Austin, Texas: Taking Texas to court again over voting laws, civil rights groups sued Monday to redraw US House districts to thwart the political might of a rapidly growing Latino population. Which is driving the explosive growth of the state.
The federal lawsuit was filed while Republican lawmakers were still racing to finalize on new voting limits in Texas, the big winner of the 2020 census awarded two new seats in Congress.
Greg Abbott of Texas Gov. is expected to sign off on the changes, which should reach his desk by Tuesday.
Maps that overhaul how Texas’ nearly 30 million residents are sorted into political districts and who are elected to represent them have booked a highly charged year on voting rights in the state. Democratic lawmakers twice walked out on an election bill that tightened the state’s already strict voting rules in what they called a brazen attempt to oust minorities and other Democratic-leaning voters.
Texas is using all the means at its disposal to prevent inevitable change in Texas voters, said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Her organization sued in federal court in Texas along with several other minority rights groups. It alleges that Republican mapmakers dilute the political power of minority voters by not attracting any new districts with a majority of Latino residents, despite creating half of Texas’ 4 million new residents in the past decade.
A spokesman for Abbott, who is named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Republicans have said they have followed the law in defending the maps, which protect their slippery grip on Texas by pulling more GOP-leaning voters into suburban districts where Democrats have infiltrated in recent years.
Texas has been regularly dragged to court for decades over voting maps, and in 2017, a federal court found that a Republican-drawn map was designed to deliberately discriminate against minority voters. But two years later, the same court said there was insufficient reason to take the extraordinary step of putting Texas back under federal supervision before voting laws or maps were changed.
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
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