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[dramatis]

The article is a part two of an article series on NYT called Disenfranchised. Part two focuses on Hispanic disenfranchisement.

After the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act, tactics to suppress minority voting are flourishing — especially in states where Hispanic voters are reshaping the electorate.

With the political stakes rising, the mayor had made an unexpected move: He proposed a ballot initiative reducing the number of Council districts to 6 from 8, while adding two new at-large council seats that would now represent the entire city. At-large offices might seem more democratic, as they are selected by the entire city instead of only the people in one district. But because Hispanic turnout was so low in citywide elections, whites could outvote them every time. Under the new plan, the mayor’s majority would almost certainly be safe. ‘‘They create two at-large districts basically as a way to ensure that power was kept on that side,’’ Del Toro said, gesturing to the south.

During his lifetime, he has seen Pasadena’s population grow to 150,000 from 3,500. He was trying to be a mayor of ‘‘one Pasadena,’’ he said, Hispanic and Anglo, north and south. But politics were getting in the way, he said, and it ‘‘seems to be worse now.’’ Isbell grew up on the north side but moved south many years ago. Now he was dealing with an emboldened group of Hispanic lawmakers — Ornaldo Ybarra, Sammy Casados and Cody Ray Wheeler — who had teamed up with an Anglo councilwoman, Pat Van Houte, to demand answers about the disparity between north and south, between Hispanics and Anglos.

Isbell wondered aloud whether his council opponents just didn’t understand the way the city worked. ‘‘They’re talking about pouring sidewalks and fixing streets — it’s just not informed,’’ Isbell said, frowning. ‘‘So it’s a matter of maybe better educating them.’’

In March 2014, the mayor presented the council with a new set of maps. In reducing the number of individual districts to six from eight, Isbell’s new map had reconfigured two of the majority-Hispanic districts, represented by Van Houte and Ybarra, into one larger district. When it was her turn to speak, Van Houte, a retired state benefits administrator, began to argue that the plan was so discriminatory that it could run afoul of the Voting Rights Act even without Section 5 in place. When she had talked for some five minutes, the mayor tried to cut her off. (He had recently enacted a new Council ordinance, on a 5-4 vote, limiting each member’s speaking time to two minutes.) Then Isbell ordered police officers to escort the council member from the room. ‘‘Oh, I’ve removed three of them,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s hard to make them obey the law. They’re still doing it, and I have to shut them down all the time.’’

To keep District 23 in Republican hands, Perales said, ‘‘they came up with the ‘nudge factor.’ ’’ The nudge factor was a brilliant plan that would have gone undiscovered had its architects not hatched it in emails that were discovered in the ensuing court fight. It was introduced by Eric Opiela, a lawyer working for the Republican speaker of the Texas House, Joe Straus, and the Texas congressional delegation. Through extensive polling, data analysis and modeling, both parties know with ever-greater precision which individual voters turn out in elections and which don’t, as well as whether they tend to vote Democratic or Republican and their age, race and ethnicity. Opiela suggested the mapmakers redraw the district to include new clumps of Hispanics — ones whom the data identified as low-turnout voters. (The subject line of one email was ‘‘Useful Metric.’’)

Lots of quotes, but there is a lot in the article and it is worth reading through. There is a picture near the end that has a nice caption; it probably looks terrifying to Republicans though.


Part one was published in late July 2016 and focused on black disenfranchisement. It's also worth reading.

A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act.

Why didn't the Republicans, whose party was founded on outrage about racial injustice, instead try to rekindle their alliance with black voters? I posed the question to Wrenn. He sat back for a moment, reflective. In fact, he said, they thought about it. They asked their pollsters to identify some Republican positions that could appeal to black voters, and the pollsters found that some black voters might just be drawn by the party's religiosity and its position on abortion. But the pollsters also found that, Abraham Lincoln and several generations of Jim Crow notwithstanding, black voters simply saw Democrats as more reliable allies after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. "Nothing else mattered," Wrenn said. "Abortion didn't matter. Religion didn't matter. It was experience." He sighed. "I may be dead wrong," he added, almost as an afterthought. "Because one thing I've learned is that I do not understand the mind of the black voter."

As for white voters, the Southern strategy worked. Helms won his next two races and provided a vast Southern support network for Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign team, which used many of the racial dog-whistle slogans that Helms had made a regular part of his campaign arsenal. In one of Reagan's first campaign events following his nomination, he went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi — near where the Klan killed three civil rights workers 16 years earlier — and declared, "I believe in states' rights."

Rehnquist and his fellow justices did not dispute the logic. Instead, they argued something new: that the plaintiffs failed to prove that Mobile set up the election system with the intention of shutting out blacks. This subtle distinction about intention created a new, often impossibly high bar for winning Voting Rights Act cases. It wasn't enough to show that a law resulted in black voters being disenfranchised. Now the plaintiff also had to show "proof of intent."

Dole, who voted for the Voting Rights Act in 1965, thought the Reagan team's ideological fervor put the party's efforts to build a broad, winning coalition of voters at risk. His argument prevailed, and Reagan ultimately signed the strengthened version of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, with the new standard for bringing discrimination cases intact. "I tried to make the point to the White House that, as a party, we needed to demonstrate that we cared and were concerned about votes from African-Americans and Hispanics," Dole, now 92, told me earlier this summer. "I don't know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln."

By then, it was becoming clear that the Bush administration was picking up where the Reagan- and Bush-era Justice Department left off. One of Bush's tactics was to pack the Commission on Civil Rights with a conservative majority. His administration was hardly the first to mold the commission to its ideology, but it did so in a new way: Avoiding rules barring a president from appointing more than four commissioners from his or her party, two Republican appointees re-registered as independents. The move cleared the way for Bush to add two new Republicans, effectively giving the commission a 6-2 split. Bush made Abigail Thernstrom, a respected conservative author who had been questioning the role of Section 5 since the 1980s, its vice chairwoman.

What I think these two articles are good at are outlining the different perspectives on what is going on with voting rights and representation fights in various place in the US, along with some history on the fights. The author, Jim Rutenberg, also describes how the roundabout 'system' implementations work against minorities without being openly against minorities.

It makes me a bit curious what will happen if the Asian population actually grows large enough to be a factor in elections.

I searched for a thread, but there didn't seem to be a thread for either of these articles, but lock if there are and I just couldn't find them.

 

[EdibleKnife]

Saving these for later. Thanks. Also sharing on Facebook

 

[Gentleman Jack]

New attack, same old tactics

 

[HK-47]

Good luck with that line. Hispanics are way too fast growing for the old African American tactics to save conservatives.

 

[funkypie]

Can you blame the republicans? Like all morons they will try to cling onto what bit of power they have left. Due to the changing demographics of the USA, they will become irrelevant in years to come.

 

[entremet]

Good luck with that line. Hispanics are way too fast growing for the old African American tactics to save conservatives.

Funny thing, Republicans had the Hispanic vote during the GWB years, but they blew it.

 

[BLACK AMERICAN PSYCHO]

Good luck with that line. Hispanics are way too fast growing for the old African American tactics to save conservatives.

They'll find a way, they always do.

 

[Toxi]

Isbell wondered aloud whether his council opponents just didn’t understand the way the city worked. ‘‘They’re talking about pouring sidewalks and fixing streets — it’s just not informed,’’ Isbell said, frowning. ‘‘So it’s a matter of maybe better educating them.’’

This man makes me want to punch him in the teeth.

 

[Admiral Woofington]

You can't stop us white people.

Every day we grow stronger from drinking the blood of American values. You see that BBQ place you've loved since you were a kid? Itll be a Peruvian restaurant by the end of the year. And worst of all we'll make soccer the National pastime.


Muwahahahahahahahahaha

 

[BLACK AMERICAN PSYCHO]

You can't stop us white people.

You really can't. We have tried

 

[Mudcrab]

We ain't scared, in the end we'll win.

You can't stop us white people.

Every day we grow stronger from drinking the blood of American values. You see that BBQ place you've loved since you were a kid? Itll be a Peruvian restaurant by the end of the year. And worst of all we'll make soccer the National pastime.


Muwahahahahahahahahaha

Don't let them know our secrets, but the BBQ restaurants can stay.

 

[fixedpoint]

The article is a part two of an article series on NYT called Disenfranchised. Part two focuses on Hispanic disenfranchisement.

Great articles, saving both for later. It's interesting how quickly public discourse conveniently forgets selected parts of our collective history.

Schlozman decided to try to quell the dissent by conducting an aggressive — and, an inspector general’s report later found, illegal — effort to hire like-minded attorneys and to marginalize or get rid of career attorneys the Bush team saw as too liberal. In emails, Schlozman boasted: “My tentative plan to is to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section” and to replace them with “right-thinking Americans.”

Probably worth noting that Rubio is backed by the same neocon sociopaths that Bush was.

 

[Not]

You can't stop us white people.

One of those awesome times where a comma makes all the difference

 

[luckygodzilla]

One of those awesome times where a comma makes all the difference

Bahahaha.

Seriously though this entire situation is downright shameful.

 

[Protein]

Hispanic Texans are going to eventually team up with Austin hipsters and we will swallow Texas.

 

[Slayven]

Good luck with that line. Hispanics are way too fast growing for the old African American tactics to save conservatives.

I feel like this is the minority version of "There is another......."

 

[Dega]

You can't stop us white people.

Every day we grow stronger from drinking the blood of American values. You see that BBQ place you've loved since you were a kid? Itll be a Peruvian restaurant by the end of the year. And worst of all we'll make soccer the National pastime.


Muwahahahahahahahahaha

No, we will not make soccer the national pastime.

 

[dramatis]

Good luck with that line. Hispanics are way too fast growing for the old African American tactics to save conservatives.

Hm, the article goes into this.

But the bigger voting rights fight isn’t about the map of today. It’s about the map of tomorrow, which will be reshaped by Hispanics in ways that could realign national politics for generations. Hispanic Americans have faced a long legacy of white hostility, dating back to the mid-19th century, when Texas state and local officials began a sporadic campaign to chase Hispanic citizens from polls with threats of violence or prison. Congress placed Texas under Section 5 oversight in 1975, based partly on its continued use of English-only ballots. But even now, Hispanic citizens are registering and voting at levels that are not much better than those of blacks near the end of Jim Crow — a 38.8 percent turnout in Texas in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, as opposed to more than 60 percent for both blacks and ‘‘Anglos,’’ the widely used informal term for non-Hispanic whites. (In the census, Hispanics can be of any race, and do not count as a racial category.)

The population is growing, but they need to be registered and able to counteract any voter-ID or voting restrictions laws that are enacted from here on out. If they're being closed out of government now, the 'Anglos' in charge can also devise ways to inhibit the Hispanic vote.

The 'main character' of the article, Oscar Del Toro, illustrates the problems right now through his story about Pasadena.

Del Toro had come to believe that Hispanic turnout was low for a reason. More often than not, he said, it had to do with fear — sometimes voters’ families came from countries with repressive regimes. But just as often, it was a fear of American authority, one that was passed down to the children, adding to a cultural bias against voting. As he worked the north side, he said, he heard the usual complaints: ‘‘Oh, they have very good parks over there; they have very good flower beds over there — I mean, we don’t have sidewalks.’’
[...]
But fear is a powerful suppressant, and as his daughters sought to get their friends to vote for their dad they learned that the local, statewide and national climate, combined with the new voter-ID law, was adding to the atmosphere of anxiety. ‘‘I have a lot of Spanish friends, and their parents were like, ‘What is the form going to ask me?’ ’’ Del Toro’s daughter Wendy, 25, a juvenile-probation officer, told me over the phone in November. ‘‘The word they used was ‘intimidated.’ ’’ A common question, she said, was whether they were going to be asked about their citizenship status; even though they were citizens, they were apprehensive about being seen as ‘‘illegals.’’ Their children were almost as uneasy. ‘‘They didn’t know what you need — they were like, ‘I can’t vote because I don’t have a driver’s license,’ small things like that.’’ (Confusion over new voting laws can be as powerful a deterrent as the provisions themselves; a recent Rice University study suggested that the Texas voter-ID law deterred voters from going to the polls in numbers that may have caused one former United States congressman, Pete Gallego, to lose his seat in 2014 — even though many of them actually had the proper ID.)

 

[yanipheonu]

http://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY

Ah gerrymandering. Reason 27 there needs to be voting reform.