Voter Redistricting Based on Race, Voting Patterns

[Jermyn Davidson]

In the Nov. 17, 2010, email, Opelia asked Interiano to look for specific data about Hispanic populations and voting patterns.

“These metrics would be useful to identify the ‘nudge factor’ by which one can analyze which census blocks, when added to a particular district [they] help pull the district’s Total Hispanic pop … to majority status, but leave the Spanish surname RV [registered voters] and TO [turnout] the lowest,” Opiela writes to the mapmaker.


http://www.salon.com/2014/07/14/texa...ails_revealed/



Are you able to defend, to rationalize, drawing up voting districts based on race and voting patterns?

It doesn't seem fair or right, but I have never really understood how voting districts are established in the first place.

What do you think?

[SiblingRevelry]

I can't. But then again, I find politics to be a dirty, awful business. Which is one of many reasons why I'm a systems analyst now, and not a journalist or a lawyer (the two professions I trained for).

[Jermyn Davidson]

Another voter redistricting debacle.

http://news.yahoo.com/gop-no-appeal-...-election.html

[n david]

Will keep an eye on the TX lawsuit, but let's be clear...this is politics as usual. BOTH sides draw their districts up to be most favorable to their party. This isn't just some racist GOP thing.

TX was told to follow a pattern for hispanics and they did. Now, obviously they did it in a way to keep it favorable to the GOP.

But this redistricting stuff is what both sides do when they're in power. Republicans AND Democrats.