Controversial Redistricting Trial Moves into Final Phase
Latino groups claim Republican-drawn political boundaries are unfair
q1019.com
by Jim Forsyth
Friday, September 16, 2011

Lawyers for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund cited one State Representative District in El Paso to stress their argument that Republicans who control the Texas Legislature redrew political boundaries during the 2011 Session not to reflect the legitimate growth patterns of the state's population, but to reduce Hispanic voting clout and to boost the voting clout of Republicans, 1200 WOAI news reports.

District 78 looks much like a scorpion, with one claw snaking through neighborhoods and the other claw ranging over mountains, cutting through streets and up alleys to pack Hispanic voters into one district to avoid having to create as many as five districts with a majority of Hispanic citizens.

"Our goal would be to get an order from this court that the map is illegal, so we can get to the point where a new map is created that would offer more opportunities to Latinos politically," MALDEF lawyer Nina Perales said.

Actually, there are five separate federal lawsuits being heard by a panel of three federal judges in San Antonio. Three of them were filed by Hispanic rights organizations which claim that Latinos made up 90% of the increase in the state's population registered in the 2010 Census, and should receive a fair share of the new Congressional and Legislative districts.

But two other lawsuits discuss other issues. One lawsuit demands that inmates at state prisons be counted as residents of the counties they were sentenced from and not as residents of the counties where the prisons where they are housed are located. The vast majority of the state's 155,000 prison inmates were sentenced from urban areas but are housed in prisons in rural areas, and counting those inmates, who are not allowed to cast votes, as residents of small towns could, the lawsuit claims, illegally boost those communities' political clout.

And a fifth lawsuit is even odder. A Tea Party group in Sherman is suing, to try to get the state to exclude illegal immigrants from the Census count when it comes to redrawing Congressional and Legislative districts on the grounds that since illegals don't vote, including them in population counts for redistricting purposes unfairly boosts the clout of south Texas and urban areas where large numbers of illegals live, to the detriment of communities in north Texas.

Perales the Latino groups are also challenging the Republican redistricting in federal court in Washington as a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but she said the judges need to get off their robes and issue a ruling.

"If the DC court takes too long to come to a decision, the pressure will be on the Texas court to put some sort of map in place in time for the March primary," she said.

The San Antonio judges have promised to issue a ruling by early October, because the first deadlines involved in filing candidacy papers to run in the 2012 elections take place in mid October.

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