The 2011 Documents That Reveal Texas’ Attempts to Marginalize Minority Voters
In 2011, Texas Republicans put forth a redistricting plan that a federal court in Washington, D.C., concluded was intentionally designed to dilute the strength of African-American and Hispanic votes. Purposeful — not merely incidental — discrimination. As a result, it was blocked under the now-neutered Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. A series of highly revealing emails between Republicans about the redistricting process, which included redrawn maps for state legislative districts as well as congressional districts, were unearthed in the ensuing litigation and proved fatal to their case.
In one email, a lawyer for Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that the Republican wanted to move a white neighborhood near the San Antonio Country Club from a Hispanic congressional district into his own congressional district, in order to make the Democratic-leaning district less white.
In response, a Republican staffer for Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) warned in a private email that the gerrymandered map “has next to no chance of pre-clearance.”
At the time, Republican state Rep. Beverly Woolley, a leader of the redistricting efforts in Harris County, told a group of minority representatives, “[Y]ou all are protected by the Voting Rights Act and we are not. … We don’t want to lose these people due to population growth in the county, or we won’t have any districts left.”
In a separate instance, one Republican congressman told another that he needed “more Mexicans in [his] district” but not from areas where Latinos were politically active.
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