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Republicans may try gain political advantage by using only citizen counts to draw state legislative maps, Common Cause says.
GOP's aspiration for citizen-only legislative boundaries targeted in new report
Attempts by Republicans to draw legislative maps for the next decade using only the population of citizens would be discriminatory and result in extreme partisan gerrymanders all across the country, Common Cause says.
Common Cause, a venerable nonprofit advocacy group with a liberal bent, issued a report Monday titled "Whitewashing Representation," citing the failed effort by the Trump administration to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
Results of the census are used to calculate federal benefit allocations to states and communities and to draw the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts. When lawmakers draw the boundaries, they often favor the party in power to an extreme. But the Supreme Court ruled this year that federal courts have no role in deciding if such partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, kicking the issue to the states.
On the same day, the court also effectively blocked the administration from adding a citizenship question to next year's census forms. President Trump then ordered federal agencies to provide whatever data they have about citizenship to the Census Bureau, which by the end of next year is supposed to deliver detailed population tabulations to the states so that redistricting can get underway.
Several advocacy groups, include Common Cause, are suspicious that the Republicans poised to lead some states in 2021 — including Arizona, Missouri and Texas — are preparing to draw maps based only on their citizen populations. While the consensus legal view is this would be unconstitutional when it comes to setting congressional boundaries, it's a more open question when it comes to state legislative or local district lines.
At the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council this month, GOP redistricting experts called on Republican legislators to use citizenship data as a way to give their party as much of an advantage as possible in state capitals for the next decade.
"Gerrymandering with citizenship data is a radical effort to undermine our representative democracy," said Suzanne Almeida, counsel for Common Cause and co-author of the report.
Excluding non-citizens when drawing the maps would favor white voters over brown and black voters in how the districts are drawn, the report states.
But proponents of citizens-only maps say that the method is proper because these are the people who have the right to vote.
- Trump's fight to count citizens and non-citizens: 5 questions ... ›
- Census bureau sued to stop gathering of citizen population data ... ›
- Even without a citizenship question, fear complicates 2020 census ... ›
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Most voters named political corruption as a top-of-mind issue ahead of the 2020 election in a new poll.
Political corruption seen as America’s biggest problem, another poll shows
More voters see "corruption in our political system" as the country's most pressing problem than any of the other issues getting greater attention in the 2020 campaign, new polling shows.
The online survey conducted in September asked voters whether seven different issues were an "extremely serious problem" for the country, and the only one where a majority said yes was political corruption; rising health care costs came in second at 49 percent.
The poll is only the latest to declare the electorate's dire concern about the broken political system. In just the last month, two-thirds of voters told one poll they believe the country is on the "edge of a civil war" and a plurality in another poll identified the government itself as the country's biggest problem.
But the topic of democracy reform is getting hardly any mention in the presidential race. Though most of the Democratic candidates have plans for limiting money in politics, making voting easier, securing elections and restoring the balance of powers, few have emphasized these ideas on the trail. And President Trump, who four years ago ran as the candidate most interested in "draining the swamp," rarely mentions this aspiration anymore.
A third lawsuit has been filed in less than a month by the liberal group Priorities USA challenging voting laws and regulations in Michigan. Above, a voter heads to a polling place in Grosse Pointe Park.
Another day, another lawsuit challenging Michigan voting laws
A Democratic advocacy group has filed a third lawsuit in less than a month challenging Michigan laws and policies it says restrict voting rights.
The focus on Michigan voting laws by the super PAC Priorities USA reflects the importance of the state's 16 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. President Trump won Michigan, a swing state, by less than half a percentage point in 2016.
The latest lawsuit, filed Friday in state court, challenges actions taken after a successful 2018 ballot initiative expanded voting options, such as allowing people to register to vote at any time (including on Election Day). It also automatically registered people to vote when they obtained or renewed their driver's licenses.