this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Statistically, you are absolutely correct. But the issue here is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which forbids "the abridgement of the right to vote based on race or color." AL-7 for instance, the current Black majority district, is drawn in such a way that it collects voters from the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery and lumps them in with rural Black voters from the "Black Belt" to form a district that is 60% non-White which you can see in the image from this article. By concentrating Black voters in one district, the legislature dilutes their voting power significantly, which SCOTUS recently ruled to be an illegal racial gerrymander under the VRA.
Southern states especially, but not exclusively, have attempted to limit Black voting power for literally hundreds of years. The VRA was written to consider race, because the existing problems resulted from White southern legislatures intentionally limiting the voting power of Black citizens. It was a remedy for a specific form of political oppression which is still ongoing in states like Alabama. You can read more about the Alabama racial gerrymander here.
Yeah, most US style guides have Black capitalized now, White less so, but I personally prefer it. Just to reflect that we're talking about racial groups specifically. Always good to learn something new!
Thanks for the article linked. That map was great for finally seeing what, exactly, people are talking about. It looks like Alabama is mostly White with two big-ish and a couple small clusters of Black voters. They achieved the one Black majority district by CD-7 basically extending two long tendrils to "eat" much of these two clusters (Birmingham and Montgomery), and despite that it is only barely a majority (56% Black).
If these two tendrils were removed, it looks like there would still be just one Black majority district (CD-6) with CD-7 and CD-2 both having somewhat big minorities of Black voters.
Seems like you would need to cut very carefully to achieve two Black majority districts, which very much sounds like gerrymandering to me. However, this is just based on that one map, so I may very well be mistaken.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, since I’ve only started informing myself on this topic starting with this article:
It seems to me, that the basis of the argument that you need a Black majority in order to fully assert your right to vote is the assertion that voters who are Black cannot be represented by officials non-Black people vote for. It seems to assume a strict racial divide in who people vote for, with White people having their White representative and Black people needing their Black representative.
This seems like a very foreign concept to me, since politicians are supposed to be able to represent multiple groups in my head, and since political opinions should not map 1-to-1 to race.
On the other hand, I resonate much more with the article’s quote on "voter dilution" by Terri Sewell. If you pack some districts so full that they are majorly Black, you thereby risk reducing them in others until their opinions as a voting block are pretty much irrelevant there. This seems like an argument to work towards having a significant minority of voters in several districts instead of concentrating them in one or two districts.
Glad the map helped! Yes, they have been ordered by the court to make the map in such a way that Black Alabamians, who make up ~~40%~~ 27% (correction, thanks @Spiracle) of the voting age population according to this article, have a reasonable shot of electing their preferred representative in at least 2 districts. In Alabama, voting is extremely racially polarized with the vast majority of Republicans being White (~70%) and the vast majority of Democrats being Black (~80%) (see here). Because of this, to elect their preferred representative, the district will almost certainly have to be majority Black.
So yes, if you want to say this is gerrymandering because it is drawing maps with a certain outcome in mind I guess you can say that. But gerrymandering is usually used to describe intentionally limiting voting power based on race or party, while this is designed to equalize it based on racial demographics.
Here is the new map proposed by the AL legislature. It essentially removes one tendril to increase the Black pop in CD-2. It is likely also to be struck down because it only increase the Black pop to about 40% in that district while the court order asks for specifically a majority "or something quite close to it."
Mentioned this a little above, but can add more detail. The Black-majority districts can elect whomever they choose, but just because of the nature of race and partisanship in Alabama this will almost certainly be a Black Democrat. I should also note that gerrymandering on the basis of party is 100% legal. The problem is a party-based gerrymander in Alabama is essentially indistinguishable from a race-based one. The law is not enforcing a racial divide, it is recognizing one that already exists. A district which is 60% non-Black (like the proposed CD-2 above) is almost guaranteed to not be represented by the candidate that the majority of Black people vote for.
(Sorry these keep getting longer, enjoying the discussion and hope that it helps explain our incredibly confusing politics)
Small correction, Black Alabamians make up ~27% of the voting age pop. The 40% number in the article was about district 2. Based on the rest of your post, I assume you mistyped.
Thank you! Yeah, that is about what I thought it would be. District 7 goes from ~56% Black down to 51,32%. District 2 grows to ~40% Black, and I don’t see how it could grow higher without some very weird shapes. I was surprised that District 6 (Birmingham) didn’t become majority Black, but it seems that the cluster there is still taken by a tendril from CD-7.
That’s quite the conundrum. With party-lines being drawn so close to the racial divide, and with the USA’s horrible two-party system, a normal map would just lead to a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the worst outcome of democratic elections.
Changing the districts to more proportionally represent the population’s opinion (which in this case happens to coincide closely with ethnicity) sounds like a band-aid solution. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, it seems obviously wrong on the surface of it, works really awkwardly, but it’s the best currently available method towards achieving equally in the spirit of democracy.
Thank you for the discussion/explanations. I quite enjoyed it and feel much more informed now.
You’re totally right my bad.
Couldn’t have said it better.