New data released by Pennsylvania officials suggests that as many as 750,000 voters in the crucial battleground territory could be impacted by a stringent new voter ID law. The law, passed this May ostensibly to prevent voter fraud, requires all voters in Pennsylvania to show a valid photo ID at the polls.
Among those acceptable forms of photo ID include a state-issued driver's license, a valid U.S. passport, a U.S. military ID, a government-issued employee ID, an ID card from an accredited Pennsylvania higher learning institution, or a photo ID card issued by a Pennsylvania care facility, such as an assisted living residence or personal care home.
According to the survey, 758,939 voters - 9.2 percent - could not be matched in state databases as having Pennsylvania driver's licenses, the most common form of photo ID in the state.
Of those 9.2 percent, about 22 percent - or 167,566 people - are categorized as "inactive" voters, according to the data. A person can be characterized as an "inactive" voter if he or she has not voted in five years and has not responded to a state inquiry about his or her current address. Federal and state law also mandate that an "inactive voter" be kept on the state registration list until he or she fails to vote in two consecutive general elections for federal office following the notification.
"Even though many voters identified in this comparison as not having PennDOT IDs are 'inactive voters', most of whom have not voted since 2007, we will err on the side of caution and include them in this mailing," said Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele in a statement released alongside the study.
Even if voters are classified as "inactive" with 100 percent accuracy, however, that leaves nearly 600,000 "active" voters who lack driver's licenses and may not be able to cast their votes on Election Day.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele had previously said that 99 percent of Pennsylvania voters had the photo ID they needed to vote this November.
The controversial legislation has come under particular scrutiny in the last few weeks after Republican Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania's House Majority Leader, suggested during a June Republican State Committee meeting that the legislation aimed to benefit Mitt Romney's electoral prospects this November.
"We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we've talked about for years," Turzai said in June, listing off a litany of Republican accomplishments in the state, according to Politics PA. "Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it's done. First pro-life legislation - abortion facility regulations - in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done."
The remarks inspired widespread criticism from Pennsylvania Democrats, who decried it as an admission that Republican legislators were attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, however, maintains that the law merely aims to deter people from voting illegally.
"We are committed to helping any eligible voter who does not have an acceptable ID get one to be able to vote in November," Aichele said. "We are continuing our outreach to get the word to voters about this law. The goal of this law is to allow every legal voter to cast a ballot, but detect and deter anyone attempting to vote illegally."
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has amended the state’s lawsuit against the federal government over the rejections of their voter ID law to include a direct strike at the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.
Abbott argues in the amended complaint that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, amended by Congress in 2006, “exceeds the enumerated powers of Congress and conflicts with Article IV of the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.”
“For the Department of Justice to now contend that Texas cannot implement its voter ID law denies Texas the ability to do what other states can rightfully exercise under the Constitution,” Abbott said in a statement.
While several courts have dealt with challenges to the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — which forces certain states with a history of racial discrimination to have their election laws precleared by either the federal government or in a D.C. court — Texas’ challenge is the most prominent. Law professor Rick Hasen thinks there’s at least a chance the Supreme Court could hear the case before the November election.
“It is really late in the SCOTUS term. So maybe this does not make it to SCOTUS before adjournment in June. But if Texas wants to use its voter id law in November, the Court could well take it up even in September, before the usual October start of the Court term,” Hasen writes.
New GOP Sponsored "Voter Fraud Prevention" ID Laws Reek Of 2012 Voter Suppression Tactics Aimed At BLACK & HISPANIC Constituents.
Its Obvious GOP Lawmakers On Capitol Hill & Some GOP Governors Are Laser-Focused On Paralyzing The Black American Community's Power & Wealth By Any Means Necessary!
As I've Mentioned Before I'm Vehemently Opposed To Straight Ticket Voting Because It Encourages Politicians, Especially BLACK Politicians To Be Lazy.
If BLACK Politicians Think Their BLACK Constituents Are Going To Support Them Regardless Of How They Are Represented, Than Why Should Those Same BLACK Politicians Fight For Or Look Out For The Best Interests Of Their BLACK Constituents?
Thus My Dislike Of The Straight Ticket Voting Process Still Stands.
However To Suppress BLACK & Hispanic People From Being Able To Vote Is A Whole Different Ball Game!
Voter Suppression DOES In Fact Take America Back To The Days Of Jim Crow, Poll Taxes & Pre-Voting Literacy Exams.
When The U.S. Supreme Court Ruled In 2008 That States Are Allowed To Control Their Own Voting Laws, The Court Did NOT Grant Permission For States To Violate Or Ignore The Voting Rights Act Of 1965.
However That Is What Exactly What GOP Lawmakers Appear To Be Doing.
By The Way Where Is The Outrage From BLACK & Democrat Leaders Over This Injustice?
Recently When DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-D) Spoke Up & Called Out What The GOP Is Doing As It Relates To Voting Rights Violation, She Was Slammed By The Mainstream Media.
Do Such Public Rebukes Mean The Mainstream Media Actually Supports Voter Suppression Of BLACK & HISPANIC Voters??
I Say Its Time For The U.S. Dept Of Justice To Also Speak Up On This Critical Issue, Just As Debbie Wasserman Schultz So Boldly Spoke Up.
To many Republicans, it is an article of faith that minimalist government works best.
Except, that is, when Republicans want to impose tighter rules for their political benefit. A case in point is the flurry of states —six so far this year— rushing to pass laws requiring voters to bring government-issued photo IDs to polling places. All have Republican governors and GOP-controlled legislatures.
Supporters say this is necessary to prevent voter fraud. But the operative question is: Why, at a time of economic distress and state budget shortfalls, is this such a priority? The answer has less to do with prevention than with suppression.
In theory, there isn't anything wrong with requiring photo IDs to vote, just as they are required to drive, board a plane or cash a check. The Constitution gives states broad latitude to run their elections. And a 2008 Supreme Court ruling upheld an ID law in Indiana, giving other states a green light for their own laws.
So states clearly can impose these requirements. The question is whether they should.
Scratch just gently beneath the surface, and these new measures appear unnecessary at best. Voter fraud is rare and consists largely of the types of actions that IDs would not correct, such as vote-buying and voter intimidation. Fraud is already kept in check by elections officials, poll watchers from both parties, and acceptance of alternatives to photo IDs, such as utility bills.
One study in Minnesota, done after an extraordinarily close Senate race in 2008, found a grand total of seven suspicious votes, out of nearly 3 million cast. No charges were filed that year. Those seven cases were exceeded by the dozen or so elderly nuns in nearby Indiana who were turned away from the polls for lack of picture IDs.
The nuns were exercising a surprisingly common choice. An estimated one in 11— do not have government-issued photo IDs. This, of course, is an option they should be free to exercise. They also have every right to participate in elections, and the government has an obligation to allow them reasonable access to the polls.
So does it make sense to place roadblocks in front of them in the name of policing a crime that barely exists? And does it make sense to try to issue IDs to millions of people who apparently don't want or otherwise need them? Many libertarians see this as a route to a national ID card system, which they deeply oppose.
There is also ample reason to doubt the sincerity of states that say they will provide IDs. When Georgia imposed an ID law in 2005, courts barred the state from charging for them, calling such fees a poll tax — an unconstitutional tactic once used by segregationists to keep blacks from voting. But given the true motive behind such laws, it's likely that states will find other ways to make the IDs hard to get.
Just as Democrats try to help their cause by making it easier to vote through expedited registration and early voting, Republicans see a benefit in lowering the turnout among certain voters. The people most likely to be dissuaded by the hassle of obtaining an ID card — the old and infirm, the young and the poor — tend to vote Democratic. Shouldn't Republicans be looking for ways to expand their appeal to these groups, rather than throwing obstacles in their way?
While both parties are guilty of self-interested behavior, the national interest of addressing the USA's deplorably low election participation rates clearly falls on the side of making it easier, not harder, to vote.
With the newfound power of redistricting in their hands, North Carolina Republicans will likely seek to draw districts that give them a chance to win more congressional seats in future elections. Despite winning statewide congressional voting by a 55-45 percent margin, Democrats hold just a 7-6 edge in congressional seats. With the power to shape district maps at their disposal, Republicans should easily be able to reverse that margin, at minimum.
Nevertheless, redistricting has been a contentious process in the past, with a myriad of lawsuits resulting from the the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
While the intent of the law is to ensure that racial minorities have fair representation in Congress, along the way, it sometimes mitigates partisan gerrymandering. In practice, it prevents a bloc of minority voters concentrated in a geographic area from having their voting power diluted or spread across multiple congressional districts. Section 5 of the VRA means the General Assembly must “preclear” their redistricting plans with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The two districts in North Carolina subject to section 5 of the VRA are the 12th and 1st districts; the DOJ will have final say in deciding how these districts will be drawn.
These requirements first took place after the 1990 U.S. Census, which was followed by two African-American congressmen winning election in 1992, the first time in more than 90 years that an African-American represented North Carolina in Congress. The 12th district has been represented by Mel Watt since 1992; he’s won the seat capturing around 70 percent of the vote each time.
The original district, as drawn in 1992, was 64 percent African-American and spanned almost the entire length of the state, south to north. Parts of the district were very narrow, running along Interstate 85 to connect urban parts of the district around Charlotte to Durham, which is more than 150 miles away.
The Supreme Court in Shaw v. Hunt ruled the district unconstitutional in 1996, finding that the oddly-shaped district was drawn up for explicitly racial purposes in violation of the 14th Amendment. The lines of the district were tweaked to exclude parts of Durham in 1998.
In 2009, a U.S. Supreme Court case, Bartlett v. Strickland — involving North Carolina General Assembly districts — eliminated the consideration of “crossover voters” who vote with Minorities to elect a candidate of their choice in districts like the 12th.
The case is important because it establishes ground rules that will apply nationwide during the redrawing of Voting districts following the 2010 census. It could result in a reduction of Minority districts by encouraging district drafters to pack traditional Minority districts with more than 50 percent Minority voters, rather than aiming for widespread distribution across several Voting districts.
The decision comes in a case challenging the creation of North Carolina’s House District 18. State officials tasked with redrawing North Carolina’s voting map found themselves caught between two competing laws.
The VRA mandates that new districts may not be drawn in such a way as to dilute the existing political clout of minority voters in minority voting districts. But North Carolina has a law requiring that counties not be split up within voting districts.
State officials discovered that if they adhered to the “whole county provision” of state law, the Minority voting age population in District 18 would be reduced from 39 percent to 35 percent.
Concerned that the reduction would amount to Illegal minority vote dilution, the officials concluded that they were required to ignore the state’s whole county provision to avoid violating the federal voting rights law.
One of the affected counties filed suit, claiming the state law’s whole county provision should be upheld. The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed.
According to David T. Canon, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this ruling will make re-crafting the 12th district easier for Republicans. Canon says that after the Bartlett v. Strickland ruling, “The only thing that matters is the percentage of minority voters in the district.”
Republicans will be able to use redistricting techniques such as “packing” and “cracking” but would risk disapproval from the DOJ.
“Cracking” means dividing a district and moving its parts into several other districts in order to reduce the power of the minority voters, while “packing” would heavily concentrate Minority voters into one district. Canon thinks in order to meet DOJ approval, the 12th district, “would likely need to have somewhere between 45 and 55 percent minority voters.”
Once the 12th and 1st districts have been approved by the DOJ, Republicans can piece together the remaining districts in an effort to capture seats in 2012 currently held by Democrats.">with a myriad of lawsuits resulting from the the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
While the intent of the law is to ensure that racial minorities have fair representation in Congress, along the way, it sometimes mitigates partisan gerrymandering. In practice, it prevents a bloc of minority voters concentrated in a geographic area from having their voting power diluted or spread across multiple congressional districts. Section 5 of the VRA means the General Assembly must “preclear” their redistricting plans with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The two districts in North Carolina subject to section 5 of the VRA are the 12th and 1st districts; the DOJ will have final say in deciding how these districts will be drawn.
These requirements first took place after the 1990 U.S. Census, which was followed by two African-American congressmen winning election in 1992, the first time in more than 90 years that an African-American represented North Carolina in Congress. The 12th district has been represented by Mel Watt since 1992; he’s won the seat capturing around 70 percent of the vote each time.
The original district, as drawn in 1992, was 64 percent African-American and spanned almost the entire length of the state, south to north. Parts of the district were very narrow, running along Interstate 85 to connect urban parts of the district around Charlotte to Durham, which is more than 150 miles away.
The Supreme Court in Shaw v. Hunt ruled the district unconstitutional in 1996, finding that the oddly-shaped district was drawn up for explicitly racial purposes in violation of the 14th Amendment. The lines of the district were tweaked to exclude parts of Durham in 1998.
In 2009, a U.S. Supreme Court case, Bartlett v. Strickland — involving North Carolina General Assembly districts — eliminated the consideration of “crossover voters” who vote with minorities to elect a candidate of their choice in districts like the 12th.
The case is important because it establishes ground rules that will apply nationwide during the redrawing of voting districts following the 2010 census. It could result in a reduction of minority districts by encouraging district drafters to pack traditional minority districts with more than 50 percent minority voters, rather than aiming for widespread distribution across several voting districts.
The decision comes in a case challenging the creation of North Carolina’s House District 18. State officials tasked with redrawing North Carolina’s voting map found themselves caught between two competing laws.
The VRA mandates that new districts may not be drawn in such a way as to dilute the existing political clout of minority voters in minority voting districts. But North Carolina has a law requiring that counties not be split up within voting districts.
State officials discovered that if they adhered to the “whole county provision” of state law, the minority voting age population in District 18 would be reduced from 39 percent to 35 percent.
Concerned that the reduction would amount to illegal minority vote dilution, the officials concluded that they were required to ignore the state’s whole county provision to avoid violating the federal voting rights law.
One of the affected counties filed suit, claiming the state law’s whole county provision should be upheld. The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed.
According to David T. Canon, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this ruling will make re-crafting the 12th district easier for Republicans. Canon says that after the Bartlett v. Strickland ruling, “The only thing that matters is the percentage of minority voters in the district.”
Republicans will be able to use redistricting techniques such as “packing” and “cracking” but would risk disapproval from the DOJ. “Cracking” means dividing a district and moving its parts into several other districts in order to reduce the power of the minority voters, while “packing” would heavily concentrate minority voters into one district.
Canon thinks in order to meet DOJ approval, the 12th district, “would likely need to have somewhere between 45 and 55 percent minority voters.”
Once the 12th and 1st districts have been approved by the DOJ, Republicans can piece together the remaining districts in an effort to capture seats in 2012 currently held by Democrats.
The Federal Voting Rights Act does not authorize vote dilution lawsuits in voting districts in which a particular racial or ethnic group comprises less than 50 percent of the voting age population.
In a 5 to 4 decision announced on Monday, the US Supreme Court rejected a claim that so-called minority crossover districts qualify for protection under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Instead, the court's conservative wing embraced a narrow view of the law.
Crossover districts are those in which a cohesive minority voting population can elect candidates of its choice by forming a coalition with cross-over votes from whites or other non-minority voters.
The case is important because it establishes ground rules that will apply nationwide during the redrawing of voting districts following the 2010 census. It could result in a reduction of minority districts by encouraging district drafters to pack traditional minority districts with more than 50 percent minority voters, rather than aiming for widespread distribution across several voting districts.
The decision comes in a case challenging the creation of North Carolina's House District 18. State officials tasked with redrawing North Carolina's voting map found themselves caught between two competing laws.
The VRA mandates that new districts may not be drawn in such a way as to dilute the existing political clout of minority voters in minority voting districts. But North Carolina has a law requiring that counties not be split up within voting districts.
State officials discovered that if they adhered to the "whole county provision" of state law, the minority voting age population in District 18 would be reduced from 39 percent to 35 percent.
Concerned that the reduction would amount to illegal minority vote dilution, the officials concluded that they were required to ignore the state's whole county provision to avoid violating the federal voting rights law.
One of the affected counties filed suit, claiming the state law's whole county provision should be upheld. The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed.
In affirming that decision, a plurality of the US Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act protects the voting clout of minority voters in districts in which minority voters comprise more than 50 percent of the voting age population.
"The rule provides straightforward guidance to courts and to those officials charged with drawing district lines to comply with Section 2 [of the VRA]," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the plurality decision.
"We decline to depart from the uniform interpretation of Section 2 that has guided federal courts and state and local officials for more than 20 years," he said in the opinion.
"Minority groups in crossover districts cannot form a voting majority without crossover voters," Justice Kennedy wrote. "In those districts minority voters have the same opportunity to elect their candidate as any other political group with the same relative voting strength."
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined Kennedy's decision in full. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia concurred in the judgment, but did not agree with the underlying reasoning.
In a dissent, Justice David Souter said the plurality was being unfaithful to the intent of the Voting Rights Act.
"Minority voters in districts with minority populations under 50 percent routinely elect representatives of their choice," he said. "The effects of the plurality's unwillingness to face this fact are disturbing by any measure and flatly at odds with the obvious purpose of the act."
Justice Souter added, "States will be required under the plurality's rule to pack black voters into additional majority-minority districts, contracting the number of districts where racial minorities are having success in transcending racial divisions in securing their preferred representation."
Justice Kennedy said that enforcing the VRA to protect minority voting clout in districts where minority voters did not constitute a majority would "grant special protection to a minority group's right to form political coalitions."
He added, "Section 2 does not impose on those who draw election districts a duty to give minority voters the most potential, or the best potential, to elect a candidate by attracting crossover voters." The law safeguards those who already possess the "potential to elect" favored representatives from losing that potential through vote dilution, he wrote.
In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the high court's decision "severely undermines" the aim of the act. "Today's decision returns the ball to Congress' court," she wrote. "The legislature has just cause to clarify beyond debate the appropriate reading of Section 2."
This week the US Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the minority vote dilution component (section 2) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In doing so the court interpreted the VRA to only protect the voting power of minority groups when they constitute a majority of the electorate in a legislative district. This ruling makes the requirements of section 2 significantly narrower then the defendant in the case, the chief elections official for the state of North Carolina, had believed it to be.
North Carolina had broken its own constitution's requirement that legislative districts respect county boundaries in order to avoid diminishing the concentration of African-American voters from 39% to 35% when redrawing a district in 2003. One of the now-split counties sued, resulting in this week's ruling.
Though the VRA speaks only generally of preventing the dilution of minority votes in order to preserve the ability of minorities to elect candidates of their own choosing, the court has now made clear that only districts with a majority of minority voters (a so called "majority-minority district") are protected from vote dilution. In North Carolina the district in question is a "coalition district" where minority voters are able to pick their choice of candidate only when joined in coalition with other voters.
The controlling opinion was written by Justice Kennedy in the conviction that courts need a clear rule for when section 2 applies to avoid what he views as the constitutionally suspect insertion of race into government decision making. While this decision is a loss for minority voting power and will likely lead to a greater number of minority "packed" districts, many Circuits Courts have previously adopted the Supreme Court's view, limiting the impact of this particular ruling.
The most positive aspect of the decision was a strong statement by Justice Kennedy that "racial discrimination and racially polarized voting are not ancient history." Court watchers almost unanimously viewed Justice Kennedy's forceful assertions about the continued problems of racism as a sign that the court in another coming voting rights case (which will almost assuredly see Kennedy casting another deciding vote) will likely uphold the power of the Department of Justice to "pre-clear" election law changes in jurisdictions with a history of disenfranchising minorities to make sure that they don't violate voting rights.
So Mel Watt is North Carolina's most Liberal Congressional Rep.
Really?
I guess "Liberal" is the new buzz word for sorry, ineffective Democrats seeking to raise Campaign funds.
Isn't Mel Watt's 12th District the MOST gerrymandered Congressional District in the state? He's been in there WAY too long.
Mel ONLY caters to Wall Street and his Fraternity/ Sorority friends that's it!
Where do you think Self-Serving, Sneaky, Empty-hearted Mayors like Anthony Foxx spawned from? Politicians like Mel Watt.
Mel is an Incumbent who keeps the rest of his constituents (mainly African-Americans) within North Carolina's 12th District poor so they can never challenge him.
Thus he's basically useless.
Due to North Carolina's Racist history, there was definitely a time when Gerrymandered districts were necessary.
However Politicians like Mel Watt are now abusing the true intended purpose of Gerrymandering for their own personal gain.
They advocate and push Straight Ticket Voting from their poorest Constituents which allows them to remain in Public Office NOT to help, but to become personally Wealthy.
In fact Mel Watt is so crooked he introduced a watered down amendment in 2009 which would have granted Wall Street execs more power to be corrupt and play games with Taxpayer money.
Even Alan Grayson slammed Mel Watt's bill.
Too many Black Youth are dropping out of High School and NOT attending College because of Mel Watt's Selfishness and Greed.
Does Mel care? Don't count on it!
North Carolina, especially Charlotte deserves better.
This is what most people imagine when they think of a gerrymandered district — what I call “Gerrymander Classic.” NC-12 looks very much like the gerrymandered districts of the 19th century, but taken to extremes. As bad as it is, NC-12 at least looks like a congressional district, with meandering lines, consistent width, and hand-drawn appearance. As we’ll soon see, modern gerrymandering is often another animal altogether, with jarring shapes and artificial boundaries that are not just offensive to the eye but somehow feel like an insult to rationality.
(9.) Florida-20
This is what gerrymandering looks like in the modern era: ugly. Gone are any attempts at aesthetics. In the old days, redistricters at least tried to disguise their gerrymandering by drawing district lines that looked almost kinda sorta reasonable. No more. Nowadays many districts, with FL-20 being a good example, seem to be the result of computer algorithms with no regard whatsoever for human or natural boundaries. Needless to say, all sense of “community” within a congressional is out the window altogether when it is shaped like this, with jagged tendrils reaching out every which way to gobble up the desired demographic.
(8.) Pennsylvania-12
PA-12 is a rare example of “packing” (jamming as many opposition voters as possible into one district) that backfired. This district was created to be a Democratic stronghold formerly held by Congressman Jack Murtha, who was assumed to have a lock on the district. At the last redistricting in 2000, the Republicans in charge gave up on the area, which is solidly unionized, and decided to “pack” Murtha’s new district with as many Democrats as possible, to allow the remaining districts in the region a chance to have slim Republican majorities. But in the intervening ten years everything has changed: the area grew more and more conservative, and the locally popular Murtha died, opening up the seat to possible challengers.
In the 2010 election, PA-12 barely remained Democratic with Mark Critz winning by a hairsbreadth 50.8%-49.2% margin — while most of the surrounding districts overwhelmingly went Republican. Thus, if the foolish 2000 Republican redistricters had not consciously set out to create a “packed” Democratic district, and had instead just drawn the boundaries at random, they could have easily won all the races in the area, instead of losing this one (and the adjacent PA-4) by the slimmest of margins. Note to gerrymanderers: THINGS CHANGE. What may appear to be a wise gerrymander maneuver today may blow up in your face sometime in the future.
(7.) North Carolina-6
I have included NC-6 as a perfect example of “inverse gerrymandering,” a district that is partly hollowed out internally by a different gerrymandered district — in this case, the northern end of NC-12, our first example above. NC-6 is a stark reminder that no gerrymander is freestanding: all congressional districts are interlocked like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and every time you enclose any area by some outrageous boundary line, you are disincluding that same area from some surrounding district. So for every gerrymander you create, you are likely to also have a less-noticeable but just as offensive inverse gerrymander next door.
(6.) Florida-3
Florida has more than its fair share of gerrymandering nightmares. But while many of the state’s districts were admittedly drawn to favor Republican candidates, FL-3 is instead a federally mandated “minority-majority” district gerrymandered to give Black Voters a voice:
[FL-3] was drawn in 1992 to be North Florida’s black-majority seat and Democrats were shifted from the surrounding districts to make the surrounding districts more Republican. It currently stretches from Jacksonville’s downtown in the north to Orlando’s in the south, and stretches east and west to include other largely minority and Democratic areas such as Gainesville, Sanford and Eatonville.
As a result of this gerrymandering, the district is strongly Democratic with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of D +18 and gave Obama 73% of its vote in the 2008 election. It is 50.9% black and 35.4% white. …
The 3rd District is at the center of the debate over the potential impact of the FairDistricts initiative. Due to its shape, the 3rd is one of several districts that violate restrictions in the initiative which require compact districts that conform to geographical and political boundaries. On the other hand, the 3rd District is protected by the Voting Rights Act and a non-compact shape may be necessary to ensure it remains an effective African-American seat.
The “FairDistricts Initiative,” ballot proposals designed to finally make Florida’s redistricting theoretically nonpartisan, was finally approved by voters this year on November 2 — but was immediately challenged in court not by the Republicans as you might imagine but by none other than Corrine Brown, the representative of FL-3! Why? Because the new law stipulates that districts be geographically compact, which would eliminate her voting bloc and most likely her seat in Congress, when FL-3 is totally reconfigured next year. Which is ironic, because Republicans also view the new law with disdain, seeing it as a plot to swing the redistricting advantage back to the Democrats. Sigh. Can’t we all just get along? (Answer: NO!)
(5.) Illinois-17
Political scientists love to cite IL-17 as the prototypical gerrymandered district, and you are likely to see IL-17 used as the illustration in many academic treatises about redistricting. And we can see why here. Its shape has often been described as “a rabbit on a skateboard,” though to me it looks more like an embryonic ichneumon wasp with a pancreatic cyst.
We saw above how PA-12 was a gerrymandering blunder by the Republicans; IL-17 is the opposite, a gerrymandered district created by Democrats to ensure themselves a seat in western Illinois — but which this year was snatched from their grasp by Tea Party candidate and now congressman-elect Bobby Schilling. Ooops! The Democrats went out on a limb when drawing IL-17 — several limbs, by the looks of it — but the wave election of 2010 changed the electoral landscape. Let me repeat my warning to over-confident redistricters next year: THINGS CHANGE. Gerrymander at your own risk.
(4.) Florida-22
Florida-22 isn’t a congressional district: it’s series of random lines generated by a malfunctioning dot-matrix printer. What else could explain the sheer purposelessness of the innumerable jagged ins and outs of a district so thin that in a few places you could run across it in under a minute? All of this to achieve — what? A district that is almost perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Couldn’t the same result have been effected a little more simply, perhaps by circling some random part of a Florida map with a felt pen?
But all is forgiven, Florida-22, because on November 2 you elected as your representative Allen West MFC (My Favorite Congressman), quite obviously the next President of the United States.
(3.) Arizona-2
Arizona’s second district is the one most likely to make people burst out laughing. I mean, c’mon. And the explanation for this atrocity only makes it seem worse:
The odd shape of the district is indicative of the use of gerrymandering in its construction. The unusual division was not, however, drawn to favor politicians.
Owing to historic tensions between the Hopi and the Navajo Native American tribes and since tribal boundary disputes are a federal matter, it was thought inappropriate that both tribes should be represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by the same member. Since the Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, and in order to comply with current Arizona redistricting laws, some means of connection was required that avoided including large portions of Navajo land, hence the narrow riverine connection.
So, the district was drawn this way so that Hopis and Navajos don’t give each other “electoral cooties” by having to vote for the same congressman? What — is America now a 3rd-grade playground? Imagine how Republicans in Nancy Pelosi’s district feel, or Democrats in rural Texas. All across America people have to line up at polling places alongside people whom they despise. Get over it!
(2.) Maryland-3
Maryland-3 is the poster child for the lunacy that is gerrymandering. And the funniest part? The Democratic politicians who created it deny that it’s gerrymandered at all:
The new district was concocted after the 2000 Census when Maryland, like all states, drew up new congressional and state legislative district boundaries to reflect changes in the population.
Former Secretary of State John T. Willis, who was in charge of the redistricting as chairman of the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee, said the committee did not mean for the 3rd District to look like it does. That’s just how the numbers worked out, he said.
“It’s a very complex situation, and population is the No. 1 driving characteristic,” Willis said.
The final plan, Willis noted proudly, created eight congressional districts that had almost exactly the same number of people in them.
“All of our congressional districts don’t deviate by more than one person,” he said. But Rascovar said that no matter how the committee “painted it”, the new boundaries were drawn to favor Democratic candidates in the 2nd District.
“They needed ‘x’ number of votes . . . what you end up doing is juggling these neighborhood votes, and it becomes absurd,” Rascovar said.
“The most absurd is that the politicians drawing up these districts are no longer concerned with the neighborhoods,” he said. “All they care is, ‘How many loyal Democrats can I get in this district?’ ”
Willis disagreed. Although the interests of incumbent representatives were taken into consideration, he said, no single district was favored.
(1.) Illinois-4
Here it is: The most ridiculous congressional district in the entire country. No, you’re not looking at two districts; IL-4 has two absurdly gerrymandered halves held together by a thin strip of land at its western edge that is nothing more than the median strip along Interstate Highway 294. The end result is a gerrymandered gerrymander, a complete mockery of what congressional representation is even supposed to be. As with AZ-2, the intention behind IL-4 was to create an ethnic enclave, in this case an Hispanic-majority district within an otherwise overwhelmingly non-Hispanic Chicago. Problem is, Chicago has two completely distinct and geographically separate Hispanic neighborhoods — one Puerto Rican, the other Mexican — but neither is large enough to constitute a district majority on its own. Solution? Lump all Hispanics together into a supposedly coherent cultural grouping, and then carefully draw a line surrounding every single Hispanic household in Chicago, linking the two distant neighborhoods by means of an uninhabited highway margin. Voila! One Hispanic congressperson, by design. And as a side-effect, the most preposterous congressional district in the United States.
But wait — our gerrymander tour isn’t over. If you think those ten were bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. While they may have indeed been the ten most gerrymandered districts in the nation, at least they shared something admirable in common: They were legal. The same cannot be said about our next ten districts, which may not be as crazily shaped as the ones above, but which are in one crucial aspect far worse: they’re noncontiguous.
The whole reason gerrymandering even exists as a practice in the first place is to overcome the requirement that each congressional district be contiguous — in other words, a unified single enclosed area, however strangely shaped it may be. This self-evident need to create contiguous districts is the whole reason why gerrymandered district boundaries wander all over the landscape, so as to enclose certain sought-after voters while still keeping them geographically connected to the rest of the district. Without the requirement to have each district be contiguous, politicians could easily have created a new level of fantasmagorial gerrymandering in which demographic groupings are enclosed without any regard to where they might be located on a map, forging “districts” out of disconnected topological islands.
Thank heavens that can never happen, right? Right?
Wrong.
The politicians in charge of redistricting are so brazen in some states that they seem to have gotten drunk on gerrymander wine, tossing caution to the wind and cavalierly creating noncontiguous congressional districts with portions completely cut off from the rest of the voters. How in the world they got away with this, I have no idea — apparently, if you have the hubris to create gerrymandered districts in the first place, it’s not so big a step to cross the invisible boundary between unethical and illegal.
That said, I am unaware of any federal law stipulating that districts be contiguous; it seems to be legislated on a state-by-state basis. And it could very well be that certain states intentionally fail to pass or enforce such a law, if it serves a political purpose to violate it. After all, who’s going to prosecute the redistricters? Themselves?
If this trend continues, perhaps the time has come to enact nationwide guidelines expressly prohibiting noncontiguous congressional districts.
Bernanke was testifying about the role of the reserve in protecting consumers from abusive practices by financial institutions, the AP reports. The Fed chairman said protecting consumers was important. Watt, a Charlotte Democrat, wanted to hear more.
Bernanke touched only briefly on an Obama administration proposal to create an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. Some say the proposal, now being debated in the House, would reduce the Fed’s power.
That drew a rebuke from Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C. "Five sentences on consumer protection when everything else gets substantially more space," Watt said. "It is just not a good message to send."
During Reconstruction, Mississippi created a "shoestring" congressional district, sweeping so many blacks into a narrow district along the river that other districts had comfortably large white majorities. This was racial gerrymandering deplored by liberals.
After the 1990 Census determined that North Carolina was 22 percent black, the state's redistricting created a black-majority congressional district. President George H.W. Bush's Justice Department deemed this insufficient under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Hence the creation of North Carolina's 12th District, which slithers 160 miles down Interstate 85. This was racial gerrymandering applauded by liberals. And by cynical Republicans. While preening about their civil rights sensitivity, Republicans could concentrate black voters into electoral ghettos, thereby making contiguous districts more Republican.
Last week, two days after the 44th anniversary of the Selma march that helped pass the 1965 act, the Supreme Court took a timid step toward limiting the perverse use of that act to create political set-asides -- elective offices to which certain preferred minorities are entitled. Last week's ruling revisits the strange career of racial gerrymandering -- how that practice went from execrable to virtuous to mandatory and became yet another manifestation of the entitlement mentality.
The 1965 legislation was enacted to combat racial discrimination that denied equal access to voting. Because of judicial interpretations and legislative amendments, it now requires racial discrimination in the name of guaranteeing effective voting by certain preferred minorities (blacks and Hispanics). Effectiveness is understood as successful racial or ethnic bloc voting, with success understood as electing members of those blocs. Such results -- minorities electing minority candidates -- have come to be regarded as necessary and sufficient proof of real voting rights.
In 1982, the act was amended (Section 2) to say that a violation occurs if nominating and electing processes "are not equally open to participation" by minority voters in that they "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." Note that there is no mention of "vote dilution."
But the amended VRA has been construed as follows: Equal "participation" of and "opportunity" for minorities means their ability to elect candidates of their choice, and that must mean minority candidates. Otherwise there has been illegal dilution of the minority vote. Such repellant reasoning expresses two tenets of liberalism's racial fatalism: identity politics (your political identity is your race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation) and categorical representation (members of an identity cohort can be understood, empathized with and represented only by members of that cohort).
Racial gerrymandering having thus become a moral imperative, North Carolina's legislature created a "majority-minority" (a voting-age population 56 percent black) state legislative district after the 1990 Census. But the 2000 Census revealed that demographic changes had made that district just 35 percent black. So the legislature tinkered with the district's shape to make it 39 percent minority. But it did so by again dividing two counties, which North Carolina's Constitution forbids.
This time Pender County sued. A state court said that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required splitting Pender, but North Carolina's Supreme Court held that Section 2 protects against vote dilution in drawing district lines only when a minority group is a majority. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed -- even though Section 2 says nothing whatever about a bright numerical line like this "50 percent rule."
In an opinion joined only by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito, Justice Anthony Kennedy lamented that "racially polarized voting" is "not ancient history." Well, yes. It is federal policy: By codifying the assumption that people of a particular race will and should think and vote alike, the Voting Rights Act now encourages such voting by treating it as normal and hence sort of admirable.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, endorsed only Kennedy's conclusion. Thomas rejected Kennedy's argument, noting the glaring fact that Section 2's text provides no basis -- none -- for "any vote dilution claim, regardless of the size of the minority population in a given district." The Voting Rights Act, properly read, concerns only "access to the ballot."
But it has been improperly read by result-oriented lawyers skillful at creative construing and by judges legislating their own notions of racial rectitude. The Voting Rights Act was written to protect each individual's right to vote. Having been twisted to serve group rights -- certain groups' entitlements to win quotas of offices -- the law has become emblematic of both the noble flourishing and the ignoble decline of the civil rights movement.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled narrowly Monday in a challenge to the landmark Voting Rights Act, siding with a small Texas governing authority while sidestepping the larger constitutional issue.
The court, with only one justice in dissent, avoided the major questions raised over the federal government's most powerful tool to prevent discriminatory voting changes since the mid-1960s.
The law requires all or parts of 16 states, mainly in the South, with a history of discrimination in voting to get approval in advance of making changes in the way elections are conducted.
The court said that the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 in Austin, Texas, could apply to opt out of the advance approval requirement, reversing a lower federal court that found it could not. The district would appear to meet the requirements to bail out, although the court did not pass judgment Monday on that point.
Five months after Barack Obama took office as the nation's first African-American president, Chief Justice John Roberts said the justices decided not to determine whether dramatic civil rights gains means the advance approval requirement is no longer necessary. That larger issue, Roberts said, "is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today."
Debo Adegbile, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund lawyer who argued for the preservation of the law at the high court, said, "The fact is, the case was filed to tear the heart out of the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act and that effort failed today."
But Hans von Spakovsky, a legal scholar the conservative-oriented Heritage Foundation, said, "It leaves the courts wide open to another challenge. If someone files a new lawsuit, I think there's a very good chance that down the line they might find it unconstitutional."
The court's avoidance of the constitutional question explains the consensus among justices in the case rendered Monday, where they otherwise likely would have split along conservative-liberal lines.
Justice Clarence Thomas, alone among his colleagues, said he would have resolved the case and held that the provision, known as Section 5, is unconstitutional.
"The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains," Thomas said.
Roberts himself noted that blacks and white now register and turn out to vote in similar numbers and that "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare."
He attributed a significant share of the progress to the law itself. "Past success alone, however, is not adequate justification to retain the preclearance requirement," Roberts said.
Still, the court did not, on Monday, decide that question in what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently described as "perhaps the most important case of the term."
The Voting Rights Act, first enacted in 1965, opened the polls to millions of black Americans. In 2006, the Republican-controlled Congress overwhelmingly renewed the part of the law which provided for the advance approval requirement for 25 years and President George W. Bush signed it.
The Austin utility district, backed by a conservative group opposed to the law, brought the court challenge.
It said that either it should be allowed to opt out or the entire provision should be declared unconstitutional.
Based on the tone of the questions when the case was argued in late April, many civil rights and election law experts predicted the Roberts-led court would indeed strike the measure down.
The court ruled instead on a provision of the law that allows a state or local government to seek to be free of the advance approval requirement.
The three-judge court that originally decided the case said the utility district did not qualify as a local government that is eligible to bail out. The high court reversed that ruling Monday, saying "all political subdivisions" are eligible to file a bailout suit.
The Austin utility district is in the heart of Canyon Creek, an affluent suburb of about 3,500 residents that didn't break ground on its first house until the 1980s. About 80 percent of residents in Canyon Creek are white, according to the 2000 census.
As recently as 2002, voters in Canyon Creek used a neighbor's garage to cast their ballot in their utility board elections. The board wanted to change the polling location to a school, but first had to seek federal clearance.
The community got it, but Canyon Creek's board felt that needing approval from Washington was an unnecessary obstacle in a tiny neighborhood with no history of minority voter discrimination.
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