In a decision that could have far-reaching impact if upheld on appeal, a federal district judge has ruled “prison gerrymandering” in Jefferson County, Florida, to be unconstitutional.
The practice of counting prison inmates (who cannot vote) as local residents when drawing district maps for elections dilutes the clout of voters in other districts without prisons. And, given the demographics of incarcerated populations are disproportionately heavy with people of color (especially blacks), these prison-gerrymandered districts appear on paper to have more minority voters than is actually the case. What that amounts to is a bleaching of the districts around the prison-gerrymandered ones, giving an edge to Republicans in those districts.
It’s not just Florida. In 2010, New York lawmakers ended prison gerrymandering in that state, although it wasn’t until 2012 that Republican opponents gave up their appeal designed to restore the old method. But in the majority of states, prisoners are still counted for districting purposes where they are incarcerated, not where they lived when they were convicted. This is no surprise because the Census Bureau also counts prisoners where they are incarcerated.
In the old days, this didn’t matter so much because prisons were generally built close to populations where inmates came from. But in the past quarter-century or so, new prisons have been built in rural areas even though they continue to incarcerate minorities from urban areas. The upshot: Black prisoners from urban areas boost the voting power of rural, white districts.
The effect is large. In the last Census, the black voting-age population of Florida’s Jefferson County came in at 47.6 percent. Remove black prisoners residing in the county’s state prison and the tally is just 32.7 percent.
In an 86-page decision, Judge Mark Walker, appointed to the bench by Barack Obama in 2012, said the county had violated the 14th Amendment’s “one person, one vote” clause.
Given the Census Bureau’s way of counting prisoners, Jefferson County’s decision to remap its districts by including the inmate population together with voting residents in its calculations might seem reasonable. But there’s chicanery these days in the prison gerrymandering scheme, as reported by Matt Dixon last September:
In a private gathering during last month’s Republican Party of Florida quarterly meeting, state Rep. Janet Adkins told a group of North Florida GOP activists that the key to defeating Corrine Brown, a black Jacksonville Democrat, is boosting the number of black prisoners in her district.
“You draw [Brown's seat] in such a fashion so perhaps, a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote,” said Adkins, a Nassau County Republican, referring to black resident.
The new district for Brown, which the Florida Supreme Court upheld in December, has 18 prisons in it. After the court ruled, Brown stated:
“I have said from the outset that the newly proposed boundaries of Congressional District 5 make it a non-performing district not only for an African-American, but for a member of the Democratic Party. Clearly, those who drew up the map knew that the new congressional district has 18 prisons in it. And they also know that in the state of Florida, felons cannot vote; so not only was the black voting age population (VAP) decreased from 50-45 percent, many of these people are not allowed to vote, so the VAP number is, in reality, vastly below 45 percent.
“Indeed, the diminishment of the black voting age population in this newly drawn district, which consists of 18 prisons that holds 17,000 prisoners, would give the newly drawn Congressional District 5 one of the highest prison populations in the state.
In the Jefferson County case, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the remapping “unlawfully inflates the political strength of actual residents in the district that houses the prison and dilutes the voting strength of those living in all of the other districts in the county."
ACLU lawyer Nancy Abudu told Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress:
...that not only do the inmates in Jefferson County lack the right to vote, the vast majority are not residents of the county, but were arrested in other parts of the state and shipped hundreds of miles away to serve their sentence.
According to the ACLU, of the nearly 1,200 inmates in the correctional center, only nine were convicted in Jefferson County. Yet the inmates make up a whopping 43 percent of the voting age population in District 3. “It skews the numbers so dramatically in this instance” ...
One more example of how Republicans seem eternally intent on figuring out ways to weaken the political clout of people whose voter preferences they don’t like. In other words: Same old, same old.