Five Ways Courts Say Texas Discriminated Against Black and Latino Voters

by Lois Beckett and Suevon Lee ProPublica, Sept. 4, 2012

How does Texas discriminate against minority voters? Federal judges counted the ways.

Last Tuesday, a panel of federal court judges ruled that new district maps drawn by Texas' Republican-controlled legislature weakened the influence of Latino voters and in some cases evinced "discriminatory intent" against both Latinos and African Americans. Two days later, another panel of federal judges unanimously struck down a voter-ID law passed by the legislature in March 2011, arguing that it would disproportionately harm African-American and Latino voters. The judges did not address whether there was discriminatory purpose behind the legislation, but they noted that the legislature failed to pass amendments that would have mitigated the law's discriminatory impact.

Minority groups have outnumbered whites in Texas since roughly 2004, and 55.2 percent of the state's residents are now minorities, according to Census figures. As of 2011, the state's legislature was more than two-thirds white.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office declined to comment on the specifics of the rulings, but Abbott has promised to appeal both cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. In news releases, he said that the Supreme Court had already upheld voter-ID laws, and that the redistricting decision "extends the Voting Rights Act beyond the limits intended by Congress and beyond the boundaries imposed by the Constitution."

Both decisions hinged on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states with a history of racial discrimination in voting — including Texas — to prove that any changes in their voting laws or procedures do not hamper the voting rights of minorities. Enacted in 1965, the Voting Rights Act aimed to eliminate discriminatory voting practices that had long been used to suppress the black vote, particularly in southern states. Section 5 has been challenged, including in two cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, as an outdated provision that unfairly singles out certain states. The Court has not decided if it will hear the cases.

The rulings detailed several examples of discriminatory practices in Texas:

1. Lawmakers drew some districts that looked like Latino majority districts on paper — but removed Latinos who voted regularly and replaced them with Latinos who were unlikely to vote.

In the redistricting case, a panel of three federal judges found that Texas lawmakers had intentionally created districts that would weaken the influence of Latino voters, while appearing to satisfy the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

In drawing Texas' 23rd congressional district, the judges found that "The mapdrawers consciously replaced many of the district's active Hispanic voters with low-turnout Hispanic voters in an effort to strengthen the voting power of [Congressional District] 23's Anglo citizens. In other words, they sought to reduce Hispanic voters' ability to elect without making it look like anything in [Congressional District] 23 had changed."

In 2010, the 23rd district narrowly elected a Latino Republican, Francisco "Quico" Canseco. One email to a Republican mapdrawer, released during the legal battle over the maps, shows that Republicans were trying to increase the chances Canseco would be re-elected.

Lawmakers used a similar tactic in redrawing a state house district, modifying it "so that it would elect the Anglo-preferred candidate yet would look like a Hispanic ability district on paper," the court ruled. An "ability district" is one in which a minority group has the capability to elect representatives of its choosing. The judges concluded that the legislature had been trying to make this district appear as if it satisfied the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, while actually trying to benefit white voters.

Judge Thomas B. Griffith, writing the unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, called it "a deliberate, race-conscious method to manipulate not simply the Democratic vote but, more specifically, the Hispanic vote."

2. Lawmakers widened the gap between the proportion of the population that is Latino and African Americans and the proportion of districts that are minority-controlled.

In the years leading up to the 2010 census, Texas' population increased by 4.3 million people, 65 percent of them Latino. As a result, Texas gained four seats in Congress.

In their decision, the federal judges in the redistricting case noted that minority voters have no constitutional right to proportional representation. But the Voting Rights Act says states can't weaken the electoral power of minorities. So, the judges reasoned, if there is already a gap between the minority population of a state and its political representation, states can't let that gap grow wider.

In Texas, the judges observed, African Americans and Latinos were already underrepresented in Congress. Given the number of voting-age minority citizens in the state, Texas's old maps should have had roughly 13 congressional seats that represent districts in which minorities have a strong voice, the judges calculated. Instead, Texas only had 10 such districts.

Instead of narrowing this "representation gap" as the minority population grew, the legislature increased it.

With four additional congressional seats, Texas should now have 14 districts in which minorities have the ability to elect their chosen representatives, the judges concluded. But the state's new plan still included just 10 minority districts.

3. Texas removed economic centers and district offices from African-American and Latino districts, while giving white Republicans perks.

In defending its new maps, Texas argued that the districts had been shaped to help Republicans and hurt Democrats — a perfectly legal tactic — and that race had been irrelevant to its choices.

The Associated Press reported that the state's lawyer had argued before the court that "'a decision based on partisanship' is not based on race, even if it results in minority voters having less political influence."

The judges noted that while there was no "direct evidence" that "discriminatory purpose" animated the new maps, circumstantial evidence indicated the design of the new congressional districts "was motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent."

Texas' gerrymandering was not limited to manipulating the kinds of voters within districts. By reshaping a district, mapdrawers can determine whether key businesses, schools and tourist attractions are removed from a district or added to another.

The redistricting opinion dwelled at length on "unchallenged evidence that the legislature removed the economic guts from Black ability districts." African-American Rep. Al Green testified that the "economic engines" of his district — including a medical center, a university, and the Reliant Park sports mega-complex that includes the Astrodome — were removed. African-American Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson's district lost a sports center and an arts district, while Latino Rep. Charles A. Gonzalez from San Antonio said that both a convention center and the Alamo were drawn out of his district.

These three members of Congress, and African-American Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, all Democrats, also testified that their district offices were drawn out of their districts — a detriment because constituents want easily accessible district offices.

"No such surgery was performed on the districts of Anglo incumbents," the judges found. "In fact, every Anglo member of Congress retained his or her district office."

"The only explanation Texas offers for this pattern is 'coincidence.' But if this was coincidence, it was a striking one indeed," Judge Griffith wrote. He noted that Texas had argued that "without hearing from the members, the mapdrawers did not know where the district officers were located." But, he wrote, "We find this hard to believe as well. We are confident that the mapdrawers can not only draw maps but read them."

The judges noted that members of Congress who represented minority districts testified that they were largely shut out of the map-drawing process. At the same time, white Republican members asked for tweaks to their districts and were often accommodated. "Anglo district boundaries were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent's grandchildren," the judges wrote, referring to requests related to the districts of Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, and Kenny Marchant, respectively.

Not all white lawmakers were happy with their new districts. Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett, who was forced to run in a new district as a result of the Republicans' maps, told the Texas Tribune last year that map plans "plunged a dagger into the heart of our community."

4. Divide and conquer: Texas "cracked" minority voters out of one district into three.

One common tactic of racial gerrymandering is "cracking" a minority community into different districts so it cannot elect a minority politician.

Looking at a State Senate district in Fort Worth, the judges cited testimony that lawmakers reshaped the district in a way that "cracked the politically cohesive and geographically concentrated Latino and African American communities," and placed those voters "in districts in which they have no opportunity to elect their candidates of choice."

The judges cited "well supported" testimony that African Americans in Fort Worth had been "exported" into a rural, "Anglo-controlled" district to the South, while Latinos on the North side of the city had been put into another white, suburban district, leaving the "reconfigured" Senate District 10 a "majority Anglo" district.

The judges rejected Texas' argument that "its decision to 'crack' [Senate District] 10 is best explained by partisan, not racial, goals," and concluded that the district map "was enacted with discriminatory purpose."

5. Texas passed a voter-ID law with requirements that would make it disproportionately difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote.

A three-judge panel found last Thursday that Texas' voter-ID law discriminates against minorities, since the costs of obtaining the required identification would place a greater burden on low-income Texans, who are more likely to be minorities than white.

Although the state issues free election IDs, the cost of a birth certificate, one of the underlying documents needed for the ID, is $22 — and that's if voters can get to the right government office in the first place. At least one-third of Texas' counties don't have a state Department of Public Safety office, which issues state IDs.

"It is virtually certain that these burdens will disproportionately affect racial minorities," wrote Judge David S. Tatel for the unanimous panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He cited "undisputed U.S. Census data" showing that Hispanics and African Americans in Texas are more likely to be poor and more likely to live in households without a car.

"Simply put, many Hispanics and Africans Americans who voted in the last election will, because of the burdens imposed by [the new voter ID law], likely be unable to vote in the next election," he wrote.

The judges agreed ahead of last month's trial to keep out any evidence indicating motivations for the voter-ID law, so they didn't address whether or not there was intentional discrimination behind the creation of the law. But the 56-page decision pointed out that the Texas legislature could have made its law more accommodating by, among other things, waiving documentation fees for the election IDs, reimbursing travel-related costs or expanding DPS office hours to evenings and weekends — amendments that were either defeated or tabled.

Finally, the judges agreed with Texas that the state had an interest in preventing voter fraud, even though there is little documented evidence of current voter fraud in Texas. However, they noted that circumstantial evidence "could nonetheless suggest that Texas invoked the specter of voter fraud as pretext for racial discrimination."

The 2012 election

Whatever the Supreme Court's response to Texas' voter-ID law, Texans will not be required to present a photo ID to vote this November.

"As a result of the court's decision, Texas is not permitted to implement the photo ID law," Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade announced in a news release last week.

As for the redistricting maps, Texas will use a set of interim maps drawn by federal judges in Texas. Those interim maps were part of a contentious battle that earlier went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wells Fargo, the nation's largest mortgage lender, agreed to settle with the Justice Department Thursday to resolve allegations that it steered blacks and Hispanic borrowers into subprime loans when similarly qualified white borrowers received mortgages with lower rates.

The settlement, which must be approved by a judge, requires Wells Fargo to provide $125 million to borrowers, $50 million in down-payment assistance in hard-hit regions where Justice found evidence of discrimination, and additional compensation to blacks and Hispanics who were wrongly placed into subprime loans.

[Via]

Thousands of people from civil rights groups walked down New York City's Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in protest of "stop-and-frisk" tactics employed by city police.

The quiet was interrupted only by the tapping of feet on the pavement and birds chirping as protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town house on the Upper East Side townhouse.

For almost 30 city blocks, the march moved slowly and silently. Then, as they passed Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street, the crowd erupted in protest chants. The house was blocked by police barricades.

It was not known if Bloomberg was at home when the protesters passed.

Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.

Via:

Tensions increased between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.

Police officers on scooters lined both sides of the avenue and officers on foot formed a line to keep people on the sidewalk. Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.
...
"The silence ended and the people's voices came out," said Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester.

"We were told to go home and we weren't ready to go yet," said Swaye, who added that his wife, Christina Gonzalez, 25, was one of the protesters arrested in the melee.

The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.

Continue reading »

These are the stories of the New York Police Department's notorious and illegal Stop and Frisk program, which saw 685,724 illegal searches in 2011 alone. The NYPD is only allowed to stop and search someone if they have reasonable suspicion that they've committed a crime, making stops on the basis of skin color illegal. 87% of New York City's black and latino population has been stopped and frisked at some point, and as The New York Times reports in its Op-Doc, "The Scars of Stop and Frisk", the vast majority of those stopped are never ticketed or arrested - 88%, in fact. In a twisted kind of apartheid, young men and women of color in New York City are being stopped on the basis of their skin color and sometimes detained for hours without reason. Pioneered by the special crimes unit - the same one that killed Amadou Diallo, an innocent man suspected of a rape, in a hail of bullets in 1999 - stop and frisk is truly "the new Jim Crow," as an activist in Nina Berman's short doc on the subject dubs it.

"I'm in fear for my life from the law" RDACBX raps on "Stop! Stop and Frisk!" featuring Rebel Diaz, Vithym and Luss, the video for which features snapshots of recent victims of NYPD overreach and is "dedicated to the mothers of victims of Police Terrorism." It was produced after the February 2 killing of an unarmed 18-year-old, Rahmarley Graham, in the Bronx, which occurred a week after officers administered a Rodney King-style beating on another unarmed youth, 19-year-old Jatiek Reed. As victims of fatal police brutality have piled up - Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, Malcolm Ferguson, Anthony Rosario - a social movement has formed to reclaim the streets for the people.

[Via]

The glowing praise of the racist "Stop and Frisk" policy by the NYPD and city officials and the fuzzy math statistics that claim vastly reduced crime weren't enough to stop a federal judge today from granting class-action status in a lawsuit against the NYPD that claims the practice violates the constitutional rights of blacks and Hispanics.

Maybe it was the Jateik Reed video or the facts that revealed, among other things, that more young black men were stopped and frisked by police last year than actually live in the city, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The New York Times obtained Judge Shira Scheindlin's opinion, which stated that the evidence presented showed that the central tenets that make up the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy led to many illegal stops. Judge Scheindlin writes:

It is rather audacious of the NYPD to argue that if it were possible to protect "the right of people to be secure in their persons" from unlawful searches and seizures by the NYPD, then the legislature would already have done so and judicial intervention would therefore be futile. Indeed, it is precisely when the political branches violate the individual rights of minorities that "more searching judicial enquiry" is appropriate.

(Emphasis is Judge Scheindlin's.) The NYPD is on track to break last year's record of 601,055 stops (that's 1,900 a day) in 2012.

[Video of the brutal beating of 19-year old Jateik Reed during an NYPD "Stop and Frisk"]

The NYPD on Sunday spoke with glowing praise of their under-fire "Stop and Frisk" policy that allows them to throw anyone they please up against a wall, and sometimes worse (See Jateik Reed video above).

Comparing numbers from the first three months of 2012 to the same period last year, the number of such stops increased 10% while the number of illicit guns taken away went up 31%, according to a New York Police Department statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

Meanwhile, New York's murder rate has plunged 21% year-to-date as of last Friday -- meaning, if the current trend continues, the yearly number of murders in the city would be the lowest since such statistics first were recorded, as such, in 1963.

"New York City continues to be the safest big city in America, and one of the safest of any size, with significantly less crime per capita ... than even small cities," the department said.

Police cited Operation Impact and the "stop and frisk" policy as key reasons for the improving crime statistics. But the policy has been criticized sharply by some as grounds for racial profiling.

The statement drew a harsh response from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) as executive director Donna Lieberman accused the NYPD of trying to "massage the numbers to make this look like an effective and worthwhile program."

Just last Wednesday, the NYCLU released a report of their own based on the information cited by the NYPD in Sunday's statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne:

More young black men were stopped and frisked by police last year than actually live in the city, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

About 168,000 black men between the ages of 14 and 24 were stopped under the controversial NYPD program in 2011 -- compared to the 158,406 who live in the five boroughs.

The NYCLU report also revealed of five precincts with blacks and latinos comprising as little as 8 percent of the population, they still accounted for up to 77 percent of of the stops in those areas.

The NYPD denies any claims of racial profiling, and says that it targets only "those who commit crimes." Yet as was revealed in the case of Jateik Reed, claims by police that he was carrying drugs have been shown to be false, and that his arrest was unfounded and he shouldn't have even been stopped when an outdoor surveillance camera video surfaced.

As for the NYPD claims of being the "safest big city in America," well, see here...and here...here...here...and here to view but a few counter-arguments to that claim.

Via ThinkProgress:

Student Loan Debt Has Ballooned Since 1990: Many of the faces of Occupy Wall Street and the blog “We Are the 99 Percent” are former students saddled with huge college debt. These individual stories and public protests have made the nation take notice, including President Obama who announced a plan that would lower some debtors’ monthly payments. The following graphic shows how student loan debt has skyrocketed over the last 21 years, topping $1 trillion in unpaid debt:

With so many students - who are known to tend to vote liberal - what's a Republican to do but try to keep them from the polls?

The New York Times reports:

Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote.

Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.

Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.

It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.

Creating an explanation for the new ID laws, as Republicans don't generally want to actually say the purpose is to turn away voters, they've claimed the stricter laws are "to prevent voter fraud." However, this explanation falls flat since there is almost no voter fraud in the nation to prevent.

The stricter voter ID laws aren't just having a negative impact on the rights of students to vote: Think Progress reports that "A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations."

"Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate."