Burnt Orange Report

Texas, Georgia and Redistricting

By Byron LaMasters

Over the weekend, University of Oklahoma Professor Keith Gaddie of Sooner Politics sent me his thoughts on the latest case involving Texas redistricting. Professor Gaddie was an expert for the state of Texas on the 2003 redistricting case, but now has some different thoughts based on the recent decision regarding Georgia redistricting. Here are Professor Gaddie's thoughts, unedited:

I’m sending this along as a little guest blurb. You’ll recall that I worked as a state’s expert in the Texas redistricting. At that point in time, I noted that the new Texas districts did not violate the Voting Rights Act (true), that they did seek partisan advantage relative to the status quo map (true), and that the maps would translate a majority of votes into a majority of seats, unlike the old map (also true).

Now, I’m going to suggest that all of you go and read the dissents in Veith, and also the concurrent opinion from the Georgia case (Larios). In the Larios case, which tossed the Georgia state legislative districts, unjustified population deviations were defined by the effort to seek partisan advantage. Writing in a rare concurrence to an affirmation of a lower court ruling, Breyer and Stevens observed that:

"It bears emphasis however, that had the Court in Veith adopted a standard for adjudicating partisan gerrymandering claims, the standard would have been satisfied in this case [...] the District Court’s detailed factual findings regarding appellees’ equal protection claim confirm that an impermissible partisan gerrymander is visible to the judicial eye and subject to judicially-manageable standards [...]

"drawing district lines that have no neutral justification in order to place two incumbents of the opposite party in the same district is probative of the same impermissible intent as the ‘uncouth twenty-eight-sided figure’ that defined the boundary of Tuskegee, Alabama in Gomillion."

In other words, the factual presentation of the pairing of incumbents, the unequal continuity of representation through district cores for incumbents of different parties, and the odd shapes and lowered compactness all indicated evidence of an illegal partisan gerrymander under the standard adopted by the majority.

Every justice except Scalia voted to uphold the Georgia case without a hearing. And, in Texas, we can only assume that the majority sending the case back down is Kennedy plus the Gang of Four from Veith. The question is, if the district court looks into the Texas maps and sees the same kind of evidence that was presented in Georgia, then they might be positioned to overturn the Texas maps, or at least create enough of an appeal point to have the new majority take a look at the districts and make a determination on their own.

There might be enough evidence to overturn those districts, except for one critical difference between Texas and Georgia: In Texas, the old maps made a minority of votes into a majority of seats, whereas the new districts do not. In Georgia, the illegal map that was thrown out made a minority of votes into a majority of seats. Otherwise, these are circumstantially identical redistrictings, and they exhibit similar traits and attributes and motivations.

Go look at the Georgia case.

Keith Gaddie
Professor of Political Science
The University of Oklahoma