The Justice Department accused Texas of discriminating against minorities in a lawsuit filed Monday challenging the state’s new redistricting maps.
The Texas Tribune reports:
At a press conference Monday, U.S. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said the maps passed into law by the Republican-controlled Legislature showed an “overall disregard for the massive minority population growth” the state experienced over the last decade.
“Our investigation determined that Texas’ redistricting plans will dilute the increased minority voting strength that should have developed from these significant demographic shifts,” Gupta said.
The Guardian explains:
Minority voters accounted for 95% of population growth in Texas over the last decade but there are no new majority-minority districts in the new plans.
Republicans who control the redistricting process drew the lines to shore up their advantage across Texas, blunting the surge in the state’s non-white population.
“The state’s new congressional map also reduces the number of districts with a Hispanic voting majority from eight to seven, while the number of districts with Black residents as the majority of eligible voters drops from one to zero,” reports The Tribune.
Attorney General Merrick Garland added that the newly approved congressional and state legislature districts “deny or abridge the rights of Latino and Black voters to vote on account of their race, color, or membership in a language minority group,” and therefore violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
POLITICO adds key context:
It is the latest voting rights lawsuit from the Department of Justice, which separately sued Texas last month over the recently-implemented new election law in the state, which adds further restrictions to mail voting in the state and banned voting practices piloted by large Democratic-leaning counties during the pandemic, like drive-through and 24-hour early voting.
At least five other legal challenges have been mounted against Texas’ maps, including one led by a group affiliated with former Attorney General Eric Holder.
