How Gerrymandering Inhibits Civil Rights Progression Stella Liu, Year 11, Keller geographic districts with at-large voting (designating members of a governing body who are elected or appointed to represent the district and its citizens). It eliminated elected positions in favour of appointed ones (that reflected less of the demographics of the area) and reconfigured state legislative districts (gerrymandering) — all in an effort to reduce the effect of the newly surging Black vote and to maintain White supremacy.
Every ten years, the United States collects census data about its population and demographics. States use the data to redraw their electoral districts; these district boundaries determine which congressmen the state elects to represent them on Capitol Hill, essentially giving state legislatures the ability to “pick the voters”. This was how Republican political strategist and gerrymandering mastermind Thomas Hoffeler described the process of gerrymandering. Diagram explaining examples of “cracking” and “packing” Gerrymandering is the manipulation of the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favour one party or class. Similarly, in the electoral college, when a citizen votes, they are in fact voting for an electoral college instead of their preferred candidate. Since varying methods are used to choose the candidates of the electoral college, there may be an uneven distribution of electors in either the Democratic or Republican Party depending on the specific state. A well-known consequence of this was in the 2016 election where Hilary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, even though she received 2,900,000 more votes than the latter. After the monumental ratification of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which replaced the southern states’ near-impossible voting qualification
tests for Black constituents with a fairer national test, the proportion of Black voters in Southern states such as Mississippi dramatically increased from 6.7% to 67.5% of the state’s voting population. Section 4 of the Act banned the unjustifiable literacy tests, which included requests (according to the civil rights movement website) such as “In the space below,”“draw three circles, one inside the other.” Another question was “Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.”, demonstrating again the fact that these questions really had no logical link to how qualified a voter is to vote. Section 5 outlawed discriminatory voting practices by preventing vote dilution, which involved nullifying the minority vote. It also required 9 states and certain areas of 7 other states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to seek approval from the federal government before making changes to voting laws. It didn’t take long, however, for Southern politicians to find a legal loophole. They realized that while it had become nearly impossible to limit black voters’ access to the ballot box, it was still possible to curtail the power of the votes they cast. In the years immediately following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, a growing number of Southern jurisdictions replaced
The literacy test that was taken in Louisiana How Gerrymanding Inhibits Civil Rights Progression
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