GALVESTON, Texas (CN) — A new Galveston County redistricting map that eliminated a sole Black- and Latino-dominant precinct violates the Voting Rights Act and cannot be used in future elections, a federal judge ruled Friday.
Though Galveston County is predominantly white and Republican, the area also has large populations of Black and Latino voters who tend to lean Democratic. That dynamic is reflected in the county’s leadership.
The County Commissioners Court consists of an elected judge and four precinct commissioners. The judge and three commissioners are Republicans.
After the 2020 census, they enacted a redistricting map in November 2021 that dismantled Precinct 3, the county’s sole Latino- and Black-majority precinct. Stephen Holmes, the county’s only Black Democratic commissioner, has led Precinct 3 for 24 years, or six terms.
The map was challenged in three federal lawsuits filed against the Commissioners Court by Black community activists from Galveston, the Justice Department, three local NAACP branches and a League of United Latin American Citizens council.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Donald Trump appointee, consolidated the complaints and held a 10-day bench trial in August.
Brown sided with the map’s opponents in a 157-page ruling issued Friday.
As the "heart of the case," the judge cited the testimony of one of the NAACP’s expert witnesses, William Cooper, who has four decades of experience crafting voting maps for more than 700 jurisdictions.
Cooper testified that the new map had changed Precinct 3 from a Black- and Latino-majority precinct to the one with the lowest percentage of Blacks and Latinos in the county.
“It’s just a textbook example of racial gerrymandering,” Cooper said on the witness stand.
“I have never seen anything this bad,” Cooper continued. “Because normally if a minority-majority district is in place, then you are not going to see a locality attempt to eliminate it unless [it] had no choice due to demographic changes.” (Brackets in original.)
Brown determined the defendants had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racially discriminatory maps, as the Supreme Court made clear in recent rulings against Alabama’s proposed congressional maps.
Calling the county’s new Republican-approved map “stark and jarring,” Brown found that it would preclude Black and Latino voters from electing their candidate of choice in any commissioner's precinct.
“It does so even though these two groups comprise 38% of the total population in Galveston County. Moreover, it eliminated an existing commissioner's precinct where such an opportunity had existed for decades,” Brown wrote.
The Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit, is co-counsel for the plaintiffs.
“Today’s historic decision underscores a simple fact: Galveston County’s Black and Latino residents deserve a voice in government,” said Mark Gaber, the group’s senior director of redistricting.
“After decades of discrimination, this most recent voting map was just the latest blatant attempt to silence Galveston County’s Black and Latino voters. The court’s decision is a momentous step in addressing that injustice and ensuring that Galveston County’s Black and Latino residents can elect a representative who will best serve their communities,” Gaber added in a statement.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Brown's decision demonstrates the Justice Department is ensuring communities throughout the country comply with the Voting Rights Act. "The Justice Department will continue to stand up for the right of every eligible citizen to vote and to have that vote counted," he vowed.
The office of Galveston County Judge Mark Henry — the elected chief of the Commissioners Court — did not respond to a request for comment on Brown’s ruling.
Nov. 11 is the opening date for Commissioners Court candidates to file declarations of their intent to run in the 2024 primary.
To ensure a map is in place before then, Brown ordered the defendants to propose a remedial redistricting plan by Oct. 20 with supporting expert analysis showing it comports with Section 2 and has at least one majority-minority district.
He gave the plaintiffs until Oct. 27 to file objections to the defendants’ plan and offer alternative maps.
If the Republican county judge and commissioners fail or prefer not to submit a revised plan, Brown said he will force them to implement an “illustrative plan” drawn by Anthony Fairfax, a redistricting expert retained by the Justice Department.
Fairfax’s plan took a “least change” approach, where he made the least map-line changes to equalize the populations of each of the county’s four precincts; making voting districts or precincts of equal or near-equal populations is required by the Constitution.
Galveston County, with a population of 355,600, holds a special place in Texas and U.S. history as the birthplace of Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery.
Its seat is the barrier island city of Galveston, which was the Republic of Texas’ largest city and hub of commerce in the 1830s before Texas joined the Union.
The city was also once a center of African slave trading.
Due to Galveston County’s history of voting discrimination, it once had to get the federal government’s approval for any changes to its voting rules or practices. But the Supreme Court tossed out the preclearance requirement for states and local jurisdictions, most of them in the South, with troubled histories on voting rights, with a 5-4 order in 2013.
Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting cycle was the first without the preclearance rule.
The case is one of several disputes arising from the mandatory redrawing of voting maps throughout the U.S. after the 2020 Census.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a challenge by civil rights groups of a congressional map drawn by South Carolina’s Republican-led Legislature. The organizations claim the state’s map dilutes the votes of Democratic-leaning Black residents.
In 2019, the Supreme Court decided partisan gerrymandering, in which Republicans or Democrats craft voting maps to give themselves an advantage at the ballot box, is not reviewable by federal courts. And South Carolina GOP lawmakers argue they used electoral data, not racial data, to give themselves an edge.
Louisiana is also involved in litigation over its GOP-majority Legislature’s new congressional map that gave just one of the state’s six districts a majority-Black voting-age population, though Black people make up nearly one-third of the state’s voting-eligible residents.
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