‘practical considerations sometimes require courts to allow elections to proceed despite pending legal challenges.’ So it is here. If the District Court’s judgment is eventually affirmed after appellate review, the injunction can take effect for congressional elections that occur after 2022.”

Essentially: The shadow docket is being used to give the legislature a get-out-of-jail-free card for the first year of an election cycle. The year reflects a perfect storm of delay, making the Purcell Doctrine even less useful. Under the Trump administration, the pandemic-triggered census data delays exacerbated previous delays caused by the administration’s unprecedented intervention in the survey, forcing a lag in the delivery of results to state legislatures by several months. This compressed an already quite speedy timeline: The Alabama legislature passed the maps after a few days of deliberation, and they were signed by the governor almost immediately. The plaintiffs sued the very next day, and the conservative justices have still said it was too late. It’s difficult to see how any challenges to maps could be successful with this set of justices, regardless of how plain the damage. Now consider that Alabama is far from the only state facing a contested map.

“It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done,” writes Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times. “The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.”

We saw states move far more nimbly in 2020 to respond to challenges brought by the pandemic. States, it’s worth noting, clearly have the ability to delay elections in order to accommodate these necessary shifts. They did it in 2020, and certainly could do so again this year given enough political appetite and judicial enforcement. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court just last week put a hold on the state’s election calendar to accommodate redistricting issues. If state legislatures and state executives refuse to take these steps, the courts can force them to.

This is an inauspicious start to voting rights litigation in 2022, and is likely to impact the rest of the court’s decisions on redistricting. “Five members of the court appear to be valuing an alleged administrative burden on states to redraw district lines that comply with federal law more than they value minority voting rights,” writes Loyola law professor Jessica Levinson of MSNBC. “This could give every state one free pass at a voting rights violation, as long as they wait long enough to impose them.”

Back Then

In the late 1860s, after the passage of the Reconstruction Act, conservatives in Alabama sent a letter to Congress decrying the possibility that Blacks and impoverished whites would band together, and denouncing the enfranchisement of “negroes.” They wrote that Black voters were “in the main,” ignorant of the principles of free government and “disinclined to work, credulous yet suspicious, dishonest, untruthful, incapable of self-restraint, and easily impelled…into folly and crime.” In the early 1900s, Alabama caught on to the wave of other states re-popularizing the notion that voting was only for some, not all. In 1901, in ratifying the state’s sixth Constitution, the state’s legislature altered the preamble to reflect that suffrage was a “privilege,” not a right. The previous Constitution had banned both property and education requirements as qualifications to the ballot.

In Other Voting News

Miles Parks is out with a fulsome explainer on the bizarre new right-wing obsession with the Electronic Registration and Information Center — a nonprofit data matching service that helps states clean their voter rolls. While you’d assume Republicans would be all about keeping voter rolls clean, there is a new movement spurred by misinformation to pressure states to abandon the most widely praised, commonly used tool for doing just that. Read about it here.
The U.S House approved a major overhaul of the United States Postal Service, approving the measure 342–92. Its companion bill in the Senate has bipartisan support and is expected to pass as well. Most notably, it removes a mandate that the USPS cover healthcare costs decades in advance, which has sent the carrier into a financial tailspin since its passage in 2006.
One of the final counties in Texas to use paperless voting machines has opted to replace them ahead of the 2022 November midterm. Jefferson County leaders technically have until 2026 to make the move, given a vote by last year’s state legislature, but have decided to move forward with purchasing the machines this year. Peoria County, Illinois, has made a similar move. Hidalgo County in South Texas is retrofitting its machines.
Are ballot drop boxes legal in Wisconsin or not? It depends on which election is in question. The Wisconsin Supreme Court last week affirmed a lower court’s ban on ballot drop boxes for the April 5 judicial elections. The court had previously ordered, however, that the boxes may be used in this month’s local primaries. The court will decide the fate of drop boxes when it hears arguments in the case later this year.
Massachusetts’ top election administrator has criticized the governor’s new budget for “dramatically” underfunding elections. Secretary of State William Galvin has asked the legislature to include millions more dollars so that the state can hire staff to implement new maps and educate voters about dramatic voter reforms and statewide elections this year.
Two American Indian tribes have sued the state of North Dakota over its new legislative maps, alleging that they dilute the voting power of their tribal members. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and the Spirit Lake Tribe have filed suit against North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger, alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act.
Tina Peters is at it again in Colorado, where she was arrested Tuesday after refusing to comply with a search warrant. The Mesa County Clerk is already under investigation for allegedly making unauthorized copies of and distributing secure election information. The warrant was for Peters’ iPad, as she was being investigated for allegedly filming a Monday court proceeding related to the case. Meanwhile, the state has adopted temporary new election security rules in reaction to allegedly mishandled data in county election offices.
Here’s a weird story from the Washington Post on a strange voter fraud conspiracy out of Otero County, New Mexico.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

It turns out that I need an original copy of my birth certificate to show to UPenn for this fellowship, but I didn’t know that when I left my home in South Florida. So, I asked my mom to mail me a copy. After nine days, it still hasn’t arrived. It struck me that I’m not the only person struggling with mail delays — and the consequences for the election are far greater than my delay in completing on-boarding paperwork. So, this week’s infographic: Mail delays in Pennsylvania, which could make the state’s redistricting process an even bigger headache.

In October, USPS implemented a new system that was supposed to cut costs and create more consistency in transportation schedules. But, it led to mail delays across the country instead. Below is a graph detailing the Zip codes with the longest mail delays in Pennsylvania, indicating how long it took to deliver a piece of mail, on average, before and after the new system. Montgomery and Chester counties, for example, have been experiencing some of the longest delays (mail previously took an average of 2.5 days to reach these counties and is now taking 3 days). While the longest increase in average delivery time was only half a day, the new system may cause longer delays if millions of ballots are mailed out across the state at the last minute.

See how the final Pennsylvania state House map scores in every key area

2022-02-08T18:11:42+00:00

HARRISBURG — A panel has approved a new Pennsylvania House map that meets the requirements laid out in the state constitution, while creating more districts that could be won by Democrats.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission — a five-person panel composed of the top General Assembly leaders and an independent chair — voted 4-1 to approve both the state House and state Senate maps on Friday.

House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) was the lone no vote, arguing that the creation of more Democratic-leaning seats in his chamber was done for political reasons. Data tests, however, show the map better reflects the partisan makeup of the state as well as population shifts over the past decade.

The process may not be over yet. Anyone can bring a challenge to either map to the state Supreme Court as part of a 30-day protest period that began Friday.

The Pennsylvania Constitution explicitly lists four requirements for state House and Senate districts: compactness, contiguity, minimal splits, and equal population. Here’s how the final map stacks up on those and other measures:

Compactness

Compactness looks at how close together all parts of a district are. It’s meant to prevent protrusions that would isolate some residents of a district. The Pennsylvania Constitution mandates that districts be compact, but it does not specify a metric or minimum threshold to measure districts.

The final House plan has an average level of compactness, scoring better than the current map on two commonly used metrics, the Polsby–Popper test and the Reock scale. Scored on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 equals maximum compactness, the final plan hits 0.35 on the Polsby-Popper scale and 0.42 on the Reock scale. The current House map scores 0.27, and 0.36, respectively.

Contiguity

Contiguity means that there is no part of a district that is detached from the rest or completely isolated. A noncontiguous district looks like an archipelago. The final House plan fulfills this metric.

Split minimization

This metric is intended to keep communities together. Mapmakers aim to reduce county, municipal, and voting precinct splits, though most tend to focus on reducing the first two.

Compared to the current state House map, the final House plan reduces the number of county and municipality splits: 221 to 186, and 124 to 92, respectively.

Population equality

The Pennsylvania Constitution mandates that districts have the same number of residents. Per a U.S. Supreme Court case from the 1980s, the commonly accepted deviation from this standard is 10% for the overall map.

The overall population deviation of the final map is 8.65%.

Partisan fairness

The top Republican on the Legislative Reapportionment Commission has accused the panel of creating a partisan gerrymander in favor of Democrats. A look at various metrics shows the final map favors the GOP.

One such metric is proportionality, which looks at whether the likely results of elections in each district, based on past electoral data, would result in a group of elected officials that reflects the ratio of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.

Dave’s Redistricting App, a nonpartisan mapping website dedicated to creating and analyzing district maps, called the final map “Very Good” for proportionality, with a much smaller Republican lean than the current map.

Depending on which past election data is used, Dave’s Redistricting finds the likely number of Democratic seats would be 98. The number of Democratic seats that is closest to proportional is 102.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, another nonpartisan group that reviews district plans across the country, pegged the number of Democrat-leaning seats at 101 in an analysis for The Inquirer, compared to the current map’s 85.

Competitiveness

Competitiveness indicates how many districts have an even balance between Democratic and Republican voters, which minimizes one party dominating an area. Redistricting advocates argue that districts with this composition will be represented by legislators who are more responsive to voters, as their districts are less “safe.”

Dave’s Redistricting rated the map as less competitive, labeling only 13.91% of its districts as competitive compared to the current map’s 18.65%. Both are still a far cry from what Dave’s Redistricting calls a good level of competitive districts, around 75%.

Minority representation

Properly representing communities of color, which are driving Pennsylvania’s population growth, was a goal of high importance during the Legislative Reapportionment Commission’s meetings.

When possible, mapmakers aim to create majority-minority districts — those where the majority population is constituted by a minority group.

The final House plan scores better than the current map does on minority representation.

In total, there are 25 districts where either one minority community or a coalition of minority communities represent the population majority — the same as the current map.

But the proposed map also creates 19 districts with minority populations that are greater than 35%, creating a meaningful voting bloc, while the current map has only 13.

This story was adapted from previous Spotlight PA reporting.

A Pa. judge just sided with the GOP on a congressional map proposal. Here’s what’s next.

2022-02-07T23:59:29+00:00

HARRISBURG — An appellate judge has recommended the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopt the congressional map passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and rejected by Gov. Tom Wolf, citing its legislative approval and how it reflects the GOP’s geographic advantage.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough selected the map from among more than a dozen proposals submitted by Wolf, top legislative leaders, citizen groups, and others as part of an ongoing lawsuit over the highly consequential district lines.

McCullough was set to pick a final map before the state Supreme Court accepted a request to take over the process, and asked her to instead make a recommendation. The high court is not required to follow McCullough’s counsel as it prepares to hold hearings on the map. The justices can pick one of the proposals, alter them, or draw a different map.

Pennsylvania must draw new district lines every 10 years to reflect population changes. Because of the state’s sluggish growth in the 2010s, it will lose one of its 18 congressional seats.

Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed the Republican map in January, calling it “highly skewed.” While it does fulfill base, neutral criteria outlined in a previous ruling by the state Supreme Court, the map does not reflect the partisan composition of the state, nonpartisan analyses show.

The map was originally drawn by Amanda Holt, a noted redistricting advocate and former Republican Lehigh County commissioner, and championed by state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York). The original map was amended after Republican members of the House State Government Committee, the panel that first considered the proposal, complained about divisions in their counties.

Anticipating an impasse between Wolf and Republican lawmakers, two groups of Pennsylvanians filed lawsuits in December asking Commonwealth Court to take over the process. The court, in turn, asked the citizen petitioners, Wolf, top Republicans and Democrats, and good-government advocates to submit their own proposed maps.

McCullough, a Republican, presided over two days of hearings on more than a dozen proposals. She cited the House GOP map’s passage through the legislative process as a factor for its selection, writing the interests of the state “would best be served” by considering that the map “is functionally tantamount to the voice and will of the People.”

She also found compelling a Republican argument that the map best reflects the state’s political geography, which favors the GOP because Democrats live clustered in urban areas.

“This map prioritizes the constitutional obligations of creating congressional districts in a nonpartisan way using only data sets that were necessary to create compact and contiguous districts that promote communities of interest and respect Pennsylvania’s natural geography,” House Speaker Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) said in a statement.

While the Pennsylvania Constitution has no explicit requirements for the state’s congressional map, the courts have embraced “neutral” criteria like keeping district populations equal and minimizing county and municipal splits. Judges are also using relatively new tests like the efficiency gap — which indicates the number of “wasted votes” in each election or the number of votes that don’t contribute to a candidate’s victory — to consider the “partisan fairness” of a map.

“I think it’s a reading that places more value on land than it does on people,” said Justin Villere — executive director of Draw the Lines PA, a project of the good-government group Committee of Seventy — of McCullough’s ruling.

“To say that there is inherent bias that we have to live with is antithetical to the idea of fair elections which states people are the ones who are electing their leaders, not necessarily determined by how the voting population is dispersed.”

After initially declining to take over the process, the state Supreme Court, which has a Democratic majority, in early February accepted a request from some of the original petitioners to select the final map as Pennsylvania fast approaches deadlines for the May primary.

Candidates can begin circulating nominating petitioners on Feb. 15, however, they will likely begin doing so without finalized districts. McCullough recommended moving the start date to March 1.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments Feb. 18.

Final Pa. legislative maps approved by redistricting panel, but legal challenges likely

2022-02-05T01:33:00+00:00

HARRISBURG — A state panel Friday approved Pennsylvania’s new legislative district maps, which could substantially alter the balance of power in the General Assembly for the next decade but are likely to be challenged in court by Republicans unhappy with the state House plan.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission — a five-person panel composed of the top General Assembly leaders and an independent chair — voted 4-1 to approve the maps, with Chair Mark Nordenberg joining the two Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland).

“I believe that we have succeeded by virtually any measure,” said Nordenberg, a former University of Pittsburgh chancellor. “Even if imperfect, these are good maps that are fair, that are responsive to the requirements of the law, and that will serve the interests of the people of Pennsylvania for the next decade.”

Compared to the initial plan released in December, the new state House map reduces the number of incumbent Republicans who would have to face off against one another. The final state Senate map remains largely unchanged, though it was amended to create a new district in Philadelphia with a significant number of Hispanic voters.

Several metrics that consider partisan fairness — a measure of how well maps reflect the party makeup of a state’s registered voters — show the plans approved Friday improve upon the current state House and Senate maps.

The panel made changes to the maps after it amassed over 6,000 public comments and hosted several hearings. While the approval marks the end of this part of the redistricting process, the maps are likely to face further scrutiny.

Anyone can bring a challenge to either map directly to the state Supreme Court over the next 30 days, which, based on Republican opposition, is expected to happen.

The final state Senate map passed Friday with little debate, as did the initial version in December. It improves upon fairness metrics laid out in the state constitution and is expected to maintain the balance of power in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Advocates for an independent and transparent redistricting process argued the initial map overly accommodated incumbents, and the final version maintains two incumbent matchups.

The state House map, by contrast, has drawn fiery criticism from Republicans, who called it a Democratic gerrymander as it creates more seats that could be won by members of that party.

Redistricting advocates said the shift seems so severe because the map reverses decades of gerrymandering in favor of Republicans. Nonpartisan analyses show that the state House map approved Friday improves upon neutral fairness criteria and still has a Republican bias.

The partisan shift also reflects the population changes Pennsylvania experienced over the past decade, with rural areas losing residents and urban and suburban areas in the southeast gaining them.

The state House map creates 103 Democratic seats in the 203-member chamber, according to one analysis produced by Dave’s Redistricting, a nonpartisan website that allows anyone to upload and analyze district maps.

However, Dave’s Redistricting categorized 12 of those seats as competitive, meaning they could be won by either a Democrat or Republican depending on the election data used to run an analysis. In total, there are 28 competitive seats.

House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) offered an unsuccessful amendment to his chamber’s map Friday, which he said maintained or improved fairness metrics while splitting fewer areas and creating more minority voting districts.

In a press conference before the vote, Benninghoff again accused Nordenberg and nonpartisan good-government groups of acting for political reasons. Nordenberg has defended himself against such claims, saying the process provided “equal opportunity for the representatives of each caucus.”

Citing an analysis by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project for The Inquirer, Benninghoff said the state’s political geography — with Democrats clustered in urban areas and Republicans spread out — gives the minority party about 93 seats in the state House.

“Our goal is to follow the constitution,” Benninghoff said. “This is, in my opinion, trying to make water flow uphill.”

Redistricting academics have explained that while the state’s political geography is beneficial to Republicans, mapmakers can create plans that reflect the overall partisan makeup of the state — where Democrats outnumber Republicans — while still abiding by the fairness criteria mandated in the state’s constitution.

Benninghoff repeatedly expressed concerns regarding the state House map’s treatment of people of color, notably Latino and Black communities. He alleged that Lancaster, Reading, and other areas that are home to sizable communities of color were split in order to benefit Democratic incumbents.

The state House’s three Latino representatives and the leadership of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus expressed their support for the map.

In an open letter, Reps. Danilo Burgos (D., Philadelphia), Angel Cruz (D., Philadelphia), and Manny Guzman (D., Berks) called the map responsive to Hispanic growth in the state. In some of the districts Benninghoff accused of being cracked — meaning unnaturally split to dilute the voting power of minority communities — the lawmakers said the Hispanic population is currently too concentrated. Spreading out these voters will increase their ability to influence elections, they said.

Good government groups and organizations that advocate for marginalized communities such as PA Voice, The New Pennsylvania Project, and Better PA also praised the map for its commitment to racial equity.

“We applaud the LRC for its sincere commitment to considering racial equity as a core value throughout this mapmaking process,” said Salewa Ogunmefun, executive director of PA Voice, an organization that works toward an inclusive democracy by expanding the power of people of color.

With court challenges likely, candidates for office are facing an uncertain future as the Feb. 15 start date to collect signatures for the May primary rapidly approaches.

A group of residents in areas of the state that saw large population growth over the past decade filed a suit in Commonwealth Court requesting it to adopt a new election calendar. The court in late January rejected a request from the petitioners to hold a “prompt” status conference.

The attorney representing the petitioners said to “expect further action in the coming days.”

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Wolf vetoes congressional map sent to him by Republicans

2022-01-27T16:22:44+00:00

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Wolf has vetoed a congressional map sent to him by Republican lawmakers, leaving the monumental job of picking Pennsylvania’s next district lines to the state courts.

In a veto message issued late Wednesday, Wolf said the map failed “the test of fundamental fairness.”

“The people of Pennsylvania deserve a fair election map that promotes accountability and responsiveness to voters and is drawn in an open and honest way,” he said. “The public deserves a fair map completed in a bipartisan manner; the General Assembly failed to adopt one.”

The map sent to Wolf by the GOP-controlled legislature was initially drawn by Amanda Holt — a noted redistricting reform advocate and former Lehigh County commissioner — and championed by state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York). It was amended by Grove’s legislative committee after GOP members of the panel criticized how their counties were split.

It improves upon four fairness criteria outlined in a previous state Supreme Court ruling, but nonpartisan analyses show it has a partisan bias in favor of Republicans.

“This is truly an historic day in our state. Never in our state’s history has a congressional map been drawn by a resident and then approved by the Legislature,” Grove said after the map was sent to the governor earlier this week. “It is now up to Wolf to follow the will of the people and sign this bill into law.”

Every 10 years, Pennsylvania redraws its congressional boundaries to account for population changes. Because of the state’s sluggish growth, Pennsylvania will lose one of its 18 seats in Washington.

With Wolf’s veto, the state judicial system is now likely to have the final say.

In response to suits filed by two groups of Pennsylvanians in December, Commonwealth Court asked the citizen petitioners, Wolf, top Republicans and Democrats, and good-government advocates to submit their own proposed maps.

The court will host hearings Thursday and Friday to consider 14 different proposals. It could issue a ruling as soon as Jan. 30 — the original deadline it set for Wolf and the legislature to come to an agreement — but redistricting observers expect the decision to be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

In recent days, legislators in the state Senate said they were still working on a compromise map that all four caucuses and Wolf could agree to. But on Monday, the chamber’s majority leader, Sen. Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland), told reporters the parties were at an impasse.

“And it just comes down to: We can’t agree,” she said. “The governor is going to veto anything that is not what he produced, and the courts will wind up drawing maps.”

House Republicans had criticized Wolf for not negotiating a map with lawmakers, which the Democratic governor said in December was not his role. He surprised many by releasing his own proposal on Jan. 15.

Wolf had previously stated that he would veto the map advanced by Republicans if it was not amended, criticizing its lack of partisan fairness and the way it split communities of interest — defined as a geographic area or group of people that share common values.

Close observers of the redistricting process had predicted the congressional map was likely to be decided by the state Supreme Court, which currently has a 5-2 Democratic majority.

In 2018, the high court threw out the previous cycle’s congressional map after finding it was a partisan gerrymander that violated the Pennsylvania Constitution. After the General Assembly and Wolf were unable to reach an agreement, the court adopted a map drawn by a Stanford professor.

Currently, the state’s 18-member delegation is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

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Pa. primary 2022: What delayed redistricting maps could mean for the May election

2022-01-26T01:12:46+00:00

HARRISBURG — The lawmakers in charge of drawing Pennsylvania’s new political maps have officially blown a deadline set by the Wolf administration to keep the May primary on track, sowing confusion among voters, candidates, and election administrators.

The redistricting process got off to a sluggish start nationwide. Because of the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau was late in publishing the results from its decennial survey, and lawmakers did not have access to clean, usable data until late October.

Still, Pennsylvania is far behind most states in finalizing its new congressional and legislative maps. In addition to the census delay, lawmakers have attributed the slow process to an increased number of public hearings and outreach.

Advocates for increased transparency in redistricting, meanwhile, have criticized those in charge for not releasing initial maps earlier and hosting public hearings before the proposals were released.

Here’s what could happen next now that the Jan. 24 deadline has come and gone:

What is the Jan. 24 deadline, and why was it set?

In June and December last year, then-acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid told those in charge of drawing the congressional and legislative maps that the Department of State needed finalized versions by Jan. 24 in order to organize the May primary without major issues.

While the primary is scheduled for May, preparations for the election begin much earlier. Major party candidates have from Feb. 15 to March 8 to collect enough signatures from residents in their district to get on the ballot.

But without finalized congressional and legislative districts, potential candidates don’t have all the information they need to decide on a run. They can, however, begin collecting signatures before the boundaries are set.

County election directors, meanwhile, have to begin preparing poll workers and ballots without essential knowledge.

“We can have conflicts all over the place and be scrambling for facilities and same with the poll workers,” Forrest Lehman, Lycoming County’s director of elections, said. “The basic infrastructure of your election is a place for people to go in and do their thing and the poll workers to help them. You don’t have that, you don’t have an election.”

What is the status of the congressional map?

The state Senate took a final vote on the congressional map Monday, passing it 29-20.

It will now be sent to Gov. Tom Wolf for consideration. The Democrat has said he would veto the map in its current form.

It’s likely the state courts will pick the final map. Commonwealth Court previously said it would take over the process if Wolf and the GOP-controlled legislature failed to reach an agreement by Jan. 30.

Parties approved by the court — including Wolf, the top Republicans and Democrats in the legislature, and groups of concerned citizens — have until the end of Jan. 24 to submit up to two proposed maps. Commonwealth Court will hold hearings on Thursday and Friday to consider them and could pick a map as soon as this weekend.

An appeal to the state Supreme Court is likely, further delaying the process.

What about the legislative ones?

The five-person panel in charge of drawing the state House and Senate maps is currently making changes after a month-long public comment period. The Legislative Reapportionment Commission has until Feb. 18 to release and vote on final versions.

After that, any person is able to bring a challenge to one or both of the maps directly to the state Supreme Court within 30 days.

What will the Department of State do now that the deadline is blown?

That’s not entirely clear.

When asked about the effect of missing the Jan. 24 deadline on the election schedule, a spokesperson for the Department of State would only refer Spotlight PA back to Degraffenreid’s letters.

Three county election directors who spoke to Spotlight PA said they’re unclear on what will happen next with little communication from the state department. But they are preparing as much as possible.

“I think most directors would like to have a solid answer, because we plan for an end date,” Tim Benyo, Lehigh County’s director of elections, said. “If it’s going to change, the sooner we know when that end date is the better because it affects all the different steps in the process.”

What could happen now? What has happened in the past?

The legislature and Wolf could move the primary date. That happened in 2020, when the primary was delayed from April 28 until June 2 because of the pandemic.

That appears unlikely to happen this year, with Republican leaders opposed to the idea and Democrats viewing it as a last resort.

The legislature’s unwillingness to move the primary date is cited in a new legal challenge brought by Pennsylvanians who live in legislative districts that saw high population growth over the past decade.

The suit, filed last week in Commonwealth Court, argues that these population shifts render the current maps unusable as they diminish representation and create overcrowded districts. The petitioners are asking the court to adopt a new election calendar that accounts for forthcoming legal challenges to the maps.

Legal challenges to the state House and Senate maps can’t be brought until they are finalized in February, but redistricting observers expect there to be lawsuits.

Candidates for legislative office could also be directed to run using the current maps, like they were a decade ago.

In January 2012, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the new state House and Senate maps adopted by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission and ordered the panel to redraw them. The 2001 maps were used in the primary that year, with the legal battle lasting until spring 2013.

Using the current, outdated maps is possible for legislative elections but not for ones for the U.S. House of Representatives. Due to sluggish population growth, Pennsylvania will lose one of its 18 congressional seats, making it impossible to use the current map.

One leading Republican lawmaker involved with the redistricting process suggested that, in the absence of a new congressional map, an arcane federal law would direct the state to hold at-large elections for the 17 seats. However, researchers and legal experts are skeptical that this would occur.

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Pennsylvania redistricting panel enters final stretch to complete House, Senate maps

2022-01-21T19:34:26+00:00

HARRISBURG — The panel charged with drawing Pennsylvania’s new legislative districts must now weigh over 6,000 comments from a month-long public feedback period before voting on final versions of the maps.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission — a five-person panel composed of top party leaders and chaired by an independent member — has until mid-February to make changes to its proposed House and Senate maps, according to the state constitution.

Once the panel approves its final versions, “any aggrieved person” then has 30 days to bring challenges against one or both maps to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

That timeline clashes with the Jan. 24 deadline for final maps set by the state’s top election official in order to keep this year’s spring primary on schedule. So far, Republicans who control the legislature have not been open to moving the May election.

“It remains my hope that we will be able to approve a final plan without using the full 30-day period that the state constitution allows, though that will be challenging,” Mark Nordenberg, chair of the commission, told Spotlight PA.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission is tasked with redrawing the state House and Senate maps every 10 years to account for population changes. The panel began meeting last spring and released initial maps in mid-December, kicking off the public comment period.

The state House map has drawn heated criticism from GOP lawmakers who call the proposal a Democratic gerrymander, as it could significantly shift the balance of power within the Republican-controlled chamber.

However, redistricting reform advocates say the creation of more seats that could be won by Democrats is the result of unwinding decades of partisan gerrymandering against the minority party and population changes over the past decade that favor Democrat-heavy areas in the southeast. Nonpartisan analyses show the proposed map improves on fairness metrics mandated by the Pennsylvania Constitution in comparison to the current map, and still has a partisan bias toward Republicans.

The state Senate map has faced less criticism, but advocates have scrutinized its deference to incumbency. In its current form, the state House map pits 24 incumbents against one another while the state Senate map creates two similar matchups. Redistricting advocates say this practice, known as “buddymandering,” often maintains incumbency at the cost of other good mapmaking criteria such as compactness or equal population.

During several hearings, private citizens, state lawmakers, county commissioners, and former public officials voiced concerns about how their communities were divided and a lack of Hispanic representation. The Latino population in Pennsylvania grew by 43% over the past decade, and advocates told the commissioners that the maps did not do enough to create districts where Hispanic voters could select the candidates of their choice.

Staff members of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission have already read through all of the submitted comments and organized them for the panel’s members to utilize when making final changes to the maps. The state senators on the commission have worked collaboratively on their chamber’s map in the past, while the state House representatives used Nordenberg as an intermediary.

Nordenberg has previously stated he would like to pass the state House and Senate maps with a unanimous vote. The initial state Senate map met that bar, but the state House map was rejected by both Republican leaders on the panel.

After the panel approves the final maps, any person can bring a challenge directly to the state Supreme Court within 30 days. Redistricting observers expect that to occur.

The past two legislative redistricting processes resulted in court cases. The 2011 cycle ended with the state Supreme Court forcing the Legislative Reapportionment Commission to redraw both maps after it concluded counties had been unnecessarily divided to benefit incumbents.

A spokesperson for House Republicans declined to get into “hypotheticals” when asked if the caucus would bring a lawsuit against the chamber’s map but affirmed its commitment to pushing for changes.

“We’re going to challenge this on behalf of the public to whatever extent we have to because it’s not right,” House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, a Centre County Republican who serves on the panel, told PennLive. “This is a 10-year verdict.”

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Proposed congressional map advances in Pa. legislature as Wolf, top lawmakers prepare for court battle

2022-01-19T20:10:00+00:00

HARRISBURG — A state Senate panel voted Tuesday to advance a redrawing of Pennsylvania’s congressional map as a top Republican expressed hope that his party and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf could still reach a compromise with a court deadline looming.

Nonpartisan analysts say the map, first proposed by House Republicans, has a clear GOP advantage. While stopping short of vowing a veto, Wolf previously said he opposes the map in its current form and expressed concern regarding the map’s partisan bias.

Wolf and lawmakers face two major deadlines. The state’s top election official has said her department needs a final map no later than Jan. 24 to meet the first of several spring primary deadlines. And Commonwealth Court has given those in charge of drawing the map until Jan. 30 to do so before it takes over the process.

The chairs of the Senate State Government Committee — David Argall (R., Schuylkill) and Sharif Street (D., Philadelphia) — had previously pledged to release their own proposed map. Argall on Tuesday was still focused on getting Wolf something the governor would sign.

“Bipartisan negotiations have been ongoing with Sen. Street and others in the hope that we can reach a compromise that can be agreed to by a majority of all four caucuses, signed by the governor, and approved by the courts, which has been our shared goals since this process began,” Argall said.

Street said he would not vote for the map in its current form but appreciated “the spirit in which we’re moving forward.”

If Democrats and Republicans can reach a compromise, Argall’s office said the current congressional proposal would be amended in order “to avoid delaying the primary.”

But with the clock ticking, it has become increasingly likely the final map will be picked by the state courts as part of an ongoing lawsuit.

Two groups of citizens in December asked Commonwealth Court to take over the process in order to maintain the date of the May primary. In recent days, the court said it would allow Wolf and lawmakers from both major parties to intervene and submit their own proposed maps by Jan. 24. Hearings are scheduled for the following Thursday and Friday.

In its initial form, the congressional map under consideration in the legislature was drawn by Amanda Holt, a former Republican Lehigh County commissioner and well-known redistricting advocate.

However, it was amended in the House State Government Committee after Republican members objected to the ways their counties were split. That version was introduced to the public and advanced by the panel at the same meeting.

Wolf recently released his own proposed congressional map, saying it and a citizen-drawn map championed by Draw the Lines — an initiative of the good-government organization Committee of Seventy — were “free of gerrymandering” and in line with principles released by the governor’s advisory council.

Both Wolf’s map and the proposal in the legislature fulfill four basic fairness criteria embraced by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

But while redistricting reform groups said the Republican-advanced map does not reflect the partisan makeup of the state, Wolf’s map does, nonpartisan metrics show.

An analysis by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project for The Inquirer found Wolf’s map would create nine Democratic or Democratic-leaning districts and eight Republican or Republican-leaning ones. Because of sluggish population growth, Pennsylvania is losing one of its 18 congressional seats this year.

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Pa. House approves proposed congressional map as court challenges loom

2022-01-13T04:03:47+00:00

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania House has advanced a new congressional map that nonpartisan analysts say has a clear Republican advantage, but its fate remains unclear as a court-mandated deadline looms.

The map, which will help determine the balance of power in Washington, passed with support from all but two of the chamber’s Republicans and from none of the Democrats. It now goes to the state Senate for consideration.

While the proposal fulfills four basic fairness criteria embraced by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, redistricting reform groups said it does not reflect the partisan makeup of the state — a sticking point for Gov. Tom Wolf, who has final say over the map.

Adam Podowitz-Thomas of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes redistricting plans across the country, said nearly all metrics that social scientists use to analyze the fairness of a map show Pennsylvania’s current proposal gives Republicans an advantage.

“I don’t believe that Gov. Wolf is going to end up signing,” he said. “I think that the partisan bias is too clearly in favor of the Republicans.”

If Wolf and the legislature do not agree on a final plan by Jan. 30, Commonwealth Court said it will take over the process as part of an ongoing lawsuit and select a map from those submitted by parties involved in the case.

The map advanced Wednesday was selected by Republicans on the House State Government Committee and based on a plan drawn by Amanda Holt, a former Republican Lehigh County commissioner and noted redistricting activist.

The initial map, however, was adjusted after several Republicans on the committee complained that their counties were split. The amended map advanced out of committee to the full House without public feedback.

Though the map creates compact, contiguous districts with equal population and minimal county splits — requirements outlined by the state Supreme Court in a previous redistricting ruling — it fails to measure up in partisan fairness, according to several nonpartisan analyses.

Partisan fairness is determined using a combination of metrics that measure how the map treats each party. Most metrics use past election data to see if the proposed map’s projected results would enhance a party’s power. Analysts also look at the difference in projected seat share between the parties even if each party received 50% of the votes, among other metrics.

Rep. Seth Grove, a York County Republican who has championed the map, emphasized that it was initially drawn by a person who is not a lawmaker and fulfills the requirements embraced by the state’s high court. He noted that no lawmakers, including Democrats, offered amendments to the map.

“The citizen mapmaker developed it without partisan data. We updated it without using partisan data,” Grove said. “I think this is a map the citizens can be proud of.”

Grove said on the House floor that, of the map’s 17 districts, eight would favor Republicans, eight would favor Democrats, and one would be a toss-up.

Those numbers come from Dave’s Redistricting, a nonpartisan website that uploads and analyzes district maps, and represent projections based on past results from a single election.

Podowitz-Thomas said using one election’s results “isn’t really a valid way to look at anticipated outcomes in the future.”

Using a composite of election results, Dave’s Redistricting has categorized five districts as likely Democratic and seven as Republican. The other five are classified as competitive but favor Republicans. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s analysis is very similar, Podowitz-Thomas said.

Democrats on Wednesday said they were shut out of the process and had no insight into why Holt’s map was chosen. Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre) criticized what he called a lack of transparency throughout the process.

“I don’t know, was it a big hat they picked it out of? Was it a group that got together? I don’t know,” said Conklin, who serves with Grove as minority chair of the committee that advanced the map.

While Wolf has criticized the map as “heavily skewed,” he has thus far declined to say definitively whether he would veto it in its current form.

“My role is either to sign or veto whatever the General Assembly sends me,” Wolf told reporters in December. He added that he wouldn’t negotiate over what the map looks like but would sign off on one that matches the principles of his own redistricting advisory council.

States redraw their congressional map every 10 years after the census to account for population changes. Because of Pennsylvania’s sluggish population growth relative to other states, it will lose one of its 18 congressional districts.

Even before the process formally began last year, many redistricting observers predicted that Wolf and the GOP-controlled legislature would fail to reach a compromise and the map would end up in court. That increasingly appears to be where things are headed.

Two lawsuits targeting the map — one from a group of residents who live in population-dense areas, the other from mathematicians and scientists seeking a “data-driven” process — were filed in Commonwealth Court in December.

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Upset over proposed House map, GOP seeks to overhaul redistricting panel

2022-01-11T05:06:53+00:00

HARRISBURG — Faced with a proposed new state House map that would diminish their power, GOP lawmakers are pushing to overhaul the process to sideline the current redistricting panel and put the ultimate power in the hands of the legislature.

The proposal is the latest in a series of constitutional amendments being pushed by Pennsylvania Republicans as a way to take issues directly to the public, circumventing the veto power of the governor’s office. The process, however, is a lengthy one.

The redistricting overhaul, introduced by Rep. Seth Grove (R., York), would eliminate the five-member Legislative Reapportionment Commission, composed of the top legislative leader from each party in both chambers as well as a nonpartisan chair who is typically selected by the state Supreme Court.

Grove has accused the redistricting panel of creating a proposed House map that unfairly benefits Democrats.

While the preliminary map has the potential to significantly shift the balance of power in the chamber, redistricting advocates say that’s because it unwinds decades of gerrymandering in favor of the GOP. Nonpartisan analysis of the map shows it still favors Republicans.

The change, advanced Monday by the House State Government Committee along party lines, would empower the legislative branch and ensure greater public input, Grove said during the meeting. Democrats and nonpartisan good-government groups, meanwhile, decried the proposal as an attempted power grab that does nothing to remove lawmaker influence from the process.

The resolution would create an 11-person commission composed of eight registered voters selected by caucus leaders as well as a former judge from Commonwealth Court and two members selected by county governments. A person would be disqualified from membership if they or their spouse has held public office, been a registered lobbyist, or been a political candidate during the preceding five years.

The final decision over the maps would be left to the General Assembly.

“The backup mechanism where the legislature regains control is quite worrying,” said Adam Podowitz-Thomas of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, an organization that conducts nonpartisan analyses of district maps across the country. “We know, based on our analysis across the country, that when legislatures have control of their own redistricting, they tend to draw partisan gerrymanders.”

He added, “To me, [this] seems like a pretty significant backtracking on the process that we have in Pennsylvania.”

Under the changes, the citizens’ commission would have 60 days to draw legislative maps, a decrease from the 90 days afforded to the current redistricting panel. After at least two-thirds of the panel’s members approve the maps, they would be sent to their respective chambers for consideration.

If a map does not earn approval in the House or Senate, it is sent back to the commission, which then has another 21 days to amend it and return it for reconsideration. Should the House or Senate fail to adopt its map after the second round of revisions, the chamber would take over the drawing, a significant shift from the current arrangement, which sends the process to the state Supreme Court.

The maps would pass through the legislative process as a simple resolution, which does not require the approval of the governor or the other chamber.

Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre) criticized what he called a lack of transparency and public involvement when forwarding “one of the most drastic overhaulings of the districting plan” in Pennsylvania.

“What we’re looking at here is another transparency plan that is not really transparent,” Conklin said during the meeting. “This is something that affects over 12 million people in this state. And I believe that we shouldn’t be doing it at 8 a.m. in the morning, that we should actually have hearings on it, actually talk about it before we proceed any further.”

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Pa. House expected to vote on proposed congressional map as redistricting lawsuit looms

2022-01-11T04:56:22+00:00

HARRISBURG — The state House is expected to vote on a proposed congressional map this week, as spring primary deadlines and a lawsuit that asks Pennsylvania’s highest court to take over the highly consequential process loom large.

A spokesperson for House Republicans told Spotlight PA the chamber will likely consider amendments to the proposal Tuesday, with a final vote expected Wednesday.

The preliminary map was approved by the House State Government Committee in December along partisan lines.

The panel’s chair, Rep. Seth Grove (R., York), first put forth a map drawn by a well-known redistricting advocate — former Lehigh County Republican Commissioner Amanda Holt — and hailed it as a response to public pressure to remove lawmakers from the redrawing process.

After complaints from some of the panel’s members, the committee advanced an altered version of that map a week later, before the public could review it.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who must approve the map for it to take effect, said in a letter the map falls short in partisan fairness and creates a result that isn’t proportional to the balance of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.

The decennial process of drawing new political boundaries helps determine the balance of power in Harrisburg and Washington. In the past, it has been an extremely politicized process that has been subject to lawsuits and accusations of gerrymandering — when a map is drawn to benefit one political party.

While Republicans controlled both the executive and legislative branches a decade ago, Wolf’s role as governor gives Democrats the opportunity to reject the proposal.

Despite the map’s importance, Wolf and the legislature are running up against the clock.

The state’s top election official has asked to receive the final congressional map by Jan. 24 in order to meet the first deadline associated with the spring primary.

Unlike the state House and Senate maps, the current congressional map is unusable because the state lost one of its 18 seats due to sluggish population growth.

Anticipating that Wolf and the Republican-controlled legislature won’t be able to come to an agreement on the congressional map in time, concerned citizens and redistricting advocates are lobbying the state Supreme Court to take over.

The suits, since merged into one, argue that the courts should intervene in the process and ban the state from using the current map for the 2022 election.

In late December, Commonwealth Court gave Wolf and the legislature until Jan. 30 to enact a plan, while it asked interested parties to submit proposals. Should they fail, the court will begin considering submitted maps the following day.

The parties who brought the suit have also asked the state Supreme Court to immediately take over the case. The court could issue a ruling on the request at any time or decline to respond to it.

A number of people — including Wolf and the top Democratic and Republican leaders — have asked to intervene in the case, as have members of fair redistricting advocacy groups who are represented by the Public Interest Law Center.

The center handled the case that saw the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2018 adopt a new congressional map, finding the one approved by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in 2011 was an “unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.”

Should the state House approve a map, it will then go to the state Senate for consideration. Lawmakers in that chamber are expected to release their own proposed congressional map this week.

Pennsylvania’s state House and Senate maps are drawn through a separate process controlled by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, a five-person panel made up of the four top legislative leaders from both major parties and a nonpartisan chair.

The commission released initial state House and Senate maps in December that are now under a 30-day public comment period that ends Jan. 18. You can see how your district would change under those proposals by using Spotlight PA’s map comparison tool at spotlightpa.org/mydistrict.

After that, the commission has another 30 days to make adjustments. Anyone who objects to one or both of the maps can file an appeal with the state Supreme Court within 30 days.

Spotlight PA’s Danielle Ohl contributed reporting.

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See how the proposed Pennsylvania state House map scores in every key area

2021-12-23T21:47:32+00:00

HARRISBURG — A proposed redrawing of the Pennsylvania House map improves on fairness metrics as mandated by the state constitution, while creating more districts that could be won by Democrats.

The preliminary map was approved in a hotly contested, split vote by the five-member Legislative Reapportionment Commission. The two Democratic legislative leaders on the panel voted yes while their Republican counterparts voted no, with House Majority Leader Kerry Benningoff (R., Centre) calling it a partisan gerrymander.

The commission’s nonpartisan chair, former University of Pittsburgh chancellor Mark Nordenberg, cast the tie-breaking vote during the Dec. 16 meeting.

“The main goal of the constitution is not to ensure that there is a fair fight between leaders of opposing parties every 10 years, but instead to facilitate what will be a good reapportionment result for the people of Pennsylvania,” he said.

The public has until Jan. 16 to provide feedback, while the panel plans to hold hearings before it amends the map and takes a final vote. The map could then be challenged in court. The state’s congressional map is created and approved in a separate process.

While Republicans believe the proposal is unfair to members of their party, fairness standards as mandated under the state constitution and embraced by the courts show it represents an improvement over the current map.

Compactness

Compactness looks at how close together all parts of a district are. It’s meant to prevent protrusions that would isolate some residents of the district. The Pennsylvania Constitution mandates that districts be compact, but it does not specify a metric or minimum threshold to measure districts.

The proposed House plan has an average level of compactness, scoring better than the current map on two commonly used metrics, the Polsby–Popper test and Reock scale. Scored on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 equals maximum compactness, the proposed plan hits 0.35 on the Polsby-Popper scale and 0.46 on the Reock scale. The current House map scores 0.27, and 0.36, respectively.

Proposed District 64 (shown in green) meets the standard for compactness, keeping Venango County whole and using only a geographically close and compact section of a neighboring county.

Contiguity

Contiguity means that there is no part of a district that is detached from the rest or completely isolated. The House plan fulfills this metric.

Split minimization

This metric is intended to keep communities together. Mapmakers aim to reduce county, municipal, and voting precinct splits, though most tend to focus on reducing the first two.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan group that conducts data analysis on district plans across the country, gave the map an A grade for county splits. Of the 45 counties that were split a total of 184 times, 40 of them were too large to fit their population into a single district. The current map splits 50 counties over 200 times.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the map an A grade for avoiding county splits when possible.

Population equality

The Pennsylvania Constitution mandates that each district have approximately the same number of residents. Per a U.S. Supreme Court case from the 1980s, the commonly accepted deviation from this standard for an individual legislative district is over or under 5% of the ideal population size and 10% for the overall map.

The population deviation of the proposed map overall, 9.28%, is just under the permissible range established by the court. Nordenberg said in December this is one of the areas that he intends to improve upon when reviewing the maps over the next month.

Partisan fairness

Republicans are so far crying foul, accusing the panel of creating a partisan gerrymander in favor of Democrats. However, a look at various metrics shows the proposed map has a bias toward the GOP.

One such metric is proportionality, which looks at whether the likely results of elections in each district, based on past electoral data, would result in a group of elected officials that is reflective of the ratio of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.

Dave’s Redistricting App, a mapping website dedicated to creating and analyzing district maps, called the proposal “Very Good” for proportionality, with a much smaller Republican lean than the current map. The likely number of Democratic seats would be 105, only a one-seat difference from the number of Democratic seats that is closest to proportional, 106.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project looks at a variety of factors when assessing partisan fairness. One such factor is partisan bias, or the difference in seat share between the parties even if each party received 50% of the votes. In that regard, the map has a 1.7% Republican bias.

Another factor is the average percentage of votes that a party receives in order to win a district. The average should be relatively equal between parties; if one party receives a higher percentage of votes to win an election, it indicates their voters could be unfairly spread out or packed into a district. Under the “Packed Wins” metric, the proposed map favors Republicans by 3.8%.

Overall, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project labeled the map as a “mixed partisan advantage,” noting that it had a “slight Republican advantage when measured by metrics related to statewide voting, yet is more favorable to Democrats than geography alone.”

Competitiveness

Competitiveness indicates how many districts have an even balance between Democratic and Republican voters, resulting in no party’s dominance in the area. Redistricting advocates believe that districts with this composition will be represented by legislators who are more responsive to voters, as their districts are less “safe.”

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the proposed map an F grade on competitiveness, finding only 17 districts are “competitive.” Dave’s Redistricting also rated the map as less competitive, labeling only 13.56% of its districts as competitive as compared to the current map’s 18.65%. Both are still a far cry from what Dave’s Redistricting calls a good level of competitive districts, around 75%.

Minority representation

Properly representing communities of color, which are driving Pennsylvania’s population growth, was a topic of high importance during the Legislative Reapportionment Commission’s meetings.

When possible, mapmakers aim to create majority-minority districts — those where the majority population is constituted by a minority group.

The proposed House plan scores better than the current map does on minority representation.

In total, there are 25 districts where either one minority community or a coalition of minority communities represent the population majority — the same as the current map.

But the proposed map also creates 19 districts with minority populations that are greater than 35%, creating a meaningful voting bloc, while the current map has only 13.

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Democrats could make sizable gains in Pennsylvania legislature under proposed maps

2021-12-17T18:26:10+00:00

HARRISBURG — A panel of Pennsylvania’s most powerful lawmakers released new proposed maps for the state’s House and Senate districts Thursday that could dramatically alter the balance of political power in Harrisburg for the decade to come — with the advantage swinging to the Democrats.

The maps were drafted and approved by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, a five-person panel made up of the four top legislative leaders from both parties and a nonpartisan chairperson selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

You can view the House map here, the Senate map is available here, and to get involved in the process, you can submit comments on the proposed maps here.

The proposed maps could reshape the 50-member Senate and 203-member House, which are both controlled by Republicans, and will also determine how well growing communities of color across the state are represented in the General Assembly. The legislature wields significant influence, setting policy and budget priorities that affect everyone in the state.

The proposed House map drew the most attention because of its potential to shift control of the chamber to Democrats. Republicans currently hold a 113-90 advantage and have been in the majority since 2010, despite the fact that they are in the minority of registered voters in the state. That’s in part because Democrats are so heavily concentrated in certain areas.

Adam Podowitz-Thomas, a senior legal analyst for the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project, said the new map creates about 102 districts that lean Democratic.

“We anticipate that the new map would give Democrats a real chance of taking the majority in the House of Representatives,” Podowitz-Thomas said. “There are seventeen districts we would consider competitive, meaning that the final outcome will very much come down to candidates and turnout.”

The Princeton project gave the House map a grade of ‘C’ overall and said it leaned Democratic in terms of overall fairness. The map was given an ‘F’ for competitiveness, meaning most districts clearly favor one party or another. The House proposal scored better for compactness and minimizing county splits, receiving a ‘B.’

Democrats assert the House map would undo years of unfair Republican gerrymandering. Since 2015, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has routinely used his veto to block the Republican agenda, but that could change depending on the outcome of next year’s gubernatorial election. Wolf, who is term-limited, cannot run again, setting up a wide-open race that is sure to attract national attention.

“I’m proud of the preliminary product that we advanced today, as well as the thoughtful and bipartisan process we used to get here,” said Senate Majority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny).

But a key Republican on the panel trashed the House map as a clear effort by Democrats to seize control. House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) said Democrats sought to twist gerrymandering in their favor rather than end it.

“Drawing a map that is meant for no other reason than to cement a legislative majority for a certain party for our coming decade [does] not undo the wrongs that they seek to correct,” Benninghoff said. “They repeat them. They perpetuate them. They revel in them.”

“I see this map as extremely partisan gerrymandered.”

The House map creates 12 majority-minority districts, meaning a single community of color comprises the majority, which is the same as the current map. But it would also create 13 coalition districts, or those in which communities of color collectively comprise the majority. The current map has only six coalition districts.

Advocates for greater representation for communities of color — which are driving Pennsylvania’s population growth — said they would be reviewing the maps closely.

“We are particularly concerned with ensuring that Pennsylvania communities are protected and that all Pennsylvanians, but especially Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and other voters of color have an equal opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice,” said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.

More than 40 counties in the west, central, and northern parts of the state saw declines in population during the past 10 years, while the southeast continued to grow. The share of residents who identify as white alone declined from nearly 82% to 75% from 2010 to 2020, as the Hispanic population grew and the number of Black residents remained roughly the same.

The House map passed by a 3-2 vote along partisan lines, with the two Democrats and the independent chairperson, Mark Nordenberg, voting in favor.

The proposed Senate map passed unanimously and received an overall “A” grade from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, in part because it did not give either party a clear advantage. Republicans currently hold a 28-21 advantage over Democrats and one Independent and have controlled the upper chamber since 1994.

Both maps create new districts in urban areas that experienced population growth, such as Allentown, Philadelphia, and Montgomery County. Those seats were made by reducing the number of districts in more rural areas that experienced population decline — and which are dominated by Republicans.

For example, Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman’s (R., Centre) seat would be moved south to accommodate for the greater population growth in Cumberland County. Corman, who is running for governor, recently announced he would not seek reelection.

Nordenberg said in opening comments that the redrawing process was inherently partisan because it was in the hands of lawmakers with a vested interest in protecting their members and growing their power, as opposed to an independent citizens’ panel. But he stopped short of endorsing either path as preferable in the future.

Fair district advocates in the state have advocated for years for the redistricting process to be taken out of lawmakers’ hands, but that change would require those lawmakers consent, and historically both parties have been loath to cede any power.

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How the Pennsylvania House’s proposed congressional map scores in every key area

2021-12-13T16:45:53+00:00

HARRISBURG — A proposed congressional map put forth by Pennsylvania House Republicans meets fairness standards set by the state’s highest court but benefits the GOP, a likely sticking point as negotiations begin within the legislature and with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

Advocates believe the map — created by former Lehigh County Republican Commissioner Amanda Holt, who a decade ago helped spur the movement for fairer districts — is a good starting point that could be improved to better reflect the partisan makeup of the state. Major party registrations are split roughly 50-50, but the map gives Republicans an advantage.

The House State Government Committee is set to vote on it Monday, but the debate over what the final product should be will last weeks.

“We have a long way ahead of us to get a map finalized in the commonwealth,” Rep. Seth Grove (R., York) said during a Thursday meeting. “There’ll be committee amendments, there’ll be floor amendments, there will be amendments to this as we move forward.”

The Pennsylvania Constitution is silent on what makes a fair congressional map. But because of a previous challenge taken up by the state Supreme Court, we know the standards a map could be judged by.

Here are some of those measures, and how the House Republicans’ proposal stacks up:

Contiguity

Districts should be in one whole piece, with all their precincts connected. In other words — no part of a district should be completely detached.

Holt’s map successfully fulfills this requirement.

Proposed District 4 meets the standard for contiguity, as no section is detached.

Population equality

Each district must have approximately the same number of residents, the state Supreme Court ruled in a 2018 challenge to a previous congressional map.

To determine how many residents should reside in each district, the total population of the state is divided by the number of districts it possesses. Pennsylvania’s population of 13 million is divided by 17 districts, making the ideal population size of each district around 764,865. Deviation from this number is permissible, according to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but must be under 1%.

The proposed map has virtually no deviation in population size in each district.

However, in testimony before the House State Government Committee on Thursday, Holt suggested she would have preferred a greater deviation in population to allow for fewer municipal divisions. She said she was adhering to preferences previously expressed in a committee meeting hosted by House Republicans.

Split minimization

The preservation of counties and other political boundaries such as municipalities, townships, and even voting precincts is an effort to keep communities together. The largest unit that can be split is counties. However, some county splits are necessary when the county itself is too large to be contained in one district. Holt chose to focus her efforts on keeping all voting precincts together.

In terms of county splits, Dave’s Redistricting App, a mapping website dedicated to creating and analyzing district maps, gave Holt’s map a slightly better score on splitting than the current congressional map. The current congressional map has 19 county splits across 14 counties, Holt’s map splits 14 counties 16 times.

“The purpose of drawing this map was to illustrate that it is possible to create a congressional plan with a zero population deviation that divides no voting precinct, and that it is possible to achieve this goal while balancing other priorities,” Holt said Thursday.

Proposed District 16 groups together six counties, keeping five completely intact and the majority of the sixth together. Its boundaries also follow municipal and precinct lines.

Compactness

Compactness is meant to ensure that no part of a district is too isolated or unreachable. There are several different metrics to measure compactness, though neither the Pennsylvania Supreme Court nor the legislature has set a standard.

One of the most commonly used metrics to score compactness is the Poslby-Popper test, which measures how indented districts are. On a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 representing maximum compactness, Holt’s map only hits 0.27. The current congressional map scores slightly better, at 0.33.

Holt’s emphasis on equal population and minimizing splits caused this loss of compactness.

The result: long sprawling districts that have protrusions or tentacles. The shapes can confuse voters as to which legislator represents their neighborhood, and drag voters into an unfamiliar community for the sake of keeping precincts together, said Anne Hanna, who won a statewide mapping competition as a member of Concerned Citizens for Democracy.

Hanna specifically pointed to Chester County and Philadelphia, which under the proposed map both have districts protruding into them in irregular shapes.

“Those extreme maps — like what she’s done — tend to just completely throw one or more other values in the trash to satisfy the one that they’re trying to do,” Hanna said. “It’s a cool technical exercise, but extremizing one value to the exclusion of everything else is not how you make a good map for Pennsylvania.”

Proposed District 5 shows the consequence of prioritizing equal population and minimizing splits. The district is not compact and stretches across several counties.

Partisan fairness

Partisan fairness measures whether a districting plan is reflective of the partisan divide of the state.

Many different facets contribute to this metric, including proportionality — looking at whether the likely results of elections in each district, based on past electoral data, would result in a group of elected officials that is reflective of the ratio of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.

The proposed map was rated “Very Bad” by Dave’s Redistricting App and labeled anti-majoritarian. In a hypothetical election, Democrats would “probably receive roughly 52.46% of the total votes,” but “only win 47.44% of the seats.”

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan group that conducts data analysis on district plans across the country, combines a few metrics to assess the fairness of a map. One such factor is partisan bias, which measures the difference in seat shares between the parties if each party were to capture 50% of the statewide vote.

Holt’s map has an 8.8% partisan bias favoring Republicans.

Another metric is the average percentage of votes that a party needs to win a district. If one party needs higher percentages of voters to win elections, it indicates that their voters could be unnaturally packed into a district or spread out unfairly.

The “Packed Wins” metric quantifies the difference between the average win percentages, and Holt’s map has a 4.5% bias toward Republicans.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the map a B rating for overall partisan fairness.

Efficiency Gap

Another factor to consider is the efficiency gap, which indicates the number of “wasted votes” in each election or the number of votes that don’t contribute to a candidate’s victory. The difference in efficiency between the two parties should be as small as possible to represent an unbiased map.

The data journalism site FiveThirtyEight found Holt’s map had an efficiency gap favoring Republicans at +3.5 while the current map has an efficiency gap that favors Democrats at +1.

Competitiveness

An emerging criterion is competitiveness, which measures how many districts have a relatively even balance between Democratic and Republican voters. Redistricting advocates say that this will hold legislators more accountable to voters, as their districts are less “safe.”

Dave’s Redistricting App, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, and FiveThirtyEight all deem Holt’s map to be fairly competitive, and comparable to the current congressional maps in that measure.

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Despite transparency vows, much of Pa.’s redistricting still takes place behind closed doors

2021-10-28T16:11:11+00:00

HARRISBURG — This year’s monumental redrawing of Pennsylvania’s political maps was preceded by an intense push for more public input, as well as a failed effort to take the power out of lawmakers’ hands and give it to an independent citizens commission.

The lawmakers leading the process have vowed openness and transparency, though advocates for overhauling redistricting say there is no guarantee they will follow through on such promises.

And as it has in past decades, the task of actually shaping the districts — and helping determine the balance of power in Harrisburg and Washington, D.C. — falls to a small group of legislative insiders who work behind closed doors.

The top Democrats and Republicans in each legislative chamber employ their caucuses’ demography teams, which are mostly led by staffers who have been drawing district maps for more than 20 years. The demographers represent the interests of their caucus members when they create maps and hash out disagreements with their counterparts across the aisle.

Critics of the current redistricting process worry a lack of oversight will facilitate backroom dealings that preclude public input and create maps that are manipulated to benefit one party over another or help politicians maintain incumbency — a practice known as gerrymandering. During the last redistricting cycle, both the congressional and legislative maps were eventually found to be unconstitutional.

“We know there’s lots of behind-the-scenes conversations, and we have no information about any of that,” said Carol Kuniholm, executive director of Fair Districts PA, a grassroots group that aims to stop gerrymandering. “We don’t know who’s making the final decisions or why they’re making the final decisions.”

Taking the lead

Every 10 years, using updated census information on where the state has grown or shrunk, Pennsylvania redraws its state and federal districts to better represent its population.

The state’s congressional map is approved through the traditional legislative process, which requires a vote from the Pennsylvania House and Senate and the signature of the governor.

No one involved in the congressional or legislative process who spoke to Spotlight PA detailed the exact methodology behind drawing district lines. They described a formulaic approach that meets the constitutional requirements of contiguity and compactness but said each district has a unique profile that will produce deviations from ideal sizes and shapes. Geographic features such as valleys or rivers can result in an oddly shaped district, while keeping communities of interest together — such as Latino or Hispanic residents in Philadelphia — means a district won’t always have the ideal population size.

The last congressional redistricting cycle saw virtually no collaboration between the Republican and Democratic caucus demographers as GOP lawmakers controlled both the legislative and executive branches. The map was passed within 10 days of its introduction along mostly partisan lines and with little collaboration from the public or Democrats. In 2018, the state Supreme Court threw out this map, finding it was drawn to unfairly benefit Republicans.

The Republican demography teams again will take the lead on drawing the congressional map, while the House and Senate State Government committees will serve as the face of the effort — holding hearings for public feedback and accepting criticism.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf could veto the map, likely sending it to the majority Democratic state Supreme Court. This division of power will require the Republican leaders to collaborate with their Democratic counterparts if they hope to pass a map with a margin that supersedes a veto.

Commissions, caucuses, and accountability

Pennsylvania’s state House and Senate maps are handled by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, which is made up of the four caucus leaders — two Republicans and two Democrats — and an independent chair. This cycle, the chair is Mark Nordenberg, former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh.

In an interview with Spotlight PA, Nordenberg said he will not draw any maps himself and instead focus on listening to the concerns of the public. The panel already has hosted 10 meetings dedicated to hearing comments from experts and interested parties as well as accepted written testimony and district maps created by the public.

The caucus mapmakers who work on the congressional map also handle the legislative ones.

In the past, members have met to define which areas of the House legislative map will be drawn by Democrats and which will be drawn by Republicans, according to one House Democratic staffer who asked not to be named to speak openly about the process. Subsequently, each caucus handled its own mapping internally and drew the districts in areas that were predominantly composed of their party’s voters.

“We’ve essentially sat down with our caucus counterparts, whether in the House [or] Senate, [and tried] to find places we agree first,” the mapmaker said.

The Democratic and Republican teams will work together on “parts of the state where we have broad agreement,” the mapmaker said. “We go to the chair to make decisions on parts that we can’t agree on.”

Earlier this year, Nordenberg hired Jonathan Cervas — a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and research associate at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project — to help assess proposed maps and research suggestions from the public.

Cervas said he believes the commission has a good process to field public critique but recognizes the final map matters most.

“What frustrates the reformers is when they don’t feel like they’re being heard, especially when the taxpayers are paying for something,” Cervas said.

The calls for public collaboration and transparency stem, in part, from the notion that the redistricting process has been rooted in protecting incumbents, thereby basing district lines on keeping officials in office despite significant demographic changes. The state Supreme Court deemed the previous cycle’s legislative maps unconstitutional for that very reason.

“If they draw [maps] to protect incumbency you’ve already got a locked-in partisan advantage, and you’re already starting with distorted districts,” said Kuniholm, of Fair Districts PA. “To get from those distorted districts to better districts is really almost impossible”

Those leading the Legislative Reapportionment Commission argue that their approach is driven by data, not politics. However, caucus leaders do consult with their members when drawing maps.

Costa and his lead demographer, for instance, have met with each member of the Senate Democratic caucus to discuss what they think each district will look like, showing them different versions of their districts.

“The desire is to look at the districts we have today and address them in a way that [flies] with the constitution and [flies] with case law and recognize the growth patterns,” Costa said. “A member doesn’t come in and draw [their] own district that protects themselves.”

Coming soon: public maps

It’s unclear when the public will get to see the proposed district lines, though lawmakers are working against the clock.

On Monday, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission voted to accept census data that had been cleaned for redistricting. Under the state constitution, the panel has until Jan. 12 to release maps to the public. Upon the release of the maps, Pennsylvanians then will have 30 days to provide feedback to the panel.

Costa said he expects to complete the process in about half the time and release the preliminary maps within 45 days, around Nov. 28. The 30-day window for public input will begin on the day the maps are released. The panel plans to host more public hearings and review maps submitted by the public during this time.

For congressional redistricting, there is no constitutionally mandated timeline, and leaders have not said when they expect to release that map or how long they will give Pennsylvanians to provide feedback.

However, both parties have expressed a desire to complete the process before it affects the 2022 May primaries. If maps are released after Feb. 15, the candidacy filing deadline, politicians might run for a district that will not exist by the general election.

Organizations such as Fair Districts PA and the Committee of Seventy’s Draw the Lines initiative have already created their own maps using the 2020 census data that they want legislators to consider. Draw the Lines has also called for legislators to immediately release a congressional map in order to allow the public more time to study and critique the proposal.

While both the Legislative Reapportionment Commission and State Government committees have held hearings, advocates say they still don’t know how lawmakers will actually use and incorporate public feedback. Only the release of the maps themselves will reveal whether citizens’ concerns were heard.

Adam Podowitz-Thomas, senior legal strategist of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, said the public will be able to assess how fair the maps are faster than in any previous redistricting cycle because of free, publicly available mapping software such as Dave’s Redistricting and Districtr.

“I think that means that legislators are hopefully less likely to engage in the most extreme abuses because they know there’s going to be an immediate outcry that happens.”

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Pa. redistricting panel rolls back new policy to count incarcerated people in home districts, not state prisons

2021-09-22T15:39:22+00:00

This article is part of a yearlong reporting project focused on redistricting and gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. It is made possible by the support of Spotlight PA members and Votebeat.

HARRISBURG — Thousands of people will be excluded from a new redistricting policy that counts state prisoners in their home communities rather than in corrections facilities, rolling back part of a major change that shifts political power away from predominantly white, rural districts.

The 3-2 decision by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission will impact any incarcerated person whose sentence ends after April 1, 2030 — an estimated 3,000 people.

The panel of four legislative leaders, as well as an appointed chair, redraws Pennsylvania’s state House and Senate maps every ten years after the U.S Census Bureau releases new population data.

In a significant shift, the commission in August approved a resolution to count most Pennsylvania residents incarcerated at state prisons at the address where they last lived. The decision does not affect the state’s congressional map, which is drawn by the legislature and approved by the governor. It also does not apply to federal prisons or county jails.

The original policy excluded nearly 4,000 incarcerated people sentenced to life in prison. Now, 7,000 out of 37,000 state prisoners will be excluded.

Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland), who introduced Tuesday’s resolution, said state prisoners with sentences that last until 2030 will still be incarcerated by the next census and thus be using the resources of their facilities’ districts.

“I still believe that reallocating prisoners is a flawed concept,” Ward said. “However … limiting the scope of prisoner reallocation … is a common-sense compromise.”

Ward and House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) voted in favor of Tuesday’s resolution, with the Democrats on the panel voting against it. The deciding vote was cast by Chair Mark Nordenberg, who also cast the tie-breaking vote on the original resolution.

Nordenberg emphasized the new resolution was a compromise on the part of the GOP lawmakers.

“Not that it’s perfect, not that it’s ideal … but is it reasonable? Is it thoughtful? Is it advanced for what I would consider to be appropriate reasons?” Nordenberg said. “My answer to that question is yes.”

House Minority Leader Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia), who introduced the first resolution and has championed opposition to “prison gerrymandering” in the legislature, argued Tuesday that there is no accurate way to predict which state prisoners will still be incarcerated in 2030. The resolution doesn’t account for direct appeals, clemency, and other ways sentences could be shortened, she said.

“The rationale for treating incarcerated individuals as residents of their home communities rather than the places where they’re incarcerated … [is not changed by] the length of a prisoner’s minimum sentence,” McClinton said.

Counting prisoners as residents of state House and Senate districts where they are incarcerated has boosted the population of rural, predominantly white areas outside of the southeast while sapping representation from Allegheny County, Philadelphia, and other parts of the state with many people of color.

The head of one good-government group that supported the original resolution said he was “deeply disappointed” by Tuesday’s decision.

“This resolution is nothing more than an attempt to leverage the bodies of incarcerated individuals, who are disproportionately Black and Brown, in order to bolster the population and political power of Pennsylvania’s rural, disproportionately white districts,” Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

The Legislative Reapportionment Commission expects to receive cleaned, usable census data by Nov. 9 at the latest. Once the data is certified, the panel will have 90 days to create new maps and reveal them to the public.

It’s likely Nordenberg, a former University of Pittsburgh chancellor, will be called on to cast the deciding vote on the maps, which help determine the balance of power in Harrisburg for the next decade.

“The resolution carries by a 3-2 vote, a voting pattern that now we have seen on both of the serious votes that we have taken,” Nordenberg said Tuesday, “but that I hope we’ll be able to break out of as we move forward.”

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