Supreme Court to examine Texas redistricting

WASHINGTON -- As the election season intensifies, the Supreme Court will hear a dispute Monday involving the fairness of new voting districts drawn by the Texas Legislature.

The case arises as several challenges from other states and localities have been made against the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. Advocates on both sides are watching the Texas case for signals from the court on whether a decades-old provision intended to ensure equality at the polls should stand.

In Texas, a San Antonio-based federal court blocked the Legislature's voting-district maps, saying they could not be used until officials had ensured, based on the 1965 law, that they didn't harm the interests of Hispanics and blacks.

Texas contends the lower court judges wrongly drew a new, interim plan for state House and Senate districts and Texas' 36-member U.S. House of Representatives. State lawyers say the judges should have deferred to the legislative plan even though it had not been cleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

That section, covering nine mostly Southern states and scores of smaller jurisdictions elsewhere with a history of racial discrimination, requires the localities to show in advance that new maps or other changes would not undermine minorities' voting rights.

Though Texas only implicitly challenges that section, several direct attacks to the constitutionality of Section 5 are simmering, including one from Shelby County, Ala., to be heard by a federal court in Washington this month.

At the Supreme Court, the looming constitutional question "will be the 800-pound gorilla in the room," says Professor Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine. Hasen observes that because of other cases in the pipeline, the justices are likely to "sooner rather than later" rule on the constitutionality of Section 5's pre-clearance rule.

It's an issue that can determine the fate of voting districts, as well as voter identification rules and any new election procedures. It could also make a difference not just in who casts a ballot but who wins an election.

The justices put the case on a fast track because of scheduled primary elections this spring. The Texas primary already has been delayed from March 6 to April 3 because of the litigation.

In 2009, when the justices last took up the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts said the "pre-clearance" rule intrudes on states and suggested it may no longer be necessary because "things have changed in the South." Yet in 2009, Roberts and the court majority did not rule on the constitutionality of Section 5 because the Texas utility district that challenged the law was exempt under a "bailout" provision.

The latest Texas dispute arises from growth in the state, particularly among Latinos, as documented by the 2010 Census. From 2000 to 2010, population rose by more than 4 million people, to 25 million. Hispanic population rose by about 2.8 million, the black population by about 523,000, and white population by about 465,000.