On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it is suing Texas over Republicans’ newly-drawn congressional maps, Which marginalizeLatinx people, and other nonwhite communities, have a disproportionate influence on white voters.
It is available in its lawsuit, the Justice Department says that the Texas legislature “refused to recognize the State’s growing [non-white] electorate” in their new congressional maps, which they drew in an “extraordinarily rapid and opaque legislative process.” The maps, which were signed into lawOctober was rammed through the legislature by the state’s Republican majority.
“This is not the first time Texas has acted to minimize the voting rights of its minority citizens. Decade after decade, Texas has enacted redistricting plans that violate the Voting Rights Act,” the Justice Department wrote. “In enacting its 2021 Congressional and House plans, the State has again diluted the voting strength of minority Texans and continued its refusal to comply with the Voting Rights Act.”
This is the second time Texas has been sued over voter suppression by the Department of Justice in just over a month. In November, the Agency charges that the state Republicans’ marquee voter suppression bill, S.B. 1. The bill, which was the state Republicans’ marquee voter suppression bill, S.B. The bill was defeated Drive-through voting and 24-hour votingThese measures had greatly increased voting access for marginalized populations.
The Department of Justice is a member voting rights groups that have also suedThe state is upset about its new district map. These groups similarly argue that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by diminishing people of color’s voting power in the state.
The new map is created two additional heavily Republican-leaning congressional districts, meaning that — if the map is upheld by courts — there will be 24 heavily-Republican districts, one competitive district and only 13 Democratic districts in the state.
Even though non-Latinx people are only 1%, Around 41 percent of the state’s population, they are a majority in 60 percent of congressional districts in the new map. Despite being 40% of the population and only 18% of districts, Latinx residents are majority in 18%. Under the new map, Black, Asian, and other populations don’t represent a majority in any district.
These maps have also marginalized the state’s new residents, 95 percent of whom are people of color. Although the state will be gaining two seats in the House due to recent population growth, Republicans are giving white voters a majority over both new districts in Houston and Austin — a move that the Department of Justice has rebuked in its lawsuit.
Republicans “surgically excised minority communities from the core of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties, some more than a hundred miles away, placing them in a congressional district where they would lack equal electoral opportunity,” the agency wrote.
These voters have been marginalized by the party despite the fact many people who would be considered Latinx by politicians voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (Notably many of the so-called Latinx in Texas are self-described. as Tejanos.) Trump still won South Texas wins. still lost the Latinx voteAccording to exit polls, this is the overall state.
It seems that Republicans, regardless of their political affiliation, are determined to take extreme measures in order to suppress non-white voters, even if those measures are based upon bunk conspiracy theories. S.B. 1 creates a monthly assessment for voter rolls To ensure that undocumented immigrants aren’t registered to vote. This rule was created after Trump falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants were voting in large numbers.
The last time Texas conducted a sweep of its voter lists was in 2019, when Secretary David Whitley ordered. a review of nearly 100,000 votersTo check for noncitizens. After voting rights groups sued state, alleging that the review violated voting right protections, state abandoned its search.
Whitley instructed officials not to take action on the list of people that his office had categorized as “possible non-U.S. citizens.” It’s unclear what methodology Whitley’s office used to create that list, but voting rights advocates noted that the very concept behind the project was discriminatory.
