People on the blog have long posted about the structural problems of elections, like Diebold machines. However, what about a type of affirmative-action that was done with the best of intentions?
In almost every poll, the Democrats now have a moderate size lead on the generic ballot, and people are telling pollsters they want a different direction. However, when political pundits like Stu Rothenberg or Charlie Cook analyze House districts, they don't see a lot of competitive races. This has been attributed to how the state legislatures redrew lines after the 2000 census to protect incumbents of both parties.
But that doesn't tell the entire story. A part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 may be the biggest reason the Republicans won & still have a majority in the House, and the biggest obstacle to Democrats being competitive in the south...
One remedy under the Voting Rights Act are
Majority-Minority Districts. A violation of
Section 2 (42 U.S.C. 1973) of the act is...
...any state or local government to use election processes that are not equally open to minority voters, or that give minority voters less opportunity than other voters to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice to public office. In particular, Section 2 makes it illegal for state and local governments to "dilute" the votes of racial minority groups, that is, to have an election system that makes minority voters' votes less effective than those of other voters. One of many forms of minority vote dilution is the drawing of district lines that divide minority communities and keep them from putting enough votes together to elect representatives of their choice to public office. Depending on the circumstances, dilution can also result from at-large voting for governmental bodies. When coupled with a long-standing pattern of racial discrimination in the community, these and other election schemes can deny minority voters a fair chance to elect their preferred candidates.
So Majority-Minority disticts were created to correct the
"dillution" of minority voices. I believe African-Americans make up 25% of North Carolina's population, but before 1992 there wasn't a single minority in the congressional delegation. That changed when
Mel Watt was elected from North Carolina's 12th, a majority-minority created district of the 1990 census. These districts have the result of having more people of color involved in government, and having their voice heard as part of the process.
However, in order to achieve these districts, you have to gerrymander them by packing African-Americans or other minority voters into one or just a few districts. The result of this, is to make all of the other districts around the Majority-Minority disctrict "Whiter" & more conservative, by taking away a group of people who tend to vote Democrat. Many people believe this is what happened in Georgia during the 90s. Also, Republicans don't have to worry about being "too" conservative in their voting, since there aren't enough Democratic voters in their district to punish them.
Take a look at Mel Watt's district and how they achieve majority-minority...
CNN's Jeffrey Toobin had an article in The New Yorker back in 2003, discussing how the Republicans have seized on these districts in order to create a structural advantage...
...Republicans recognized the value of concentrating black voters, who are reliable Democrats, in single districts, which are known in voting-rights parlance as "majority-minority." As Gerald Hebert, a Democratic redistricting operative and former Justice Department lawyer, puts it, "What you had was the Republicans who were in charge for every redistricting cycle at the Justice Department--'81, '91, '01. And there was a kind of thinking in the eighties and in the early nineties that if you could create a majority-minority district anywhere in the state, regardless of how it looked and what its impact was on surrounding districts, then you simply had to do it. What ended up happening was that they went out of their way to divide and conquer the Democrats." The real story of the Republican congressional landslide of 1994, many redistricting experts believe, is the disappearance of white Democratic congressmen, whose black constituents were largely absorbed into majority-minority districts.
So what to do about them? If it is a choice, is it more important to have minority representation than a Democratic party majority? Should the party push to abolish the section of the Voting Rights Act that allows majority-minority districts when it comes up for renewal in 2007? If we do that, is there a backlash from African-Americans & other minority voters, and those represenatives who come from these districts?