Comments on: Decatur City Commission Compelled to Look at Creating Five Voting Distrists

By: james

james — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:56:52 +0000

you are correct, this type of gerrymandering was what the voting rights act was meant to remedy.

By: karass

karass — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:48:43 +0000

My understanding is that gerrymandering used to be done to ensure that blacks would not have a majority vote anywhere. So let’s say that a 1 mile square area was 90% black residents. Instead of the whole 1 mile square being included in a single district, where blacks would now make up 60% of the residents, it would be divided into quarters with each quarter going to a larger neighboring mostly-white district, resulting in four districts in which blacks might make up only 30-40% of the district. So legislation (VRA?) was passed to try to ensure that a mostly-minority area got to retain the power of its numbers in the voting process, rather than being diluted out by creative districting.

Don’t know the numbers well enough to know if diluting out the voting power of mostly black neighborhoods is still a risk with city redistricting. If it were, according the map above, the two communities at risk would be the very southern quarter of the city or the DHA homes area.

By: james

james — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:54:33 +0000

“I find it at least troubling, and maybe just plain insulting, to have legislation underpinned by the assumption that a group (racial or otherwise) will vote “together.””

—-

It’s not an “assumption,” its a statistical fact. The point of the legislation is to prevent minority voters from being unrepresented by their governments. And historically it has been very helpful toward increasing peoples’ access to their governments. That is an underpinning of democracy.

By: james

james — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:48:30 +0000

The “point” is that the Voting Rights Act does, in effect, require governments to “consider race” when drawing voting districts. So if a particular districting map results dilutes the minority vote by, for example, having two white-majority districts in a 50/50 county, the Justice Department won’t approve it. Districts need to be drawn so that the number of black to white representatives is proportionate to black to white demographic of the city.

It only applies to a number of states that were targeted by the Voting Rights Act for being, lets say, historically not so nice to black folks, including Georgia.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:27:19 +0000

Ah, I am far from being an expert! Why, I’m not even a lawyer!

But here are two great resources: Brennan Center’s Guide to Redistricting http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/a_citizens_guide_to_redistricting_2010_edition/

and a short guide to the VRA:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/05/973462/-Short-Guide-to-the-VRA

The latter with due apologies to “Token Republican”!