Color Us Connected: Redrawing the lines of voting districts reveals a lot about ourselves

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, in recognition of the season, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Alabama, and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about voting districts and the recent Supreme Court decision on Alabama’s congressional districts.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Alabama’s Act 140 gerrymandered Tuskegee’s city limits in 1957, keeping all of the white population but excluding every all-Black neighborhood, along with Tuskegee University. It reduced the number of Black people registered to vote in local elections from 400 to 5. Prior to the landmark 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that Act 140 violated the 15th Amendment, Appeals Court Judge Brown had called Act 140 “a clear legislative purpose to deprive Negroes and only Negroes of vote and village."

In January 2022, after hearing a massive record of facts over seven days of testimony and reviewing over 1,000 pages of briefs, a three-judge panel in federal district court held that Alabama’s 2021 Congressional redistricting plan violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court found the plan unlawfully diluted the votes of the Black population, and ordered the state to devise a new congressional district map for the 2022 elections.

Alabama’s district lines allow fewer than 30% of Blacks to reside in a majority Black district, but allows 92% of Alabama whites to reside in a majority white district. Alabama’s Black legislators presented 11 plans that included a second majority-Black district, and even the Alabama state’s map expert said the plaintiffs’ plans adhered to the rules, and on a higher quality level than the enacted state plan he had authored.

On Feb. 7, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in a 5-4 decision said: “the District Court’s injunction is a prescription for chaos“ and “Our action today shall of necessity allow the (2022) election to proceed without an injunction.” (No redrawing the map.)

Chief Justice John Roberts, in dissenting, stated: “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction....In my view the District Court’s analysis should therefore control the upcoming election.“

Justice Kagan, with Justices Breyer and Sotomayor also dissenting, wrote: “This Court goes badly wrong in granting a stay....The District Court here did everything right under the law. Staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”

She continued, “Alabama cannot contend that redrawing its map in advance of this year’s elections would be impossible. It enacted its current plan in less than a week. ....Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year. And most of all, it does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished."

SCOTUS: You have been charged with stealing half the food and turkeys from the Black community, for the next 10 years, and a Federal Court told you to give it back. Is that right?

ALABAMA: Yes! But in November we are preparing Our Party to celebrate how we took land from the Mvskoke Nation. We just don’t have enough time to give it back and have the Party!!

SCOTUS: So you want to use the stolen Black community’s food and turkeys for Your Party?

ALABAMA: Yes! Yes, that’s exactly our intention!

SCOTUS: That sounds reasonable. OK, we will discuss your case after the November Party!

By Amy Miller

We mere mortals have no hope of figuring out how the new Congressional districts being drawn in each state will change the politics of this country.

We can understand clearly, though, that if the people who draw up the districts have a personal stake in how the lines are drawn, that will affect their drawings. This, in fact, is the case in the more than 30 states where the legislators get to craft the new districts, using the 2020 census as a guideline for population counts.

In New Hampshire, the Republican-controlled legislature designed new districts that Democrats say will make one district more clearly Democratic and the other more clearly Republican, in other words less competitive; right now they are both represented by Democrats. The new lines mean a quarter of state residents will be in a different district now.

In New York, the Democrat-led legislature has redrawn lines that the GOP says take away some of their edge. Democrats responded that they are merely righting the wrong created by years of GOP-drawn lines.

And in Maine, although the state legislature draws the boundaries as in 31 other states, it managed to avoid the “gerrymandering drama” seen in many other states, as the Associated Press reported it. Here, a two-thirds majority is required to approve new district maps, which are subject to veto by the governor.

But perhaps the biggest drama has centered around Alabama, where new districts so clearly compromise the representation of Blacks voters. Three federal court judges agreed the lines unfairly and intentionally reduced the power of Black voters in the state, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to reverse the court’s decision and allow the lines to stand. The majority said it ruled this way not because the lower court was wrong but because of the hassle state leaders would face in redrawing the lines before the next election.

The state-by-state changes are easy to see at Politico’s website with its interactive maps, which also show changes in key demographics in each district.

Efforts have been underway nationwide to find less partisan ways to draw these maps, including reform of redistricting laws, making redistricting more transparent, and electing politicians who will fight for reform, but recent drawings done after the 2020 census do not add to my optimism.

I can’t help wondering why, in this age of oh-so-smart computers, we cannot put the decisions for districts in the hands of a randomizing machine. How is it possible that we allow humans in power, humans keen to keep power in an increasingly polarized country, to make these decisions that clearly affect them and their personal hold on power?

Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Fosters Daily Democrat: Redrawing voting districts reveals a lot about ourselves