WashPo: GOP’s gerrymandered advantages

[SteveFromYellowstone]

Quite well since I live in one drawn to represent the 'minority' vote with the explicit approval of the Justice dept and courts

I is disenfranchised :pfft:

You just going to go in circles? Of course Texas wouldn't be guilty of packing minorities into a few districts

[twa]

You just going to go in circles? Of course Texas wouldn't be guilty of packing minorities into a few districts

They certainly do....by federal court order

[Predicto]

They certainly do....by federal court order

Haha. Not exactly. The Federal Court ordered them not to unfairly dilute minority representation. So the powers that be shamelessly gerrymander as much as they can without technically falling afoul of the court's orders, and blame it on the courts.

[twa]

Haha. Not exactly. The Federal Court ordered them not to unfairly dilute minority representation. So the powers that be shamelessly gerrymander as much as they can without technically falling afoul of the court's orders, and blame it on the courts.

I'd suggest you look again

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-redistricting/redistricting/court-increases-minority-districts-texas-legislatu/

and it is certainly not the first time the court has drawn the districts here

[Predicto]

I'd suggest you look again

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-redistricting/redistricting/court-increases-minority-districts-texas-legislatu/

and it is certainly not the first time the court has drawn the districts here

So, you are complaining that the Texas Legislature was stopped from drawing the maps to give the GOP 75 percent of the seats in Congress when the state is almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and diluting Hispanic representation even though the state is almost 40 percent Hispanic?

I feel so sorry for you.

We were afraid Texas would wind up here, with new boundaries for its U.S. and state House districts being drawn by a judge. The reason it’s happening: Our GOP-dominated Legislature got greedy.

As a result, legislative and congressional races are in turmoil after a federal court this past week threw out the state’s Republican-drawn redistricting maps.

If you haven’t been following this story line, here’s a recap:

Texas, with 32 congressional districts, is getting four more because of population increases in the last Census. That meant the Legislature had the chore of redrawing district lines to add the new districts. The lines the Republican majority settled on aimed primarily to fortify GOP ranks in Congress and in Austin.

But Texas remains one of the states that, because of its history of discriminatory practices, must have changes in its elections procedures pre-cleared by a federal court or the U.S. Justice Department. And the feds found the new state and federal House districts violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to maintain the ability of minority candidates to get elected. Most of the state’s growth in the past decade was among Hispanics, but the House districts didn’t reflect that reality.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel found the state “used an improper standard of methodology to determine which districts afford minority voters the ability to elect their preferred candidates of choice.”

http://www.news-journal.com/opinion/editorials/gerrymandered-texas-inability-to-redistrict-is-call-for-new-better/article_e98d021e-91c6-54c5-b381-73702693c3fa.html

[twa]

I feel so sorry for you.

Liar , but that's OK, I chuckle over your mess as well

btw....what are court ordered ability districts ?

[Larry]

Actually, he's going further than that. (Never one for moderation when it comes to spin, is he.)

Near as I can tell, from reading the link that twa, himself, supplied, what actually happened was:

• Texas tried to draw discriminatory districts.
  
• They got told "no".
  
• The legislature decided to go to court, instead of fixing the problem. They asked the court to ignore the federal law and impose the Republican gerrymandering, anyway.
  
• The court ruled that it couldn't do that, it had to follow the law. The court was forced to make the minimum changes they could, to go as close to what the legislature passed as possible, but to make it barely legal.

twa then announces that the court gerrymandered Texas, to give them minorities more votes.

[twa]

What I said was the court requires minority ability districts, which of course ya'll then complain about since they lump minorities into districts.

and in fact created more

[Larry]

What I said was the court requires minority ability districts, which of course ya'll then complain about since they lump minorities into districts.

Yeah, I know.

Texas wanted to spread their 40% Hispanic population around, into dozens of districts that were majority-Hispanic, and the evil courts stepped in and said "No, no, no. You can't have 20 majority-Hispanic districts, electing 20 Hispanic legislators to represent them. You must create four districts that are 90% Hispanic. Because having the Hispanics elect 4 legislators instead of the 20 you wanted to give them is better."

[twa]

The court did not mandate that the legislature must create districts that are 90% minority. The legislature did that all on it's on. (As part of their plan to disenfranchise minorities.)

and in fact created more

anything to support the state created 90% minority districts?

It's amusing to me my minority ability district elects a white Dem,and somehow this shows they are not represented in enough seats

[Elessar78]

Great article in last month's The Atlantic on Gerrymandering.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-of/309084/

The League of Dangerous Mapmakers

Who’s most to blame for our divisive politics? How about the gerrymanderers quietly deciding where your vote goes. Inside the dark art and modern science of making democracy a lot less democratic.

By ROBERT DRAPER

Every 10 years, after U.S. census workers have fanned out across the nation, a snowy-haired gentle*man by the name of Tom Hofeller takes up anew his quest to destroy Democrats. He packs his bag and his laptop with its special Maptitude software, kisses his wife of 46 years, pats his West Highland white terrier, Kara, and departs his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for a United States that he will help carve into a jigsaw of disunity.

Where Hofeller travels depends to some degree on the migratory patterns of his fellow Americans over the previous decade. As the census shows, some states will have swelled in population, while others will have dwindled. The states that gained the most people are entitled, under the Constitution, to additional representation in the form of new congressional districts, which (since the law allows only 435 such districts) are wrenched from the states that lost the most people. After the 2010 census, eight states (all in the South and the West) gained congressional districts, which were stripped from 10 others (in the Midwest and the East Coast, as well as Katrina-ravaged Louisiana).