Republicans sends out scam Census ahead of the actual 2020 Census.

CatHedral said:

I am waiting for more districts shaped like ramen noodles.

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Unclebaldrick said:

Before or after?

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A decade ago, North Carolina Republicans redrew their legislative districts to help their party in a way that a federal court ruled illegally deprived Black voters of their right to political representation. A state court later struck down Republican-drawn maps as based on pure partisanship.

So, as the GOP-controlled legislature embarks this year on its latest round of redistricting, it has pledged not to use race or partisan data to draw the political lines. Still, the maps Republicans are proposing would tilt heavily toward their party. Several publicly released congressional maps dilute Democratic votes by splitting the state’s biggest city, Charlotte — also its largest African American population center — into three or four U.S. House districts and giving the GOP at least a 10-4 advantage in a state that Donald Trump narrowly won last year.

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As the once-a-decade redistricting process kicks into high gear, North Carolina is one of at least three states where Republicans say they are drawing maps without looking at racial and party data. But those maps still happen to strongly favor the GOP.

Democrats and civil rights groups are incredulous, noting that veteran lawmakers don’t need a spreadsheet to know where voters of various races and different parties live in their state. Plus, under certain scenarios, the Voting Rights Act requires the drawing of districts where the majority of voters are racial or ethnic minorities.

“This is the first redistricting round I’ve ever heard of this,” said Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is suing Texas Republicans over maps that the GOP said it drew without looking at racial data. “I suspect they’re trying to set up a defense for litigation. Because they know the race data — they know where the Black community lives. They know where the Latino community lives.”

Jason Torchinsky, general counsel to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said ignoring racial data is proper in certain circumstances, as in the cases of North Carolina and Texas.

“It depends on where you are,” Torchinsky said.

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The drawing of legislative lines is often a raw partisan fight because whichever party controls the process can craft districts to maximize its voters’ clout — and scatter opposing voters so widely they cannot win majorities.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Cour t ruled that federal courts cannot overturn unfair maps on the basis of partisanship. But state courts still can void maps for being too partisan and race remains a legal tripwire in redistricting.

If mapmakers explicitly try to weaken voters’ power based on race, they may violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. But the Voting Rights Act requires them to consider race if the state has “racially polarized” voting, in which white people consistently vote against candidates backed by a minority racial or ethnic group. The mapmakers must then create a district in which that minority comprises a plurality or majority of voters so they can elect their preferred candidates.

Republicans complain they cannot win.

“It’s truly a conundrum and has been for the last decade for the GOP, because when we look at race, we were told we shouldn’t have, and those maps were struck down,” said North Carolina state Sen. Paul Newton, who co-chairs that state’s redistricting committee. “Now that we’re not looking at race, the Democrat Party is telling us, ‘Oh, you should be looking at race.’”

North Carolina’s redistricting legal fight is part of why the new race-blind approach caught on.

The Republican-controlled legislature has complete control of redistricting; its maps cannot be vetoed by its Democratic governor. A federal court in 2016 found North Carolina Republicans improperly crammed Black voters into two congressional districts to dilute African American votes elsewhere. It ordered the map redrawn. That updated map was the basis of the 2019 Supreme Court case.

But, barely two months later, a North Carolina state court found the GOP advantage in some of the redrawn state legislative maps still violated the state constitution. Based on this and other rulings, Republicans redrew the maps once again in late 2019, this time saying they weren’t looking at racial or partisan data, and they passed legal muster.

Then, in August, the legislature formally adopted a rule that it wouldn’t consider race or partisanship in its latest line-drawing that would begin after the U.S. Census Bureau released data on population changes over the past decade. Lawmakers noted that, during the epic litigation of the prior decade, a federal court had found the state didn’t have racially polarized voting and didn’t require special attention to racial data.

Democrats and civil rights groups strenuously objected. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice wrote Republicans a letter warning they would be disenfranchising Black and Latino voters. “They’re not listening,” said Allison Riggs, head of the group’s voting rights program.

Other GOP-controlled states have followed North Carolina’s example. For the past five decades, Texas has been found to have violated federal law or the U.S. Constitution in redistricting, including by shortchanging Black and Latino voters. This time, Republicans who control the state Legislature said they wouldn’t consider racial data and their lawyers said that was OK.

“I’ve stated it, and I’ll state it again — we drew these maps race blind,” Texas state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican who drew that state’s maps, said in one Senate hearing.

Although almost all of Texas’ population growth has come from Latinos, African Americans and Asian Americans, the maps do not create any new majority Black or Latino districts. That latter omission is at the heart of suits by Latino civil rights groups last week as Texas approved its maps.

“The only time that communities of color can get justice is going to the courthouse,” said Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia, chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Ohio Republicans are also enmeshed in litigation over their state legislative plan, which they said was drawn with no racial or partisan data. “It’s illegal to use race in drawing districts. That’s a violation of federal law,” Republican state Senate President Matt Huffman told reporters last month.

Ohio Republicans said that even though they didn’t use partisan data, they were targeted in a suit by several community and anti-gerrymandering groups for drawing a partisan map anyway.

“The way the map performs is to really skew partisan outcomes in Ohio,” said Freda Levenson, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, one of the plaintiffs. “It’s very likely they did use partisan data.”

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When officials in Chester, Georgia, heard that the 2020 census had pegged their small town at 525 people, their jaws dropped. They believed the town was almost triple that size and feared an inaccurate number could force them to make budget cuts.

“I said, ‘Whoa, that’s not right,’” City Clerk Melanie McCook said. “The first thing I thought is, ‘This is going to affect our revenues greatly.’”

Chester and two other small, rural municipalities in Georgia are the first communities in the U.S. to challenge the accuracy of their numbers from the once-a-decade head count. Successful challenges are scant, but the outcome could determine whether Chester, the city of Glennville and White County get their fair share when it comes to the distribution of $1.5 trillion in annual federal funding.

In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, White County officials were stunned when the 2020 census said the county had 28,003 residents. A Census Bureau estimate from 2019 had put the county’s population at 30,798. The county is home to the town of Helen, a tourist draw modeled on a Bavarian alpine village.

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An analysis by the Georgia Mountains Regional Commission, a nonprofit agency that provides planning help to communities in the region, said half of the county’s census blocks had incorrect housing counts. Although the 2020 census put the number of homes at 13,535, it should have been 15,286, according to the analysis.

“We are concerned about long-term impacts, not qualifying for grants, not getting as many dollars as we need for our schools, those kinds of opportunities that come when the census count is used,” said John Sell, director of White County’s community and economic development.

Both Glennville and Chester are home to state prisons, which became among the most difficult places to count — along with college dorms, nursing homes and military barracks — as the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S. during crucial weeks for the census in the spring of 2020. Students were sent home from campuses, and prisons and nursing homes went into lockdowns when those residents were supposed to be counted.

In Georgia, inmates are supposed to be counted where they are imprisoned. About a dozen other states are planning to count prisoners at their home addresses when it comes to drawing political districts.

Because of the challenges pandemic lockdowns posed to these “group quarters” counts, the Census Bureau has proposed creating a separate program to accept challenges for dorms, military barracks, nursing homes and prisons. The local officials in Georgia aren’t waiting around.

In Glennville, where more than a third of the population is Black, the 2020 census counted 3,834 people. The 2019 estimates said there were 5,066 people, and Glennville officials say the 2020 number should be more than 5,300 residents because they believe the 1,500 or so inmates at Smith State Prison weren’t counted.

“It’s not that they did anything wrong. It was just an oversight. You had to take into account we had COVID and people weren’t allowed in or out,” Stan Dansby, Glennville’s city manager, said of the prison.

A combination of the pandemic and a lack of reliable broadband for filling out the census questionnaire online may have led to discrepancies in the counts in rural Georgia, said Heather Feldman, executive director of the Georgia Mountains Regional Commission.

“Unlike many areas of the country, Georgia was seeing extremely high cases of COVID-19,” Feldman said in an email. “Unlike the metro areas where population is dense, door-to-door census counters may not have gone to harder to reach areas of rural counties.”

The scope of appeals allowed by the Census Bureau is narrow — mistakes in recording boundaries or housing skipped during data processing. Revisions to population and housing totals were made to about 1% of the nation’s 39,000 governments after the 2010 census. The census challenges won’t change the number of congressional seats each state gets or the numbers used for redrawing political districts.

Other communities have signaled they plan to challenge their census numbers, including several college towns and the cities of Boston and Detroit.

In the case of Chester, about halfway between Atlanta and Savannah, the 2020 census said it had only 525 people, which would mark a 67% decline in the population over the decade if it were true. The 2019 American Community Survey pegged the majority-Black town’s population at 2,102 residents, and city officials believe it has a minimum of 1,500 inhabitants.

Chester officials believe the head count missed not only inmates at the Dodge State Prison but also residents in the town’s homes.

Without a large property tax base or much business taxes, Chester relies on a state-run program in which counties share sales taxes with cities as well as a tax on insurance premiums. Both sources of revenue are tied to the population of Chester, which spends about $350,000 per year on its operations but is scrambling to adjust to the lower-than-expected number even as it seeks an adjustment.

“It was a budgeting nightmare for me. I have no idea when this will be straightened out,” said McCook, Chester’s city clerk. “We are kind of, for the time being, only spending money on the necessities, stuff that you absolutely have to have. We are hoping it will be resolved before we have to make any major budget cuts.”

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-business-georgia-census-2020-3fc3ef87b47cbe81cb15a19469841387
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