Tuesday, March 7, 2017

The Background of Racial Gerrymandering



After Baker v. Carr and Renyolds v. Sims outlawed population-based gerrymandering (where districts were apportioned to have vastly different populations, over-representing some constituents while under-representing others), state legislators found two new ways to gerrymander effectively. One of these was racial gerrymandering. This week, I read the supreme court case White v. Regester, which was the first instance of the court finding racial gerrymandering to be unconstitutional.

The 1973 case was based upon the 1971 reapportionment of Texas’s House of Representatives. The court ruled on two aspects of this reapportionment: population variance between districts, and racial discrimination.

One of the metrics used to evaluate population-based gerrymandering claims is variance between the populations of a state’s most and least populous districts. In Texas, this variance was 9.9%. The court ruled that this was an acceptable variance, even without justification for why such variance was in the state’s best interest.

The more important part of this case, however, was the assessment of racial discrimination in the 1971 reapportionment. The court found that in Dallas County and Bexar County, racial minorities had undergone significant disenfranchisement in their multi-member districts.

The 1971 reapportionment plan had divided the state into 79 single-member districts (where the district elects one representative) and 11 multi-member districts (where some specified number of representatives are all elected to represent the same constituents. The court found that the way in which these single-member or multi-member districts were distributed was irrational and unjustified.

In Dallas County, the multi-member districts discriminated against African Americans, because of a white-dominated Democratic Party primary (in which candidates could win without the support of any African American voters) and the so-called “place rule”. The place rule forced candidates to run on a specific place on the ballot, making each seat a two-candidate head-to-head race. While the court did not see such rules as inherently unconstitutional, it found that this one in particular served to discriminate, and was therefore illegal.

Bexar County had a slightly different discrimination issue. Mexican Americans in this county made up only 29% of the population, despite having huge majorities in neighborhoods like Barrio. This, along with a poll tax, language barriers, and the nation’s strictest voter registration system, effectively eliminated the political voice of Mexican Americans in Bexar County.

The court ruled that this discrimination was unconstitutional. The ruling became the foundation for claims of racial gerrymandering.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Giacomo. The court cases that you are reading seem to be really adding to your project. I think they offer a concrete expression of the court's opinion on the issue. One question that came to mind is how the calculate the variance that you discussed above. Did they just use data from the census and/or is there a formula that they use to calculate this? Just a thought :)

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  2. Liz, good question. Population variances between districts are always determined using census data, because it is the official data that redistricting is supposed to rely on. An interesting side note here is that in at least one case (Texas's 2003 congressional district reapportionment), the court ruled that only census data should be used to decide population variances, even if the data is not current. This was a mid-decade reapportionment, and they still used the census data from the beginning of the decade.

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