Texas Defends New Electoral Maps at Trial in Washington
January 19, 2012, 8:43 AM ESTBy Tom Schoenberg
(Updates with more court challenges in seventh paragraph.)
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The state of Texas defended in court its election maps for congressional and state assembly districts as the U.S. sought to block the plan, alleging it discriminates against Hispanic voters.
Adam Mortara, a lawyer for Texas, urged a federal court in Washington today to sign off on the state’s redistricting proposal, saying the boundaries drawn on the maps comply with the Voting Rights Act.
“Map drawers made a good faith effort to follow Department of Justice guidance,” Mortara said at the start of a trial over the redistricting plan. “The voter map is not retrogressive in terms of Latino voting strength.”
A panel of two federal district judges and one appellate judge, in a trial scheduled to last about two weeks, will hear testimony from Texas legislators, their staff and expert witnesses who analyzed voter data in the state.
The same panel ruled in November that Texas used an “improper standard or methodology” when determining whether minorities had the ability to elect their preferred candidates.
The dispute stems from maps drawn last year by the Republican-controlled Texas legislature after the decennial census. Governor Rick Perry, now a Republican candidate for president, signed the maps into law.
More Challenges
Legal challenges over the Texas maps are under consideration by three federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments last week on whether federal judges in Texas overstepped their authority by drawing up interim voting plans.
The U.S. objects to two proposed congressional districts and five state assembly districts.
The Justice Department said in court filings that Texas “purposely manipulated” proposed congressional districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to decrease current and future minority voter strength in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Texas sued the administration of President Barack Obama in July seeking so-called pre-clearance for the state’s new maps under the voting act, a step required of all states with a history of voting-rights violations.
Past Elections
Lawyers for Texas opened the trial with a 45 minute statement arguing that the state believes the maps were legal because its analysis was based on Justice Department guidance. Mortara said Texas studied 10 elections in the state from 2002 to 2010, five of which took place from 2008 to 2010.
“The problem here is that the Department of Justice ignores that it violates the Constitution to redistrict with racial ends or racial means, unless the Voting Rights Act requires it,” Mortara said. “Once you’ve assured there’s no retrogression, you cannot draw districts based on race anymore.”
He said Texas didn’t draw more districts dominated by Hispanic voters because “that’s where use of race has to stop.”
The majority-Republican legislature redrew electoral maps after the state grew enough to gain four seats in Congress, adding almost 4.3 million residents since 2000, according to the 2010 census.
In June, Perry signed a bill approving the map lawmakers had created.
Congressional representatives whose jobs are threatened by the redistricting plan sued Perry and the state in federal court in San Antonio to block approval of the map as did Hispanic voting-rights organizations and Travis County, which includes the state capital, Austin.
The case is Texas v. U.S., 1:11-cv-01303, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
--With assistance from Laurel Brubaker Calkins in Houston. Editors: Fred Strasser, Andrew Dunn
To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Schoenberg in Washington at tschoenberg@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net.
