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      This is what gerrymandering looks like | The fight to vote

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      This is what gerrymandering looks likeWe zoomed in on four districts that provide some of the clearest examples of how US politicians are locking in election results for the next decade Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon on the Guardian’s visual team asked to do something that I thought would be exceedingly difficult: could we show what gerrymandering looks like to our readers?While there’s a growing awareness of how gerrymandering “debased” American democracy, in the words of supreme court justice Elena Kagan, articulating exactly how it works can be extremely difficult. The boundaries that make up our political districts are invisible, so when politicians move them every 10 years, voters don’t feel it in their everyday lives. Looking at gerrymandered districts can feel like you’re just looking at a bunch of squiggly lines (trust me, I’ve been there).Over the last few weeks, Andrew put together four maps that overcome this problem. And the final product is, I believe, the best visualization of how gerrymandering works that I’ve seen to date.We zoomed in on four districts – two in North Carolina and two in Texas – that provide some of the clearest examples of how politicians are gerrymandering this cycle. Using the 2020 election results and demographic data, we showed how politicians are transforming districts to virtually lock in election results for the next decade.Just take a look at what happened to the sixth congressional district in the north-central part of North Carolina. It’s currently represented by Democrat Kate Manning, and Joe Biden won the district by 24 points in 2020, a sign that it’s a heavily Democratic area. But when Republicans in the state legislature drew the new lines, they cracked the district into four pieces. The Democratic voters in the sixth district were tossed into four districts that strongly favor the GOP, ensuring Republicans will have a powerful advantage in elections for years to come.All four districts we focused on were drawn by Republicans, who have an immense advantage across the country in drawing district lines this year. But where Democrats do have the upper hand, in places like Oregon and Illinois, they’ve shown a willingness to gerrymander as well.Amid the complexity of redistricting, there’s an important, and often ugly, story about how voters are grouped based on race. In north-eastern North Carolina, for example, we showed how Republicans lowered the share of Black voters in a district, probably making it harder for Black voters there to elect the candidate of their choice. GK Butterfield, a Black Democrat who has represented the district since 2004, is now likely to announce his retirement this week. While courts have historically protected the ability of Black voters to elect the candidate in their choice in the district, that’s now in jeopardy.“I’m fairly certain that this district, if GK were to retire, would be a district that Black voters don’t have the opportunity any longer to elect their candidates of choice,” Allison Riggs, a prominent voting rights attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in North Carolina, told me last week.We also showed how Hispanic voters in the Democratic-leaning suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth are being tossed into a largely rural district where Republicans dominate.Civil rights groups are bringing a flood of lawsuits to challenge these maps. But they face a huge uphill battle. In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts can’t address partisan gerrymandering. And while plaintiffs can challenge discriminatory maps on different grounds, those suits can take years to resolve in court, enabling politicians to hold several elections using discriminatory maps.Reader questionsRobert writes: With all the talk about eliminating the filibuster, what do you suppose is going to happen to it if Republicans once again achieve a solid majority as now appears likely? Just sayin’.This is a concern that some Democrats who defend the filibuster share. But those who support getting rid of the rule point out that Republicans have distorted the filibuster from a tool that is supposed to forge compromise to one that prevents the majority party from governing at all. And I think there’s also a belief that Republicans might be willing to do away with the filibuster when they get back into the majority, regardless of what Democrats do.Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.Also worth watching …
      Ohio Republicans were so secretive in drawing new gerrymandered state legislative maps that they shut out members of their own party. Now, they’re pushing ahead with drawing a gerrymandered congressional map.
      Georgia Republicans unveiled a new congressional map that heavily favors the GOP.
      Civil rights groups have filed a challenge to Texas’s new electoral maps.
      TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans are ‘cracking and packing’ voters to secure minority rule | David Daley

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      Republicans are ‘cracking and packing’ voters to secure minority ruleDavid DaleyThis partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade – if not longer Salt Lake is the largest county in Utah, containing not only the state’s capital, Salt Lake City, but 40% of the state’s population. While Donald Trump carried the safely conservative state, Joe Biden defeated him in Salt Lake county, soundly, by 53% to 42.1%. Two different Democrats have captured a competitive congressional seat there over the last decade, most recently Ben McAdams, who defeated the incumbent Mia Love by fewer than 700 votes in 2018, then lost by less than a percentage point to Burgess Owens in 2020.Don’t expect a tight rematch next year. Utah’s new congressional map, approved by the state legislature this week, divides Salt Lake county into four pieces, attaching pieces to conservative rural counties hundreds of miles away. It ignores the recommendation of an independent commission established by initiative in 2018, and scatters voters here across four districts so uncompetitive and safely Republican that the non-partisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project graded it an F.It’s a similar story in Oklahoma, where the new Republican map cracks Oklahoma City into three different congressional districts, dismantling the competitive fifth district – captured in 2018 by a Democrat, Kendra Horn – and ensuring a big Republican advantage for every seat. The cartography needed to be more creative in New Hampshire, where Republicans took two competitive districts that have largely elected Democrats over the last 15 years and guaranteed themselves one by moving 75 towns and 365,000 people into a new district.The quiet evisceration of the few remaining competitive seats in conservative-leaning states has flown under the radar compared with greedier Republican gerrymanders in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, where the estimated net of seven to 10 Republican seats would be enough to flip the US House of Representatives in 2022 and perhaps keep it in Republican hands for the next decade.Yet Republicans could reinforce their primacy through 2031 – and cut off an important road that helped Democrats retake the House in 2018 – by turning battleground seats into safe strongholds not only in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City, but with creative cracking and packing of Democratic voters in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Little Rock, Omaha, Louisville, Nashville, Kansas City and Spartanburg.Nebraska’s second congressional district, for example, one of just 16 remaining “crossover” districts where the vote for the US House and president diverged, becomes slightly more Trumpy, trading suburbs close to Omaha for rural counties to the west. This district has national implications, as it is one of two nationwide that award presidential electors. The subtle shift matters; Biden carried this district by fewer than 23,000 votes.In Indiana’s fifth, Republicans locked in a map giving them a 7-2 advantage by shifting Democratic suburbs in Marion county into an adjacent Democratic district – packing the liberal voters into a single Indianapolis district. By reworking that seat, the Republican party pinned Democrats into two overwhelmingly Democratic districts, eliminated the last competitive seat that might have become closer over the next decade, and assured themselves 78% of the seats in a state Trump won in 2020 with 57%.​In Arkansas, where the new congressional map divides Black neighborhoods in Little Rock across multiple districts to ensure a partisan edge for Republicans, the Republican governor found the racial gerrymander so distasteful that he refused to sign it. (It became law anyway, without his signature.)Kansas has not yet introduced a new congressional map, but during the 2020 campaign, the state senate president vowed to gerrymander the state’s single Democratic member of Congress out of office if Republicans won a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature. They did.South Carolina, meanwhile, has slow-walked new maps and pushed the process into next year, most likely to narrow the window for litigation challenging the plan. Republicans are expected to reinforce the first district seat, won by a Democrat in 2018 by 4,000 votes, and then recaptured by the Republican challenger in 2020 by 5,500 votes.Democrats have done some gerrymanders of their own this cycle. It’s just that Republicans are better equipped to make gains. Oregon Democrats claimed the state’s new seat for themselves; that pickup will be mitigated by a new conservative seat nabbed by Republicans in Montana. Illinois Democrats added one liberal seat and eliminated a conservative seat; Ohio Republicans did the opposite move. Democrats might make a move on the last conservative seat in Maryland and look to gain two or three seats in New York; but that only counters Republican pickups in North Carolina – where new Republican maps will require Democrats to win by seven percentage points to have a shot at even half of the 14 congressional seats.The maps offer no additional gains for Democrats. Republicans still net seats in Texas, Georgia, Florida, New Hampshire and Kansas, in addition to likely gains in Tennessee and Kentucky, and sandbagging competitive seats in Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Carolina and Indiana. It shrinks the map dangerously for Democrats, at a time when Republicans need to win only five seats to capture the House. And it portends a future in which an election similar to 2020 – in which Democratic US House candidates won 4.6m more votes than Republicans – could place the House under Republican rule regardless of the people’s will.This partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade, if not longer. Much of it was made possible by the gerrymanders of a decade ago, still providing Republican advantages in states like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been enabled by the US supreme court, which closed the federal courthouses to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019 and gave lawmakers a green light for ever more egregious redistricting schemes. These maps have been enacted by Republicans at the same time that they have blockaded congressional action on democracy reform and the Freedom to Vote Act that would end this anti-democratic behavior by all sides. And all of this could hasten a constitutional crisis in 2024 if a gerrymandered US House and gerrymandered state legislatures refuse to certify electors, or send multiple slates of electors, to Congress.When Utah’s governor refused entreaties to veto his state’s gerrymandered congressional maps, which effectively preclude competitive elections until at least 2032, he told voters that they should simply elect people who might be interested in fair maps next time around. Easy, right? Only how are they supposed to do that when the current legislators control the maps and draw themselves every advantage?Republican legislators are barricading themselves into castles of power and pulling up the drawbridge. It’s close to checkmate. Voters are running out of avenues – and time – to do anything to stop it.
      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
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      Brad Raffensperger: ‘I haven’t talked to Trump. I don’t expect that’ll happen’

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      The fight to voteGeorgiaBrad Raffensperger: ‘I haven’t talked to Trump. I don’t expect that’ll happen’ Georgia’s top election official was pressured by Trump to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory. What does he think about it now?The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 11 Nov 2021 05.00 ESTLast modified on Thu 11 Nov 2021 10.21 ESTBrad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, was sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife, Tricia, in early January, his cell phone on a metal stand so he could take notes. On the other line was Donald Trump, who had lost Georgia to Joe Biden in November, a result confirmed by multiple recounts.The president had a blunt and unimaginable request for Raffensperger: find enough votes to flip the results of the election in Georgia.Raffensperger, a mild-mannered engineer by training, refused to go along with the president’s request, but saw it as a threat, he writes in his new book Integrity Counts.He and his family have since been subject to a barrage of harassment, including death threats, from Trump and his supporters. Republicans in the Georgia state legislature have stripped him of his role as the chair of the state election board. Now, he’s running for re-election next year in what is expected to be an extremely difficult primary for him, in a field that includes at least one candidate, endorsed by Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.The Guardian spoke to Raffensperger about the January phone call with Trump, threats to election officials, and whether he thinks there’s a place in the Republican party today for officials who resist attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.Have you talked to Trump since that January call? Do you expect to ever talk to him again?No, I haven’t talked to him, and don’t expect that’ll happen in the future.Were you scared in the moment of [the phone call]? You have the president of the United States, the leader of your party, in a very heated environment in the days after the election, pressuring you to do something that could affect whether he serves another term. And did you ever doubt yourself in what you were doing?I wanted to make sure that we had all the facts. That we weren’t missing something. Our team was continuously asked by me: “What about this? What about that?” And so we ran down every single allegation. Then I sent a letter to Congress, it’s a 10-page letter, which I put in the book – they got it on 6 January and I know they were busy with other things. But it really goes through, point by point, every single allegation that was made.I understand my side is grieving and has difficulty understanding this, but 28,000 people, 28,000 Georgians, did not vote for anyone for president. They skipped that and yet they voted down-ballot. And when I give those three data points to Republicans it starts to really dawn on them, they start to understand that there was [tail-off] at the top of the ticket.But people are still talking about the ballots that were stuffed in the suitcase and whatever else. People don’t seem to be persuaded by facts.I think that everyone is best served when they have intellectual honesty. And to get intellectual honesty you have to have intellectual curiosity. That you actually want to uncover the facts and have the courage to actually look into it and maybe have your paradigm shifted and challenged because what you’ve been told has been wrong.At some point, I know that if I was lied to by all these people, and they know that they’ve been lying to people, I think that they may rise up in anger and really understand that they’ve been played.Does it worry you to see the Republican party flirting with these claims, and in some cases not disavowing them and even embracing them?Well, let’s be fair and balanced. It bothers me that both parties are doing that. Because Stacey Abrams was in Virginia less than three weeks ago, and she said “just because you win doesn’t mean you’ve won”. Her narrative of voter suppression has been parroted by many people, from Hillary Clinton to many other notable national figures. (Note: Abrams has strongly repudiated attempts by Raffensperger and others to equate her decision not to concede Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.)So it’s actually both sides are guilty of this. And both sides need to pull back, stop, and walk that line of integrity. When you walk that line of integrity, then you can start rebuilding trust.Are you continuing to get threats?Every once in a while, now that the book’s out, you get a text or a voicemail. It’s people that really don’t want to know the truth and don’t want to dig into the truth. I understand where they’re coming from. They’re not happy with losing an election. They’re not happy with the direction of the country and they’re not pleased probably with President Biden. There’s a lot that’s happened in the last year under his leadership that is very disappointing and alarming.Are you concerned about experienced election officials leaving their jobs?I’m concerned that we have seen in Georgia, probably less than a handful of county election directors leave, retire a little bit early.And so you hate to see that happen. And you just hope they’ll have a team in place that’ll pick up that mantle and lead with strong leadership.I wanted to ask you a little bit about the provisions of Georgia’s new election law that dealt with your authority specifically on the state elections board. How concerned are you about efforts to give legislatures in Georgia and elsewhere more control over the bodies like the state elections board and election administration?I’ve always believed that these boards should be held accountable to the voters.If you look in Georgia, the state elections board chair has always been an elected position. And so for that reason alone, I don’t believe it was wise. I believe in some point in the future, they’ll regret the decision they made. But it was made with the thought of payback, petty retribution, blame-shifting, to placate people looking for, you know, a head on a platter.So you’re still very opposed to it?Well it’s bad policy. I don’t support bad policy.You’re in a competitive primary with at least one opponent who has voiced serious doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. How concerned are you that someone could get into power that gets a call from the president or someone else and is willing to go along with the kind of thing that you weren’t willing to go along with in 2020?I believe that Americans overwhelmingly are good, honest, people. And they’re looking for honest government. And they’re looking for people that will stand in the gap and do the right thing. And I’ve shown that I will make the tough calls to make sure that we follow the constitution, we follow state law.I talk to Republicans. I talk to a lot of them. And yes I get dog-cussed by a few. But many Republicans support what I did. They’re disappointed in the results. They wish that the president would have won. That runs the whole gamut. But people recognize that when people do what is right, even when it can appear to be difficult, that that is really something that should be modeled and esteemed.I’m curious what message you think it would send if people didn’t vote for that. If what you did in 2020 wound up costing you the election next year, what message would that send?Well, people have to decide individually and corporately what they want our country to look like. And I think that Americans, as I said, the vast majority are good, honest, taxpaying, law-abiding Americans. And what they want is people who will make the right decision.TopicsGeorgiaThe fight to voteUS elections 2020US politicsUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      DoJ sues Texas over new voting law, saying restrictions violate civil rights

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      Biden administrationDoJ sues Texas over new voting law, saying restrictions violate civil rightsSuit takes aim at two specific provisions that deal with providing assistance to voters at the polls and mail-in voting Sam Levine in New YorkThu 4 Nov 2021 17.56 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 20.54 EDTThe Biden administration filed a federal lawsuit challenging Texas’s new voting law on Thursday, saying some of the state’s new restrictions violate key civil rights laws.The suit takes aim at two specific provisions in the Texas law that deal with providing assistance to voters at the polls and mail-in voting, respectively.The first measure restricts the kind of assistance people can provide at the polls to voters, blocking them from explaining how voting works or breaking down complex language on the ballot.Senate Democrats poised for voting rights push to counter Republican restrictionsRead moreThat violates a provision of the Voting Rights Act that guarantees that anyone who requires assistance because of “blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” can receive assistance, the Department of Justice said.“Prohibiting assistors from answering voters’ questions, responding to requests to clarify ballot translations, and confirming that voters with visual impairments have marked a ballot as intended will curtail fundamental voting rights without advancing any legitimate state interest,” DoJ lawyers wrote in their complaint.The complaint targets a second provision that requires voters to provide identification information on mail-in ballot applications as well as the ballot return envelopes.The new Texas law says that election workers have to reject the ballots if there are discrepancies in the identification provided.The justice department said that violates a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that says someone can’t be blocked from voting because of an error on a paper or record that is unrelated to their qualifications under state law to vote.“Conditioning the right to cast a mail ballot on a voter’s ability to recall and recite the identification number provided on an application for voter registration months or years before will curtail fundamental voting rights without advancing any legitimate state interest,” the complaint says.“Laws that impair eligible citizens’ access to the ballot box have no place in our democracy. Texas Senate Bill 1’s restrictions on voter assistance at the polls and on which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible,” Kristen Clarke, the head of the Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement announcing the suit.“Texas leaders must be held accountable for their blatant abuse of power in a shameless attempt to keep themselves in power,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic party.The lawsuit comes as Joe Biden faces mounting pressure to enact federal legislation to protect voting rights.Republicans have successfully used the filibuster four times this year to block voting rights bills in the US Senate.The most recent filibuster came on Wednesday, when Republicans blocked a bill that would have restored a key part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with repeated evidence of voting discrimination, including Texas, to pre-clear voting laws with the federal government before they go into effect.Nineteen states have passed 33 laws this year restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This is the second major voting rights suit Biden’s DoJ has filed this year. It sued Georgia over its sweeping new voting restrictions in June.Many of the laws are widely understood as an effort to make it harder for minority populations and low-income people to vote.Texas Republicans say the changes provide safeguards against voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare.“Biden is coming after Texas for SB1, our recently enacted election integrity law,” tweeted Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. “It’s a great and a much-needed bill. Ensuring Texas has safe, secure, and transparent elections is a top priority of mine. I will see you in court, Biden!”The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsBiden administrationUS politicsTexasUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      Senate Republicans again block key voting rights bill

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      The fight to voteUS voting rightsSenate Republicans again block key voting rights bill John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act blocked in SenateBill’s failure likely to increase calls to end contentious filibuster The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkWed 3 Nov 2021 16.10 EDTFirst published on Wed 3 Nov 2021 15.27 EDTRepublicans in the US Senate again blocked a significant voting rights bill from advancing on Wednesday, a move many see as a breaking point in the push to get rid of the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation.Democrats suffer disastrous night in Virginia and a tight race in New Jersey – liveRead moreThe bill – the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – is one of two major pieces of voting rights legislation Democrats are championing in Congress in an effort to fend off attempts across the US by Republicans to erode easy access to the vote. Those efforts often most affect communities of color.The measure, approved by the US House in August, would have implemented a formula at the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required certain places, where there was repeated evidence of voting discrimination over the last 25 years, to get any voting changes pre-cleared by the federal government.The US supreme court struck down a previous version of the formula in 2013, saying it was outdated, a widely criticized ruling that civil rights groups say opened the door to voting discrimination.There was never any serious prospect of the bill passing – only one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, supported it. The vote in the Senate was 50-49 in favor of advancing the bill.But Wednesday’s vote was targeted towards Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who supports the filibuster, showing him that passing voting rights legislation is not possible while the filibuster remains in place.Many Democrats hope it will be the final straw for Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, who is also a staunch defender of the filibuster. Republicans have successfully filibustered voting rights bill three times already this year, including once just two weeks ago.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said Wednesday’s filibuster was a “low, low point in the history of this body”.He continued to suggest Democrats would consider options for getting rid of the filibuster, saying they would “explore whatever path” was needed to restore the Senate to its status as a deliberative body. He said the gears of Congress’s upper chamber had “ossified” and that Democrats were committed to continuing to push forward on voting rights “even if it means going at it alone”.Nineteen states enacted nearly three dozen laws that make it harder to vote between January and the end of September, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. While the John Lewis bill would not necessarily have blocked all of them, it would have required some states, including Florida, Georgia and Texas, to get their policies reviewed before they were implemented.“For the fourth time this year, Republicans have filibustered federal voting rights legislation. Whether it’s the original version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the substitute amendment backed by Senator Murkowski, or other good faith legislative efforts to forge compromise and deliver on federal voting rights legislation, it’s crystal clear that Senator Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans will weaponize the filibuster to block progress,” said Eli Zupnik, a spokesman for Fix Our Senate, which supports getting rid of the filibuster. “Our question now to President Biden and Senate Democrats is this: what are you going to do about it?” .There is increasing urgency for Democrats to pass both the John Lewis measure and the Freedom to Vote Act, the other major voting rights legislation that aims to outlaw excessive partisan gerrymandering and would require early voting, no-excuse mail-in voting, as well as automatic and same-day registration.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterState lawmakers are quickly passing new electoral districts that weaken the votes of minority voters and are distorted to lock in partisan advantages for the next decade. Democrats are also largely expected to lose control of the US House of Representatives next November.Democrats have already started to escalate the pressure.Joe Biden gave a strong public endorsement of changing the rule last month for voting rights legislation “and maybe more”. But it’s unclear whether Manchin and Sinema, who have largely stymied Democratic ambitions in Congress so far, will budge. Manchin has indicated he does not support a filibuster carve out for voting rights legislation.Civil rights groups have been pressing Democrats for months to get rid of the filibuster to pass voting reforms, publicly voicing their frustration that the White House isn’t putting enough political muscle behind the issue. Dozens of activists, including the son of Martin Luther King Jr were arrested outside the White House demonstrating ahead of the vote on Wednesday.“Don’t take the Black vote for granted. Don’t torpedo our democracy. Our future depends on the restoration of voting rights for all,” said Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP. “Those who made campaign promises to the Black community must use any means possible to ensure that this Congress gets it done. The urgency of this issue cannot be overstated. We are watching.”“We have had moments of bipartisanship on voting rights in our nation’s history, but sadly, this is not one of them. The only way to protect the freedom to vote is to end the filibuster,” said Sean Eldridge, the president of Stand Up America, and one of the people arrested on Wednesday.“The King family and civil rights leaders from across the country came to the White House today because President Biden has the largest soapbox on the planet, and we’re asking him to use it to protect voting rights before it’s too late.”TopicsUS voting rightsThe fight to voteUS politicsUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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      How Texas Republicans are rigging the system against minority voters | The fight to vote

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      Fight to voteTexasHow Texas Republicans are rigging the system against minority votersRepublicans currently have a 23-13 advantage over Democrats, and the new map gives them a good chance to pick up two extra seats – what might happen next? The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 28 Oct 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 Oct 2021 10.01 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHello Fight to vote readers,You don’t have to be an expert to see why Texas’ new maps for its state legislature and congress discriminate against minority voters. Ninety-five per cent of the state’s growth over the last decade has been driven by minorities. But the new maps Texas enacted don’t include a single new district where there is a Hispanic majority.It’s an astounding fact that underscores how powerfully Texas Republicans have wielded the control they have over the once-a-decade redistricting process.Republicans currently have a 23-13 advantage over Democrats in the congressional delegation, and the new map gives them a good chance to pick up the two extra seats.The boundaries of several of the congressional districts Donald Trump barely won in 2020 have become safe GOP seats. I wrote about one of those districts, the 22nd congressional district a few weeks ago. The new map transforms it from one Trump won by about 1 percentage point in 2020 to one he would have carried by 16 points.A few days before the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, approved the maps, I spoke with Nina Perales, a lawyer at the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (Maldef), who filed the first of two lawsuits challenging the maps, and who is one of the most widely respected redistricting attorneys in the country. I asked her to walk me through how exactly Texas Republicans had gone about entrenching control and what might happen next.“These maps are intended to protect incumbents against the effects of demographic change,” said Perales, who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “They’re also maps to kind of protect white voters and the power of white voters at the expense of clearly Latino voters, because Latinos are the large demographic that’s growing very quickly.”Of the two new seats, “one is made into a white majority Republican seat. And the other one is made into a white-majority Democratic seat. So white people win and people of color don’t get anything,” she added.Texas has a long history of discriminating against minority voters in redistricting – courts have struck down districts in every redistricting cycle since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965. For years a key provision of the act required Texas to get its maps pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect. But the US supreme court gutted that provision in 2013. That means this year will be the first time since 1965 that Texas won’t have to get its maps pre-cleared before they go into effect.That puts Perales and other people challenging the maps at a huge disadvantage. One reason is that the burden now falls on those who challenge the map to demonstrate why districts are discriminatory. Before, the burden was on Texas to show why the maps didn’t discriminate.“Essentially, we have to prove race discrimination. That’s very hard to prove. The working assumption is always going to be that the state did not discriminate. And it’s our burden to establish that the state did discriminate. And courts are just very, very reluctant to accept the idea that a state actor has discriminated on the basis of race, even unintentionally.”The new Texas districts should be the poster child that show why pre-clearance is still needed, Perales said. Given clear evidence of recent discrimination in redistricting, Texas should have a burden to show why the new plans don’t discriminate, Perales said.Yet as they were drawing the districts, Republicans were already building a shield against claims that the maps were drawn with race in mind. “I’ve stated it, and I’ll state it again – we drew these maps race blind,” Joan Huffman, the GOP state senator, who oversaw the redistricting process in her chamber said during a public hearing.Perales said that kind of claim was “a lie”.“Do you think she was blind to the fact that the Rio Grande Valley is heavily Hispanic? Or the border region is heavily Hispanic? Do you think the historic wards of Houston, historic Black neighborhoods, that she’s somehow unaware of those things? It’s just not true,” she said.When she testified at one of the legislature’s redistricting hearings, Perales urged lawmakers not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Afterwards she realized she had said something nearly identical during the redistricting cycle 10 years ago.“I feel almost cursed,” she said. “I go to these hearings. I tell them about the cases that they’ve lost. I tell them not to repeat the mistakes. I tell them the plans are likely illegal. And they go ahead and do it anyway.”Reader questionsThank you to everyone who wrote in last week with questions. You can continue to write to me each week at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try and answer as many as I can.Andy in Washington writes: Are there mechanisms that can be put into place to help reduce lawsuits (such as those impacting election law) that have no sound basis before they drag through the courts? Asking this because we all watched as the Trump team put the legal system to task claiming election fraud, and lost over 50 of these cases. It was clear to most rational people what was going on, yet our legal system allowed this continuance of abuse of power to great detriment.Yes, there are mechanisms in place that are supposed to hold bad-faith actors accountable in the legal system.In August, a federal judge in Detroit sanctioned Sidney Powell and L Lin Wood, two attorneys involved in several of Trump’s post-election suits, for making bad-faith arguments. Powell and Wood were ordered to take legal education classes and pay attorneys fees to the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. Rudy Giuliani also had his law license suspended in New York and Washington DC for spreading election lies.TopicsTexasFight to voteUS voting rightsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We need him to deliver’: Biden faces wrath of disappointed supporters

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      Joe Biden‘We need him to deliver’: Biden faces wrath of disappointed supporters The US president hopes to be a transformational figure like FDR but inaction on voting rights, the climate crisis and social policy has fuelled frustrationDavid Smith in Washington@smithinamericaSat 23 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 23 Oct 2021 02.07 EDTWhen Joe Biden huddled with a group of historians in March, the conversation revolved around thinking big like one of his predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal. Biden, it seemed, wanted to join him in the first rank of transformational US presidents.Six months later, a very different gathering took place this week outside the White House gates. Five young climate activists, holding signs and sitting on folding chairs, began an indefinite hunger strike. It was a visceral expression of disgust at what they see as Biden’s willingness to think small and break his promises.Biden gives strongest signal he’s ready to move to end Senate filibusterRead more“Young people turned out in record numbers to elect him on his climate commitments,” said Nikayla Jefferson, 24, an activist helping the quietly determined hunger strikers on the edge of Lafayette Park. “But over this past month he’s almost given up. He’s not being a leader in this moment in the way that we need him to deliver.”A growing sense of betrayal is shared by campaigners for everything from gun rights to immigration reform, from racial justice to voting rights, who saw Democrats’ governing majority as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Instead party infighting has put Biden’s agenda in jeopardy and could result in voter disillusionment in next year’s midterm elections.The 46th president came into office promising to attack four crises – coronavirus, climate, economy and racial justice – but has seen his approval rating sink to 42% after colliding with some harsh political and economic realities.These include tepid jobs growth, labour strikes, rising inflation and petrol prices, logjams in the global supply chain, a record number of arrests at the US-Mexico border and a botched withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan that raised unexpected questions about his competence.Even routine business, such as appointing an ambassador to Japan, appears to have become jinxed: Biden’s choice for Tokyo, Rahm Emanuel, provoked a backlash from liberals because of his record on racial justice as mayor of Chicago.Worries that Biden has lost his way have been intensified by his failure to hold an open-to-all press conference since taking office in January. In that time he has done only 10 one-on-one interviews – far fewer than Barack Obama or Donald Trump at the same stage.But the biggest sense of a stalled presidency derives from seemingly interminable wrangling among congressional Democrats over Biden’s $1tn physical infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion social and environmental package.Two senators in particular, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have demanded cuts to the reconciliation package, prompting public acrimony with Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives that has come to dominate Washington and crowd out other urgent causes.Biden’s proud march into the history books appears to have descended into internal party mudslinging.Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator for Oregon, told the Meet the Press Daily programme on the MSNBC network: “It’s completely taking the air out of the balloon for the Biden presidency. It’s hurting Biden. It’s hurting the Democrats. It’s undermining the vision of all the accomplishments we will have as being highly significant.”With his legislative agenda in limbo if not peril, Biden was this week forced to step in, host both factions at the White House and take a more aggressive role. This gave some Democrats fresh hope of a breakthrough but indicated that he will pare down the $3.5tn package in favor of a more modest proposal, threatening a clean electricity programme that was the centerpiece of his climate strategy.It also underlined concerns that Biden is yielding to corporate interests on fossil fuels, prescription drug prices and tax increases. Critics say he has become so consumed with the grind of policy sausage-making that he has lost sight of big picture issues dear to his supporters.Among them is the fate of democracy itself.Last week Senate Republicans deployed a procedural rule known as the filibuster to block, for the second time, debate on sweeping reforms that would protect the right to vote. Activists who knocked on doors and raised funds for Biden warn that his failure to prioritize the issue above all others could prove his biggest regret.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “Do I believe that he’s against voter suppression? Absolutely. Do I think that he supports voting rights? Absolutely. Do I believe that he is willing to use the full power of his office and his administration to ensure that voters that voted for him are not punished for voting for him? That’s yet to be seen.”In a CNN town hall on Thursday night, Biden signaled support for filibuster reform. But he should have pushed the cause earlier and more forcefully, Brown argues.“When you fight for those that fight for you, you go in the midterms with an advantage. I think they squandered that with choosing the wrong strategy. They miscalculated. Black folks may not have another real, viable party option but we always have options,” she said.Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, a leading civil organization, described the White House’s passivity about safeguarding democracy as “appalling”. He told the Washington Post: “I have heard from many of my colleagues and members that the lack of priority around voting rights will be the undoing of the legacy for this presidency.”Disenchantment was evident again last weekend when dozens of advocates for immigration reform staged a virtual walkout on administration officials during a video meeting. They are critical of Biden’s continuation of Trump-era border policies such as forcing migrants to wait in Mexico pending asylum hearings and deploying a public health order known as Title 42 to expel migrants at the border over concerns about Covid-19.Ariana Saludares, an advocate from the New Mexico-based community organization Colores United, who took part in the walkout, said: “Title 42 is a sham. Politicians, including the current administration, use it to explain that those coming across the borders have higher rates of infection. We have the numbers from our shelters along the borders to show that that is absolutely false.”Speaking by phone from Puerto Palomas, a small border town in Mexico suffering water shortages, Saludares asked: “Where is Joe Biden? Where is Kamala Harris? Where are all of these things they said that they would be able to provide us with after such a ‘horrible period’. And now what? It leaves a lot of people wondering what actually are they doing?”The disappointment of grassroots activists spells trouble for Democrats ahead of midterm elections for the House of Representatives and Senate that historically tend to favour the party that does not hold the White House. Ominously seven House Democrats have announced they will retire rather than run for re-election, with another five seeking other elected office.Democrats fear a replay of 2010, when the tortuous but ultimately successful passage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act did not prevent a crushing defeat in the midterms. And looming in the distance is Trump, who seems likely to run for president again in 2024, a prospect that fills many observers with dread for the future of American democracy.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “This is obviously a delicate moment in the Biden presidency. Right now the Biden agenda is the equivalent of airplanes in a kind of a crush, circling above an airport that doesn’t have enough runways to accommodate all of them simultaneously.“Things will look different once some of the planes begin to land and I do expect that the infrastructure bill and a pared-down reconciliation bill will in fact be enacted into law well before the end of the year. That will change the mood to some extent. The situation is not quite as bad as it looks – but it’s bad enough.”But not everyone is doom and gloom. Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, was more upbeat. “I feel cautiously optimistic,” he said. “Joe Biden has demonstrated over time his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking. He’s also demonstrated that when people count him out, he always teaches them that they do not know how to count.“When the ink dries about the story of this piece of history, you’re going to see that as the continued theme when it comes to Joe Biden. I believe we’re right where we need to be. Mike Tyson has a quote, ‘The key to being successful is peaking at the right time,’ and I think Joe Biden will in the end do just that.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratsUS domestic policyUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022featuresReuse this content More

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      Republicans blocked a voting rights bill again – are Democrats out of options? | The fight to vote

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      Fight to voteUS voting rightsRepublicans blocked a key voting rights bill. Are Democrats out of options?No one is surprised by the Republican effort to block the measure – but the higher-stakes fight is what Democrats do next with the filibuster The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 21 Oct 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 21 Oct 2021 10.02 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHello, and happy Thursday,Senate Republicans on Wednesday again blocked Democrats from advancing sweeping federal voting rights legislation, escalating one of the most important fights for the future of US democracy.The bill failed to advance on a 49-51 party-line vote (Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, changed his vote at the last minute in a procedural maneuver that will allow him to bring it up again). It would have required states to automatically register voters when they interact with motor vehicle agencies, offer two weeks of early voting, allow anyone to request a mail-in ballot, and outlaw the severe manipulation of electoral districts, a practice called gerrymandering.No one was particularly surprised by the Republican effort to block the measure – they already blocked an earlier version of the bill two times this year. But the higher-stakes fight is what Democrats do next with the filibuster, a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation. Republicans are using the provision to prevent a vote on the bill.“What we saw from Republicans today is not how the Senate is supposed to work,” Schumer said after the vote.Democrats have been calling to get rid of the filibuster, arguing that the rule, once envisioned as a tool to bring compromise, had turned into a GOP weapon of obstruction. Now, all eyes will be on two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two of the staunchest supporters of keeping the filibuster. If Democrats were to get rid of the rule, they could advance the voting rights bill with a majority vote.A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I was optimistic that this vote could be a crucial turning point for Manchin. After Republicans blocked a more expansive voting rights bill earlier this year, Manchin reportedly made efforts to get GOP support for the measure. Republican recalcitrance in the face of those good-faith efforts could push Manchin to open up to changing the filibuster rules. I still think that Manchin would not have put so much effort into the revised measure if he wasn’t willing to do something to get it passed.Civil rights groups and other activists are also going to be closely watching how Joe Biden responds in the aftermath of another voting rights failure. While the president strongly supports voting rights legislation, the White House has not explicitly endorsed getting rid of the filibuster. Senate Democrats would like to start debate on the Freedom to Vote Act. Senate Democrats have worked hard to ensure this bill includes traditionally bipartisan provisions. But Senate Republicans are likely to block even debate on the bill, as they have before on previous voting rights bills. “It’s unconscionable,” the president said in a statement on Wednesday.Aside from a brief comment earlier this year, the White House also has not publicly pressured Manchin and Sinema around the voting rights bills. That has infuriated some activists, who feel that the White House is not putting enough political muscle behind pushing voting rights legislation.“You said the night you won that Black America had your back and that you were going to have Black America’s back,” the Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said at a voting rights rally in August. “Well, Mr President, they’re stabbing us in the back.”What’s next?The next few weeks are going to be some of the most critical for Democrats – and no one quite knows what will happen. After the vote, Schumer and other Democrats immediately suggested they weren’t giving up on voting rights legislation, hinting they would do away with the filibuster if necessary. Schumer also promised he would bring the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a separate bill that would restore a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act, up for a vote next week. Another filibuster of that would only increase pressure on Manchin and Sinema.It’s also worth watching whether the White House escalates public pressure on Manchin and Sinema after the repeated filibusters – something it has not been willing to do.Senator Amy Klobuchar, one of the main sponsors of the bill, said in a statement on Wednesday that Democrats would not give up on the bill, hinting that changes to the filibuster were needed.“We will continue to fight. We must restore the Senate so we can work together in the way the Founders intended to take on the challenges facing our democracy,” the Minnesota Democrat said in a statement.There would be immediate, tangible consequences if Democrats were able to pass the bill. In Texas, Republicans are on the verge of implementing a new congressional map filled with district lines that are distorted to entrench the party’s control of the state for the next decade and blunt the growing power of minority voters. The bill contains a provision that would allow courts to block maps if a computer simulation shows they produced an unacceptable level of bias in two of four recent elections. The new Texas map would fail the bias test, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.On Tuesday, I spoke with Rafael Anchia, a Democrat in the Texas House who sat on the panel tasked with redrawing district lines. The previous evening, the Texas legislature gave final approval to the maps, and Anchia had been working until 3am. He described how frustrating it was to watch his Republican colleagues rush through the maps, giving the public little chance to provide feedback on the plans.“It’s pretty demoralizing, to be honest with you,” he told me. “The Senate has to act. They have to act because democracy requires it,” he added.Reader questionsThank you to everyone who wrote in last week with questions. You can continue to write to me each week at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try and answer as many as I can.John writes: Is it now time for the US to adopt the obvious system that appoints the presidential candidate who has the most popular votes?There have been growing calls to get rid of the electoral college in recent years, especially after two presidents, George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, won the presidency but lost the electoral vote. To me, it’s part of a broader recognition of how certain rules and practices – the filibuster, partisan gerrymandering – undermine America’s democratic ideals.I’m curious to see how and if the push grows ahead of the 2024 election. There is an interesting effort, bubbling in some states, to create a compact where states would agree to award their electors based on the winner of the popular vote.TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More