Tuesday, October 05, 2021

Gerrymandering in Texas

This is a map of the Republican Party's proposal for TX-33, a congressional district in the city of Dallas. Last Monday the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature unveiled maps of how it plans to redraw Texas' political map. Under these proposals TX-33 will become probably the most gerrymandered electoral district in all of the USA, if not the world. It is a spectacular testament to the Republican Party's contempt for both democracy and the American people.

In Explaining the Most Bizarrely Shaped Districts in Texas’s Proposed Congressional Map the Texas Monthly explains the incredibly gerrymandered proposal for TX-33 very simply as an attempt to "pack non-Anglo voters into one district". The bizarre shape of TX-33 is a blatant attempt to pack possible Democrat voters all into the one district, in the process making marginal neighboring Republican districts much less marginal.It is an attempt at vote packing which can be seen all over Texas' proposed new political map.

In How Texas Plans to Make its House Districts Even Redder the New York Times has published an interactive map which shows the boundaries of all the proposed congressional districts in Texas and also visualizes the 2020 Presidential vote margin in each precinct. By overlaying the vote margin on top of the proposed new electoral districts the NYT clearly shows how the Republican Party is trying to pack Democrat voters into as few districts as it possibly can. 

The result is a political map which will contain some of the most bizarrely shaped electoral districts that Texas has ever seen. A map which is so gerrymandered and undemocratic that any politician supporting this map should by right be automatically barred from standing for office ever again.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous1:19 PM

    Only Republicans gerrymander districts?

    ReplyDelete