by wide bipartisan margins in 2007 -- when Republicans controlled the U.S. Congress and George W. Bush was president. The Voting Rights Act is seen as one of the most successful pieces of legislation, being credited with the election of 9,000 African-Americans, 5,000 Latinos, and numerous Native Americans to local, state, and national offices.
The Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting to prevent states and localities from drawing districts that deny minorities a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. There are two important provisions. Section 2 applies nationally, and Section 5 applies only to certain "covered jurisdictions" which are located primarily in the South. These provisions are discussed in detail below. To understand how Section 2 and Section 5 apply, it is first important to understand how racial gerrymandering works.
What is Racial Gerrymandering?
To understand how to do a racial gerrymander, consider a hypothetical state with thirty-six people in it, which we will call Gerryland. Sixteen Gerrylanders are of a racial minority (represented by tan colored circles) and twenty are the racial majority. There are four districts to be drawn. (Thanks for Justin Levitt, formerly at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, for these diagrams.)
Racially polarized voting is when all the minorities always vote for their preferred candidate and all the majorities always vote for their preferred candidate. If racially polarized voting exists, it is possible to gerrymander with brutal efficiency to ensure minorities have little or no representation in a four-seat legislature. There are two gerrymandering strategies, known as cracking and packing. The same strategies apply to both racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Cracking is when the minority community is fragmented into several districts, none of which have a majority of minorities. When there is racially polarized voting, minorities will be unable to elect a candidate of their choice to the legislature in any district. The cracking strategy in Gerryland might look something like this.
Stacking is when the minority community is concentrated into a small number of districts so that their votes are wasted in a district that their preferred candidate will win by an overwhelming margin. The packing strategy in Gerryland might look something like this, where the minority community is concentrated into one district.When Must a Minority Opportunity District Be Draw?
In practice, things are more complicated than the simple Gerryland example. Communities do not fit into nice squares, so the federal courts are fairly lenient on what minorities districts may look like. Some of the ugliest looking district ducklings are beautiful swans in the eyes of the courts. For example, the Illinois 4th Congressional District drawn in the 2000's decade is often called the "earmuff" district for obvious reasons. The western portion of this district actually travels along the northbound lane of Interstate 294! But, this district has a very important purpose. It was initially created in the 1990s to elect the first Latino representative to Congress from the Midwest.
The 4th congressional district has its funny shape because there is an African-American community sandwiched between two Latino communities. The African-American community is represented by the 7th Congressional district, which is designed to elect an African-American candidate of choice. The 4th district was wrapped around the 7th district so that both African-American and Latino communities could have congressional representation.
The ideal district has just the right percentage of minorities to elect a minority candidate of choice. The percentage of minorities cannot be too low, lest cracking occurs, and cannot be too high, lest packing occurs. Determining the legally acceptable minority percentage requires the following steps:
The most accessible population data to assess when a minority opportunity district must be drawn is voting-age population. The Census Bureau releases two types of data: tot