As noted elsewhere, SCOTUS is reviewing a variety of voting district isuues. Would that someone on her Iowa listening tour asks Hillary about Lani Guinier being thrown under the bus in the 1990s as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993.
"Guinier later wrote that neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton ever spoke to her again." "William T. Coleman Jr., who had served as Secretary of Transportation under President Gerald Ford, wrote that the withdrawal was "a grave [loss], both for President Clinton and the country. The President's yanking of the nomination, caving in to shrill, unsubstantiated attacks, was not only unfair, but some would say
political cowardice."
(1994) The case, now called Shaw v. Hunt, went to court in North Carolina Monday, and guess what? Attorneys on both sides say they are open to at least one of the alternative voting ideas that Clinton and Guinier's other critics called radical.
In fact, contrary to Guinier's "quota queen" tag, the parties in Shaw v. Hunt like the alternative voting scheme precisely because it can increase black representation without quotas, gerrymandering or the infringement of white rights. It is called "cumulative voting," and it works like this: You lump several candidates together into a much larger geographic district and you give every voter as many votes as there are candidates.
The voter then can give as many of the votes to as many candidates as he or she wishes. If blacks or any other racial, ethnic or interest group want to put all of their votes on the candidates from their group, they can do it.
If it sounds radical, it shouldn't. Cumulative voting is used to elect councils in Peoria; Cambridge, Mass.; Alamogordo, N.M., and several Alabama counties. Voters in Illinois called it "bullet voting" when they elected the General Assembly this way for more than 100 years to ensure minority party representatives. "It even plays in Peoria," quips Rob Richie, national director of the Washington-based Center for Voting and Democracy, which is advising the parties in Shaw v. Hunt on alternative voting.
Both sides like it, says Richie, because "it offers universal coverage." Whereas race-based plans sound like they are deliberately trying to ensure outcomes by race, cumulative voting guarantees opportunity to minority interests without guaranteeing outcomes.
The North Carolina case is Dickson v. Rucho. Dickson is former state Rep. Margaret Dickson, who said in a statement Monday that North Carolinians “deserve to have this resolved so that they can benefit from fair and legal maps for the 2016 elections.”
“We have always known that the current maps were unconstitutional and are gratified that the Supreme Court of the United States has now set in motion a way forward for final disposition of this long-running and wrongly-decided case,” she said in the statement.
Monday’s decision was set in motion in March, when the U.S. justices issued a divided ruling in the Alabama case, saying the court there must take another look at whether Alabama’s Republican-led legislature relied too heavily on race when it redrew the state’s voting districts in a way that black leaders say limited minority voting power.
In that case, the justices split 5-4 across ideological lines in ruling that a three-judge panel had not properly considered complaints that state officials illegally packed black voters into too few voting districts.
Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the lower court should have reviewed claims of racial gerrymandering on a district-by-district level, not just statewide. He also said the court didn’t apply the right test when it found that race wasn’t the primary motivating factor.
Breyer said both the district court and the state legislature relied too much on a “mechanically numerical” view of whether the new plan reduced minority voting strength. Instead of asking how it could maintain the minority percentages in districts, the court should have asked what percentages the minority should have to elect their candidate of choice.
“Asking the wrong question may well have led to the wrong answer,” Breyer said.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote, joined the court’s four liberals in the majority, including justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.