The Voting Rights Act and Gwinnett County
With the Supreme Court set to issue some (potentially) landmark redistricting rulings soon, I thought I’d take a look at Gwinnett County, Georgia and how it’s unique distribution of residents could dominate the next decade of redistricting lawsuits and how we currently contemplate the Voting Rights Act and how that might have to change. The only tool really left with the VRA is Section 2, which has historically required the drawing of minority majority districts only when a single minority group can constitute 50% of the citizen voting age population in a compact district. Gwinnett County has four county commission and school board districts and enough population to qualify for about 15 of Georgia’s 180 state house districts. To start with, here’s a color coded map of each precinct in Gwinnett County based on voting age population shaded by the largest plurality group. White voters get two colors — yellow if they are over 50% of the voting age population and blue if they only make up a plurality. Green = Black voters, Purple = Hispanics, Red = Asians.
As of 2010, majority white areas make up just over 51% of the county, plurality white areas make up an additional 17%, majority/plurality black areas make up 16% (though in these combined precincts, blacks make up just 41% of the voting age population), majority/plurality Hispanic areas make up just under 15% (Hispanics are 47% of the VAP) and one Asian plurality precinct (43%) is just under 1% of the county.
On the whole, the county’s VAP is 48% white, 22% black, 18% Hispanic and 11% Asian. So in a 4 district plan, you could reasonably expect to have 2 white districts, 1 black district and 1 Hispanic district. We’ll ignore, for now, the citizenship analysis that seriously dilutes Hispanic VAP calcualtions — this will be less of an issue going forward as the citizen Hispanic population ages into voting age. Here’s the best single non-contiguous black district you can draw on a 4 member map:
Obviously, this district is not contiguous. But even if it were, at only 39.1% black VAP, Section 2 would not mandate its drawing. Once you make the district contiguous, it’s black VAP drops even lower, to 35.1%.
Amazingly, 55% of Gwinnett’s black voting age population lives outside the non-contiguous district, and about 60% of the voting age population lives outside of the contiguous district. Historically, Section 2 has been applied in areas where the minority population was much more tightly distributed. Fayette County had a landmark voting rights case this decade that required the 19% black VAP county to use 5 separate districts instead of at large seats so that at least one district could be drawn that was majority black.
But Gwinnett doesn’t use at-large elections (though many other cities in Georgia do and could be overdue for their own VRA lawsuits). It already has districts. Similarly, an attempt to draw a contiguous Hispanic seat stalls out at much lower than a majority — before even taking citizenship into account.
An attempt to draw a contiguous Asian district can’t even produce a non-majority white district — the Asian district would be 17.9% by VAP, higher than black (13.9%) and Hispanic (10.7%), but whites wold still be the majority (55.7%).
Even when drawing much smaller districts, in this example districts roughly equal to the size of a state house district, Gwinnett’s high minority populations are almost impossible to group into compact and contiguous minority majority districts.
Drawing just at the precinct level, you can get to a single 50% black district (with rounding), a single 55% Hispanic district, and the best you can do for Asian voters is a 29% plurality district that still has a white plurality. So even on a 15 member map, Gwinnett’s 52% minority voting age population is likely to directly control only 2 districts — instead of the nearly 8 they make up by population. In fact, when you draw a “fair looking” contiguous map to fill in the remaining 15 districts, only 4 districts don’t have a white plurality or majority.
So it’s clear to me that the Voting Rights Act, as currently written or interpreted, does not contemplate what to do with an area like Gwinnett County. It’s very likely that the next time districts are drawn, Republicans will have lost their majority control of the county and Democrats may have enough input into the process to electively carve up the county into districts that try to give Gwinnett’s minority population more of a say in electing representatives. But even if that happens, will it be enough?
I would argue that Gwinnett County and other areas of the country that are seeing increased diversity where more than one race also lives together in communities (one Gwinnett precinct doesn’t have a single racial group higher than 30%) will require a re-imagining of Section 2 of the voting rights act — to either mandate a less strict majority test and the creation of minority plurality districts, the creation of minority coalition districts, looking at groups of districts together to see if they jointly achieve representation, or the most radical of all — forcing states or other jurisdictions to adopt multi-member at large elections in certain areas that would for example group Gwinnett into something like three districts where every voter gets one vote and the five highest vote-getters are elected.
In that scenario, we could imagine the green district (52% white, 29% black) electing 3 white members and 2 black members, the purple district (28% white, 22% black, 32% hispanic, 16% asian) electing 2 Hispanic members and 1 each black, white and Asian, and the blue district (64% white, 14% black, 11% Hispanic, 10% Asian) electing 1 black member and either 3 or 4 white members (with perhaps the 4th being Hispanic or Asian).
Under that scenario, Gwinnett could end up with 8 white members, 4 black members, 2 Hispanic members and 1 Asian member. That would produce an outcome much more representative of the county as a whole than a fair section 2 driven redistricting process that would currently only yield 4 plurality+ minority districts. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will give map drawers some clarity this year on reining in partisan gerrymandering, but as this post shows, the issues continue to evolve and are never really settled.