Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
The drawing of electoral districts, which takes place every 10 years, will be key to the adequate representation of minority voters in the future, a situation that could be affected by the 2020 census, which was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, experts said.
Because the ten-year state redistricting survey data is delayed due to pandemic-related disruptions and closures, and minorities will feel the results.
But what is the risk?
"The risk is that you end up not having communities of color adequately represented in Congress, in state legislatures, and that then leads to different agendas being pursued within those policymaking bodies," said Thomas A. Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).
During a briefing held by Ethnic Media ServicesAs the country becomes more partisan and polarized, the expert said, there will be close elections in the House and Senate.
"If we fail to create majority-minority districts where justified by the Voting Rights Act, there will not be adequate representation," he said.
He recalled that in majority-minority districts, racial or ethnic communities constitute a large enough portion of the electorate to ensure that the community can elect the candidate of their choice regardless of race.
Redistricting
Redistricting specifies who lives in each district, and of those, who runs for public office in order to respond to the needs of the community on issues such as safety or housing and immigration policies, but this requires a census.
Thus, the census has two explicit purposes, he said. One is to count every inhabitant of the country to reallocate the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among the states, according to their population, and the other is to redistrict not only for Congress, but also for state legislatures and local bodies such as city councils, county boards, boards of education, community college boards, among other bodies.
In that sense, the results of the census make it possible to determine the reallocation of 1.5 billion dollars a year in federal funds to the states for services such as hospitals, schools and others.
In 2020, the situation was turbulent, on the one hand, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on the other, the Donald Trump administration's attempts to include a citizenship question and create a database that would exclude undocumented people.
That action was unsuccessful, but it set a pattern where Republicans have tried to equalize the redistricting database based on voting age population rather than overall total.
"That would have a devastating effect on communities of color for two reasons. First, because particularly Latino and Asian-American communities have higher proportions of non-citizens? (Second), because it would exclude all people under the age of 18 ? and all communities of color have higher proportions under 18 than white populations," Saenz said.
The expert said that according to projections, Texas and Florida could gain more than one seat when the official census count is delivered, while California could lose a seat in the House of Representatives, which could mark a milestone for that state.
To know the outlines and where redistricting is going, he said, we'll have to wait until the end of April.
He also recalled that, in the last 10 years, Texas gained four seats in the House of Representatives thanks to population growth, where 80 percent belonged to communities of color. However, none of the seats went to minority communities.
For LMU Loyola law professor Justin Levitt, in some local jurisdictions there is not a partisan fight, but a titular fight against the minority communities that are emerging in that local jurisdiction, when it is in their interest to preserve their own power.
He explained that, in 2013, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required some states and localities to obtain federal preclearance before they could implement redistricting plans.
Without such oversight, redistricting could diminish the ability of African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American and other minority voters to participate.
The Voting Rights Act also has a provision to attack convertible redistricting plans.
