This Week at Democracy Docket: First on Voter Suppression News
This week, Democracy Docket readers were first to learn about three important new developments in Republican voter suppression.
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This week, Democracy Docket readers were first to learn about three important new developments in Republican voter suppression.
States using the Trump administration’s overhauled citizenship verification system to find noncitizens on the voter rolls may be mistakenly flagging eligible voters at an alarming rate, a Texas county election administrator revealed in a federal court filing Wednesday night.
A federal appeals court upheld Tarrant County, Texas’ mid-decade gerrymander, dismissing claims that local Republicans intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino voters when they redrew county commissioner districts to cement partisan control.
Another week, another Republican gerrymander rammed through at the expense of minority voters.
This was the week when it became clear to anyone paying attention: The GOP’s drive to gerrymander districts in their favor — usually at the cost of minority representation — threatens the long-term fairness of elections.
In red states across the country, GOP lawmakers and officials took a range of steps to move forward with their gerrymanders. Together, the moves suggest that, even leaving the Supreme Court aside, Republicans have abandoned any remaining political or moral qualms about drawing maps that maximize their advantage — with potentially dire consequences for the future of fair elections.
A panel of three federal judges will soon decide whether to block Texas from using its new congressional map in the 2026 election, after a contentious nine-day hearing concluded Friday.
In federal court Thursday, information about Texas’ secretive redistricting process started to come into focus as Republican leadership testified.
The Republican Party’s top mapmaker testified in federal court that while he’s been instructed in the past to preserve minority congressional districts protected by the Voting Rights Act, he received no such direction when drawing Texas’ new gerrymander this summer.
The Republican Party’s leading mapmaker took the stand Tuesday in a federal hearing to determine whether Texas can use its new gerrymandered congressional map in the 2026 election.