March 11, 2017

A District Court Just Ruled That Texas Gerrymandering Violated the Voting Rights Act

The long-awaited ruling dropped Friday night.


Good evening!

The case in question was originally filed in 2011 and charged that the congressional redistricting that happened after the 2010 census in Texas had been intentionally designed to dilute and diminish the votes of minorities.

And guess what?

Good news!

Tonight, in a 2-1 decision the US District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that, indeed, the boundaries of certain districts in the Lone Star State do violate both the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.

“If this stands at the Supreme Court,” Rick Hasen writes at ElectionLawBlog, “it could lead to the creation of more Texas minority opportunity districts.”

If you don;t have any plans tonight, you can read the 200 page opinion here:

 

 

And the 450 page finding of facts here:

 

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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