SCSJ represents the Texas State Conference of NAACP Branches in Texas v. United States, litigation in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia in which the state of Texas is seeking federal preclearance for its Congressional, State House and State Senate redistricting plans. The NAACP is joining with the United States Department of Justice in arguing that these plans were crafted with racially discriminatory intent and will have a retrogressive effect on minority voters.
Trial begins on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 and will conclude at the end of the following week, with closing arguments on February 3. The outcome of this trial will be key in what plan is in place for the 2012 elections conducted in Texas this fall. Texas is an incredibly diverse state, and the NAACP stands with all minority voters in resisting the state’s longstanding and egregious attempts to minimize the voting strength of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters in Texas.
Voting Rights
SCSJ in 2- Week Trial Urging the D.C. District Court to Find Texas’ Redistricting Plans Racially Discriminatory
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Judges Hear Arguments in NC Voting Maps Challenge
A three judge panel arguments challenging the legality of Voting District Maps drawn last year by the Republican -controlled legislature.
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Judge Hears Arguments in NC Voting Maps Challenge
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NC Redistricting Hearing to Focus on Speed of Case
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Advocacy groups, Democratic elected officials and voters challenging North Carolina's new redistricting plans want rulings on their legality by mid-February, but the state's lawyers argue a "rush to judgment" is unreasonable and the judicial branch is reluctant to delay the 2012 elections.
Attorneys on both sides of a pair of lawsuits filed a month ago seeking to block new Republican-penned legislative and congressional districts from taking effect have filed motions and responses in recent days. While they largely agree on consolidating the two cases into one, the attorneys are at odds over how fast the matter should be considered by a special three-judge panel. Judges on the panel announced Monday they would hear arguments Dec. 16 on the fast-track timeline and consolidation.
One lawsuit filed Nov. 3 by dozens of voters and Democratic legislators and another filed the next day by civil rights and election watchdog groups argue the maps originally approved in July are illegal for generally the same reasons. The lawsuits contend the district lines illegally cluster black voters to decrease their electoral power, cross too many county boundaries and split too many precincts, causing chaos among voters and a re-segregation of communities.
The GOP lawmakers who drew the maps have said they comply with state and federal rules and legal precedent. They point to U.S. Department of Justice attorneys declining to challenge the boundaries on the basis of certain racial discrimination grounds as proof the boundaries are lawful.
The cases are important because the GOP-drawn maps, if approved, could assist the party in winning as many as four additional congressional seats this decade and retaining their new majorities in the state House and Senate. Eddie Speas, a Raleigh lawyer representing voters and elected officials who filed one lawsuit, offered a litigation calendar to the judges that would lead to a trial on the combined lawsuits in early February. The candidate filing period begins Feb. 13.
Should a court strike down the maps later, new maps would be drawn by the Legislature or the courts. It could require a new filing period based on new boundaries and delay of the scheduled May 8 primary. Redistricting litigation delayed the 2002 and 2004 primaries. "The relief sought by the plaintiffs in this action, if granted, will substantially affect the 2012 elections process," Speas wrote in his Nov. 18 motion. A similar motion was filed by lawyers suing in the second redistricting case. "Disruption and uncertainty will be minimized if this matter can be tried and decided by this Court before the opening of the filing period," he added.
The state Attorney General's Office, defending the maps on behalf of legislative leaders and the state, offered its own plan in which there would be at least four months to collect evidence so it could respond to several hundred numbered allegations and dozens of named plaintiffs. The lawsuits, filed more than three months after the Legislature initially completed its work, could have been filed earlier, Special Deputy Attorney General Alex Peters wrote.
The scheduling "request is unprecedented, unreasonable on its face and would force the court to rush to judgment regarding the constitutionality of redistricting plans duly adopted by the General Assembly and affecting all North Carolinians," Peters wrote in a Nov. 29 response opposing the accelerated calendar. Peters said the most recent state Supreme Court ruling involving redistricting showed the justices are wary about disrupting the electoral process. The justices declined in August 2007 to direct the General Assembly to correct a few Wilmington-area districts before the May 2008 primary, he wrote.
In a response filed late last week, Speas said his timeline is not unreasonable and Peters' arguments forget that state courts blocked the 2002 primary election from going forward when the statewide legislative maps were challenged, as is being done now. Those maps were declared unconstitutional. Speas, a former general counsel to Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue, worked on behalf of the state in defending maps a decade ago with the state Attorney General's Office.
Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/12/05/1692070/nc-redistricting-hearing-...
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Early agreements on Florida redistricting favor incumbents
TALLAHASSEE - Legislators have reached their first deal in the once-a-decade redistricting battle: Senators will draw Senate maps and House members will draw House maps.
It sounds like an obvious agreement - each chamber knows its own territory better than the other - but, in practice, it means that House and Senate leaders both have a better chance of making incumbents happy.
The first proposal for Senate boundaries is a good example. It's modeled after a redistricting map submitted by the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, packs Democrats into districts to strengthen neighboring Republicans seats and gives incumbents on both sides of the aisle a good shot at re-election, a Times/Herald analysis shows.
From the Panhandle to Miami, there have been few complaints from Senate Democrats or Republicans about the proposed map.
The only trouble spots are a handful of districts that could provoke a court challenge because they might not comply with requirements of the new Fair District amendments to the Florida Constitution.
The Senate redistricting committee will discuss the map today, while the House plans to take up the NAACP plan in a workshop Thursday.
Sen. Don Gaetz, the Senate redistricting chairman and incoming president of the Senate, "has piloted the ship very, very well,'' said Sen. Jack Latvala, a Clearwater Republican whose district is shifted from southern Pinellas County northward under the Senate plan.
Both Gaetz and Latvala defended the Senate map as being in keeping with an agreement made by Republicans and Democrats last month to give top priority to the creation of minority seats.
The Senate reviewed the maps submitted by the Florida State Conference of the NAACP and then drew maps based on that plan's minority districts.
But the Democratic Party and proponents of the constitutional amendments that impose new redistricting standards say the maps protect incumbents, favor the party in power and permanently disadvantage minority voters who may not be in the protected minority seats - the opposite, they say, of what the amendments intended.
"These districts are packed,'' said Rod Smith, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. "They've created enclaves of a disproportionate number of Democrats surrounded by largely Republican, or much more bleached, districts on either side."
For example, the Senate map includes only one district - out of 40 total districts - with more than 50 percent Republicans and the NAACP map includes only two.
But there are eight districts with more than 50 percent Democrats on each map. Neither map has districts with fewer than about 26 percent registered Democrats, but some have as few as 11 percent registered Republicans in districts packed with Democrats.
One packed Democrat district, No. 33 in Miami, would be 69 percent Democratic.
The Senate map also mirrors much of the NAACP's proposal for dealing with minority districts.
The NAACP's map was submitted Nov. 3 by Timothy Stallman, a demographer with the North Carolina-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
In an email to Senate staff two days later, NAACP president Adora Obi Nweze asked that Stallman's name be removed from the map and the name of the NAACP be substituted instead. Repeated efforts to reach Nweze were unsuccessful.
According to the NAACP and Senate maps, six of the eight districts that pack Democrats are so-called minority-majority seats.
Both maps also have eight districts with between 40 and 49 percent Democrats.
The Senate map has 21 districts that are between 30 and 39 percent Democrat, while the NAACP map has 22 districts with that percentage of Democrats.
But Gaetz defends the maps as necessary to adhere to the federal Voting Rights Act, which require that minority voting strength be protected.
Smith says the Senate map "permanently gerrymanders" minorities and disenfranchises those who are not in the selected seats.
"This is going to court,'' Smith predicted.
Here are some of the hot spots:
. Republican Sen. Joe Negron's Stuart-based district would stretch along the coast east of Interstate 95, slicing through Martin and St. Lucie counties, while a Polk County-based seat, District 17, would reach over to pick up the western edges of those counties.
. Polk County and the city of Lakeland are chopped apart to include a winding district that includes the home territory of former state Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, who is hoping to replace Sen. Mike Bennett, a clear disadvantage to Galvano's expected opponent, former state Sen. Pat Neal. The map consumes the current district held by Sen. Thad Altman, R-Viera, and pushes him into a district being vacated by Senate President Mike Haridopolos.
. Most of Altman's former district would become the new District 24, which would wind from southern Orange County through Osceola and Polk counties and include a 50.5 percent Hispanic population. It is being eyed by state Rep. Darren Soto, an Orlando Democrat.
. To make room for a proposed District 24, proposed District 19 must divide the city of Orlando to take in the home territory of Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando.
. In Jacksonville, the map appears to boost the candidacy of former state Rep. Aaron Bean, who is seeking to replace Republican Sen. Steve Wise in the Senate.
. State Rep. Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, would be the beneficiary of the new District 17.
Mary Ellen Klas can be reached at meklas@MiamiHerald.com and on Twitter @MaryEllenKlas.
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Victory for the NAACP in Texas Redistricting Case
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice has been representing the Texas State Conference of Branches of the NAACP in ongoing litigation over Texas’s statewide redistricting plans. On Friday, November 25, a three-judge panel in Texas ordered the implementation of a court-drawn interim plan for Congressional elections in 2012. This plan corrects almost all of the major problems that the NAACP identified in the state’s enacted plan.
In the court-drawn plan, Congressional Districts 9, 18, and 30—districts currently electing the candidates of choice of African-American voters—are not weakened, as they were in the state’s enacted plan. The court-drawn plan respects the cores of the district and does not split significant communities of interest, as the state plan did. The court’s drawing of these districts in a way that respects the integrity of the districts and complies with the Voting Rights Act makes even clearer the discriminatory intent that infected the drawing of minority districts in the state’s plan.
In the state’s enacted plan, Texas had purposefully destroyed a Congressional District 25, a multi-ethnic coalition district based in Austin. The state’s plan carved up East Austin, a historically significant African American community that had always been represented by a single representative, into multiple districts, in order to dilute the voting strength of African American voters in that area. The court’s plan retained the core of CD 25, and kept East Austin intact.
Finally, the court-drawn plan creates a new African-American opportunity district in Tarrant County, in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area. After the 2010 Census, Texas gained 4 Congressional representatives because of population growth of the last decade—population growth that was almost entirely from increases in Latino and African-American population. Despite this fact, the congressional plan that Texas drew created no new African-American opportunity districts and no net increase in Latino opportunity districts. Congressional District 33 is majority-minority, with African-Americans constituting a strong plurality of the citizen voting age population. The drawing of Congressional District 33 is fair and complies with the Voting Rights Act, and will enable the minority community in the Dallas-Fort Worth region to elect a candidate of their choice.
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D.C. Court Denies Texas’ Request for Quick Approval of State Redistricting Plans
This morning, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. denied a request by Texas for approval of the State's congressional, Texas House and Texas Senate redistricting plans without conducting a trial to determine whether these plans were drawn with the intent or effect of diminishing the ability of minority voters to elect the candidates of their choice.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, on behalf of the Texas State Conference of NAACP Branches and in conjunction with the Texas Legislative Black Caucus and the League of United Latin American Citizens, offered briefing and oral argument to the court on November 2, 2011, urging the court not to approve the redistricting plans because the plans are unfair to Black and Latino voters.
Because of the Court’s ruling, the state’s enacted redistricting plans for Congress, State House, and State Senate cannot be used for the 2012 elections. A federal district court in San Antonio will now draw interim redistricting plans for 2012 elections. The court in San Antonio has already conducted hearings on those interim plans, in which SCSJ presented information to the court on how to draw plans that would be fair to minority voters.
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Redistricting Lawsuit Filed
Today SCSJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of four statewide organizations and 27 individual voters, challenging the newly enacted redistricting plans for the North Carolina State House, State Senate and U.S. Congress. We allege that all three plans “are an intentional and cynical use of race that exceeds what is required to ensure fairness to previously disenfranchised racial minority voters.” In addition to violating the equal protection rights of North Carolina voters on the basis of race, the maps also unfairly create two classes of voters in the state. One class is those who live in split precincts and who will experience delays, confusion and a heightened risk of receiving the wrong ballot. Approximately two million voting age adults in the state (27% of the total voting age population) live in a split precinct. The other class is those voters who do not live in a split precinct and who will not face these problems. African-American voting age adults are 50% more likely than whites to live in a split precinct.
The organizational plaintiffs are the North Carolina NAACP, Democracy North Carolina, the North Carolina League of Women Voters and the North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Institute. We seek to overturn the legislature’s unconstitutional packing of black voters. The Complaint is attached below.
For a musical explanation of what this case is about, check out this video from ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/article/video-the-redistricting-song.
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MEDIA ADVISORY: DC District Court Upholds Minority Voting Rights
September 21, 2011
Contact: Domenic Powell (704) 281 - 9911
omenic@southerncoalition.org
http://southerncoalition.org
DC District Court Upholds Minority Voting Rights
Preserves Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, likely to influence case from Kinston, NC
DURHAM--Today the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia issued a 151-page opinion upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County v. Holder case. The decision is a victory for civil rights advocates and communities of color fighting to have their voices heard in elections.
“The opinion includes an exhaustive review of the legislative record,” says Anita Earls, the Executive Director for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ). “The court’s opinion was very careful to lay out the legal standards for a facial challenge and then to apply them to this statute.”
The court concluded that Congress had before it sufficient evidence to justify renewing Section 5’s protections, which requires certain states to submit changes in their election processes to the federal government or the DC District Court for review in order to prevent laws or policies that make it harder for previously disenfranchised minority voters to vote or to participate in elections, also called “retrogression.” This part of the Voting Rights Act was renewed for 25 years in 2006.
The ruling today could go far towards upholding the Voting Rights Act in other local challenges to discriminatory election practices in the near future. With the most significance for North Carolina, today’s decision lays the groundwork for a similar result in Laroque v. Holder, filed by Kinston State Representative Stephen Laroque and pending before the same Judge, in which SCSJ is defending the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
The opinion can be read in full here.
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The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in August, 2007 in Durham, North Carolina by a multi-disciplinary group, predominantly people of color, who believe that families and communities engaged in social justice struggles need a team of lawyers, social scientists, community organizers and media specialists to support them in their efforts to dismantle structural racism and oppression.
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Challenge to Texas Redistricting Opens in Federal Court
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