Texas sued again over redrawn voting districts

AUSTIN, Texas — Voting-rights advocates are suing Texas again, this time with support from a former U.S. attorney general, over the state’s newly redrawn congressional district maps that favor the GOP, claiming the maps dilute the vote of communities of color after growth in America’s largest red state that was overwhelmingly Hispanic, Black and Asian American people.

The lawsuit was filed Monday by Texas voters and Voto Latino, a Hispanic voter advocacy organization, in an Austin federal court just moments after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the redrawn districts into law.

Texas was the only state to be allocated two new congressional seats this year after U.S. census figures showed the state’s population grew by 4 million people, nearly half of whom were Hispanic. Texas will now have 38 representatives in Congress and 40 electoral votes — second only to California.

The latest lawsuit alleges that the new U.S. House maps violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act by not giving people of color a fair opportunity to elect their representatives. The maps do not include any additional districts in which Black or Hispanic voters make up more than 50% of eligible voters, and census data shows more than 9 in 10 of Texas’ incoming residents in the past decade are people of color.

It comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund this month that makes similar claims.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and whose affiliate organization, the National Redistricting Action Fund, is supporting the lawsuit, said the maps, which pave potentially safer paths for Texas’ majority-GOP incumbents to remain in office, were a “desperate grasp for partisan political power.”

“The map has been crafted with really surgical precision to eliminate competitive districts at the expense of the states’ communities of color,” Holder said.

Texas Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican who devised the maps and chairs the state Senate’s redistricting committee, and Abbott did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Huffman said previously that the maps were “drawn blind to race.”