Federal judge instructed state to use older maps, with Republicans likely to appeal decision
New maps that added five Republican districts in Texas hit a legal roadblock on Tuesday, with a federal judge saying the state cannot use the 2025 maps because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.
The decision is likely to be appealed, given the push for more Republican-friendly congressional maps nationwide and Donald Trump’s full-court press on his party to make them. Some states have followed suit, and some Democratic states have retaliated, pushing to add more blue seats to counteract Republicans.
A panel of three federal judges in Texas said in a decision that the state must use previously approved 2021 maps for next year’s midterms rather than the ones that kickstarted a wave of mid-decade redistricting. The plaintiffs, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, are “likely to prove at trial that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map”, so the court approved a preliminary injunction to stop the map’s use for next year’s elections.
Nice. So the 5 blue districts we just added in California aren’t just canceling out those red seats, they’re just adding 5 blue ones.
California’s law is only Mutually Assured Destruction. It applies in response to the gerrymandering of other states.
They pulled the reciprocity clause out at the last minute after Texas passed it’s bill.
Womp womp.
afaik those laws only kick in if texas goes through with their plan
I think that was in the original text but was removed before passage because Texas has already passed their gerrymander
lame. mitch mcconnell taught us better
playing by the rules as usual :( it should have been a punishment - not just an equaliser… there’s no reason for them not to try again next time
This will probably just get appealed to the supreme court so they can further gut the civil rights act.
Just fucking end first past the post already!
Stop treating the symptom and rip out the cause.
yes end fptp, but changing from fptp doesn’t stop gerrymandering
Why not?
fptp is about choice of candidate and counting who comes out on top in an area, where gerrymandering is about geography… you can still pack and crack an STV/RCV system… ie if everyone is able to and does vote for the candidate they want (rather then defensive voting etc) then you can still make a single district have 100% of 1 candidates votes and another 2 with 51% of another
in australia we have an STV system, but we also have independent bodies that draw the district boundaries and various things to stop gerrymandering
I seem to be missing something here…
If I understand FPTP correctly, it means that only the majority holder of votes in a single district gets full representation of that district, right?
So if A gets 51% and B gets 49%, A gets to represent the entire district, right?
Without FPTP, the district result doesn’t matter at all, since it is the total number of votes that matter, not a designated winner of a district.
So since the result of a district election doesn’t matter for the end result of the election, there is little point to spend time and resources to gerrymander anymore.
Have I understood the issue correctly?
your interpretation of FPTP is mostly correct however it’s a plurality that wins, even if it’s not 50%: if there are 3 candidates, you’d only the highest vote total out of all the candidates to win (which could be as low as 34%)
what you’re talking about though is representative vs proportional systems… in representative systems a group of people directly elects their representative (like in geographic districts, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be geographic: this can be seen in some cases where minorities are codified and those groups elect a minority representative), where in proportional systems your vote goes towards the government as a whole
i think this is far less of a black and white good vs bad than fptp vs stv/rcv/irv:
fptp voting counting leads to huge issues which force a 2 party system that will never represent the majority of people (through things like defensive voting, people vote less for the candidate they want and more for the candidate they think is most likely to win who isn’t the candidate they most don’t want), and recent american politics has shown that fptp also leads to much more polarising politics (in RCV systems candidates care about their 2nd, 3rd, 4th choice votes so they have to be as likeable as possible: they don’t want to come off as bullying they 3rd place candidate, because their voters really do matter)
proportional vs representative is more nuanced though… with representative systems you have someone who is there to represent your group specifically, rather a kind of often nebulous set of ideals… proportional meanwhile you do get more philosophically aligned candidates, but they always have to form coalitions with other parties (nobody has a majority: proportional governments are formed by lots of small parties/candidates) which means you can never really hold them to what they say: they’ll have to compromise a lot, and the government is very much sometimes beholden to the whims of marginal groups who hold the power (this has been happening a lot in europe at the moment where coalitions break down)
so in australia’s case we have a bit of a combination: for our house of representatives we use IRV/representative… we have districts, and we elect a representative, and those representatives form a government and the leader of the majority party is the prime minister. we also have our senate which is proportional (but still IRV), so they have a lot more small parties - including some far right shitbags
note though i am using RCV, STV, and IRV interchangeably but i believe they are different forms of RCV (and yes, i also believe RCV is both the category and a specific implementation). i think our ballot counting is IRV, but that’s based on some high school civics stuff so it may actually be another method and the teacher just said something generic
Without FPTP, the district result doesn’t matter at all, since it is the total number of votes that matter, not a designated winner of a district.
That depends entirely on what FPTP is replaced with. Any system with local representitives can be gerrymandered to reduce the representation of certain groups, with the exception of MMP where you can still gerrymander but it doesn’t affect representation. That includes ranked choice, approval voting, etc. That’s not to say these aren’t better, of course with better local representation the effectiveness of gerrymandering is reduced, but it is not eliminated. The only way to eliminate gerrymandering is with a proportional system.
that’s largely correct, but there are multiple parts to the ballot system: FPTP, RCV, etc are means of counting ballots, but another part is proportional vs representative
you can have representative with RCV (that’s what australia is)
Yes that’s true, systems like FPTP and IRV (as used in australia) are single-winner and thus require a local representation system, but you could use ranked-choice in a proportional system.
You can have ten Republican majority districts and one Democrat majority district. Then whatever voting system you have doesn’t matter. To get rid of potential gerrymandering, you can treat the whole state as one district and have multiple winners.
This is exactly what will happen without FPTP, the local districts become irrelevant for the election process, meaning that the Gerrymandering stops being relevant as well.
∆∆∆ This guy fucks
Seriously though it is so incredibly important to nuke FPTP from orbit. We’re never going to get measurable change without it.
I get how this works in the senate. How does it work in the house?
A low-key hilarious artifact of the prohibition of racial gerrymandering and acceptability of political gerrymandering is that Republican-gerrymandered maps are pretty much ALWAYS gonna be more overtly racially biased than Democratic-gerrymandered maps.
By which I mean: staunchly Republican supporting areas tends to lean heavily white, while staunchly Democratic supporting areas tend to be much more cosmopolitan and racially heterogeneous.
thats why they are get all upset with CRT too, its racial legal discrimination against POCs , more to agains tblacks. eventhough this is a legal concept taught in grad school.
The thing is that, afaik, coincidentally gerrymandering by race isn’t sufficient to get the map thrown out. It has to be intentionally gerrymandered by race, with evidence to support such an assertion.
And the incredible thing is that Republicans can’t keep their damned racist mouths shut, and they keep incriminating themselves by either saying the quiet part out loud or getting so specific with their gerrymandering that it’s no longer plausible that it’s just a coincidence.
They’d get away with it if they were smarter (but then, if they were smarter they wouldn’t be racists)
It’s so depressing how dumb most people running the show nowadays are, even if you put aside the overt malice
Which is great until SCOTUS finishes fully gutting the Voting Rights Act next year.
they’re are waiting when nobody is noticing, and they will pounce and repeal the SAME SEX Marriage first.
I’m amused that if this does get stopped by judges, and the other one recently reportedly blocked for the same reason in another state, that if California redistricts their maps it’s really going to be the GOP shooting themselves in the foot.
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There are many texans that would very much surprise you, it seems.
Tx republicans have been rigging elections in their favor for decades now. Though there is definitely a higher concentration of bigots and x-phobes in the south, they are still the minority. Those governing the state simply do not accurately reflect the will of its people because it is far less profitable to do that than it is to do its immediate alternative.
there were, until many migrated to texas and florida as republican voting.
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You just keep appealling till someone lets it happen.
It’s basically a game of hot potato where you don’t want to be unlucky when the game ends, but nothing else matters. Pass it too early and you’ll get it back, just with less time on the clock.
You just keep appealling
till someone lets it happen.until 6months before the election then claim its too late to change up.When the highest tier of appeal is the current Supreme Court, that means it will almost certainly settle in Republicans’ favor eventually. You’re right in that it’s just a question of how long it takes to get there.
The only chance this redistricting has at not passing on appeal is if all of the retaliatory redistricting efforts are taken down with it and there is a concern that the sum total of these redistricting efforts may cost the Republicans more seats than they are to gain. There’s no way they allow Texas to be rejected while California goes forward.
California was a referendum by the voters. Texas was a unilateral decision by the current government.
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DEI redistricting LMAO
I’m sure that’ll stop them
