Using Racial Gerrymandering to Combat Racial Gerrymandering

I’ve previously written about the way that the existing case law regarding voting-rights protections requires the very kind of odious racialization of politics that Congress wrote the Voting Rights Act to forbid.  Specifically, courts have read the law in a way that essentially requires racial gerrymandering, which also racializes political differences between the parties. (The Supreme Court this term is considering one of the bizarre consequences of this line of precedent.)

Well, a couple of weeks ago an interesting lawsuit was filed by the Equal Voting Rights Institute (a Texas nonprofit run by Dan Morenoff, who is a friend of mine from law school) that illustrates where this jurisprudence leads when paired with the most basic notions of equal protection.

EVRI has brought exactly the same kind of suit long used by traditional voting-rights activists but this time on behalf of non-Hispanic-white voters in Dallas -- where they constitute a racial minority that has seen its "preferred candidate" (a term of art in this arcane legal field) win only two county-wide races contested by the major parties over four election cycles, which is 2 out of about 150 elections. EVRI asks the courts to apply the same measuring sticks they’ve used for decades to require the drawing of districts for other groups in the new context of a “minority-majority” jurisdiction whose governing coalition still votes on ethnic lines and uses its political power to strip an out-of-step race of any chance to fairly participate in elections.

It’s hard to imagine a case where equal protection provisions are more starkly implicated: either the VRA protects the out-voted white voters of Dallas exactly as it protects the outvoted African American and Hispanic voters of Texas, or the Voting Rights Act -- as construed by the courts -- provides unequal protections to different races in flagrant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

But this means that a constitutional reading of the VRA would broaden the scope of its case law (and the odious racial gerrymandering it requires) to apply to every minority-majority jurisdiction in the country. In fact, as America becomes more diverse, it makes sense that judges would need to look at actual demographic facts on the ground to determine who needs their protection from racial disenfranchisement. That development may wake up the communities that have long viewed the Voting Rights Act as their proprietary cudgel to the need to return to the original understanding of the legislation: to police against actual instances of discrimination rather than maintain some sort of statistical parity akin to the "disparate impact" theories running rampant in other contexts. 

In other words, and to paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts's famous dictum, the way to stop racialized interpretations of the Voting Rights Act is to highlight the way that race-based decision-making has been used to interpret parts of that law. It’s a strange world where a classical liberal is required to root for more racially informed lawmaking in order to recover the core ban on racist voting laws that made the VRA the cornerstone of civil rights movement. But that is the world we live in.

For more on the case of Harding v. County of Dallas, Texas, see the complaint and EVRI's press release.