This diary was to see if one can draw 7 VRA districts in South Texas - and therefore whether the DOJ's lawsuit has the potential for victory. I say the answer is yes. The only way to do this is to add another Fajita strip (to avoid a packing of a 85 % Hispanic district) and cutting up Bexar County carefully (it is messy though in the current map as well). I tried to keep the hispanic percentage of each district as close as possible to the current existing one. There are some slight population deviations, but that can be fixed with splitting of precincts and wouldn't change the underlying demographic data. I did this pretty quick but tried to keep counties/cities together (second of course to getting those 7 VRA seats).
I consulted Wikipedia for what the current hispanic %age is from the Delay remap - which I assume are not VAP but just overal %age.
District 1: El Paso (Blue). 77.7 VAP (77.9 Hispanic). 65 % Obama. Safe Reyes.
District 2: El Paso to San Antonio (Green). 70.9% VAP (55 %). 56.9 % Obama. Lean Gallego.
District 3: San Antonio (Teal). 63.2 % VAP (67.1%). 58 % Obama. Likely Gonzalez.
District 4: Laredo to SA (Silver). 65.1 VAP (64.5%). 58% Obama. Likely Cuellar.
District 5: McAllen (Yellow). 74.4 VAP (new). 57.8% Obama. Open Likely Democrat.
District 6: South Texas to Victoria (Red). 72.0 % VAP (not listed). Obama 54.2 %. Tossup Hinojosa. (Pretty identical to the current district, so assume the %age VAP is about the same).
District 7: Brownsville to Corpus Christi (Purple). 70.4 % VAP (68.1 %). Obama 55%. Tossup Farenthold.
All the districts were at or above where they are now, and bumps up the VAP % for Canseco by about 15 points. Aware that they use the spanish surname index but VAP was the best approximation using DRA for that.