The process of redrawing borders takes place in the country almost every ten years. This is reflected in the change in the original structure of the boundaries of legislative bodies and congressional districts. This process makes sense since the composition of the population changes over a certain period. Therefore, to create homogeneous and equally populated areas, it is necessary to follow this procedure, which is aimed at maintaining the Voting Rights Act. However, in reality, re-redistricting is used to manipulate the composition of certain districts’ populations to obtain the necessary election results for a particular party.
This process can be considered a crime since, provided that one of the parties has a majority, the process is used to support its interests. It is worth noting that based on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, borders should not be created in such a way as to interfere with the opportunities of minorities for fair voting (National Archives, 2022). However, conducting re-redistricting before the decennial census has several illegal violations when one of the parties may be interested in creating the boundaries of legislative bodies and congressional districts with a particular ethnic composition.
In this case, it is necessary to get acquainted with the example of Texas, in which the Republican Party traditionally occupies a strong position. This state’s position is succinctly reflected in the slogan “Don’t Mess With Texas”. In this case, there is a severe tendency toward a rather individualistic political culture when the state seeks to use various ways to promote specific candidates. It is necessary to indicate how this process of redrawing borders can be used in the interests of one of the parties.
One of the most popular methods is “packaging”, which is based on analyzing the composition of the population in different areas. Thus, they are trying to divide them so that a more significant number of the population interested in candidates from the Republican Party is concentrated within the newly created borders. Given the fact that this process takes place before the decennial census, it becomes the cause of unequal straightening of voting rights among the population. Thus, Texas uses re-redistricting to create neighborhoods where the white population significantly outnumbers minorities. Consequently, this strongly affects which candidate has more opportunities to get electoral votes from the state.
Confirmation that the policy of forming new district boundaries is a crime is the filing of a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice. It is based on the fact that the new borders of Texas do not correspond to the changes in the population composition (Ramsey, 2022). This is manifested in the fact that the growth of the Latin American and African American populations was not taken into account. This aspect is another indication that state politics tends to have an individualistic political culture. Even considering the increase in the number of seats in Congress to 38, they are distributed so that minority representatives do not have the opportunity to get them (Ura, 2021). Thus, re-redistricting is used by the state to ignore and manipulate the voting rights of representatives of various ethnic groups. This is done to maintain the stability of the position of the Republican Party, which manages to control the situation, neglecting the interests of the population of various districts.
References
National Archives. (2022). Voting rights act (1965). Web.
Ramsey, R. (2022). Analysis: Gerrymandering has left Texas voters with few options. The Texas Tribune. Web.
Ura, A. (2021). Texas will gain two seats in Congress. The Texas Tribune. Web.