One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The 2010 Census indicated that Texas’s population had grown significantly. As a result of 4.3 million new residents, four additional seats were added to the state’s congressional delegation. That growth, however, was the direct result of the Hispanic and African American population increasing by 42 and 22 percent, respectively. “In other words, without the minority growth, Texas—now officially a majority-minority state—would not have received a single new district.” The GOP-dominated legislature, nevertheless, then set out to produce “lavishly brazen maps” where “white Republicans were awarded three of the four new seats that resulted from Democratic-leaning minority population growth.”47 The racial gerrymandering in Texas is so institutionalized that, frankly, it has the aura of the apartheid era’s “white minority rule.”