The files of Thomas Hofeller show that the Republican Party has been using gerrymandering and voter ID laws to suppress the rig elections by suppressing the Democratic and minority vote.
The New Yorker reviewed the files and wrote:
Other files provide new details about Hofeller’s work for Republicans across the country. Hofeller collected data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona, among other states, as far back as 2011. Hofeller was part of a Republican effort to add a citizenship question to the census, which would have allowed political parties to obtain more precise citizenship data ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle. State legislative lines could then have been drawn based on the number of citizen voters, which Hofeller believed would make it easier to pack Democrats and minorities into fewer districts, giving an advantage to Republicans.
Other documents show that Hofeller was hired by a Massachusetts Republican who sought to use the Voting Rights Act provision for majority/minority seats to draw a single district containing all of Boston, so that Republicans could make inroads into an otherwise entirely Democratic congressional delegation. Hofeller drew several sets of maps, but the effort went nowhere. Additional files document his work in Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia, among other states.
E-mails also connect Hofeller to redistricting efforts in Florida.
Sam Wang summarized what the files reveal on Twitter:
Holy moly, this is amazing. @davedaley3 has the goods on Thomas Hofeller – he appears to know exactly what is in these files.
-Analytics Hofeller did to figure out the anti-Democrat impact of a Census citizenship question.
-NC and FL gerrymanders.
-Draft maps/data in MS/AL/VA… https://t.co/XH7SjUfMot— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 6, 2019
– Demographic breakdown of college-student voters in North Carolina, including by race, to crack their votes and guarantee GOP wins in Congressional districts.
He split North Carolina A&T, a historically black university, in two. Detailed spreadsheets of race and residence.
— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 6, 2019
Impacts of voter ID laws. Again, an explicit trail of analytics demonstrating that the goal of such laws was to suppress Democratic and black votes.
— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 6, 2019
All of the Republican excuses for voter ID laws and gerrymandering were bogus. US democracy dodged a major bullet when Trump couldn’t get the citizenship question included in the Census. The name of the game for Republicans has always been to use voter suppression tools to rig elections.
If the citizenship question would have been included in the Census, Republican state legislatures would have been able to use the data redraw districts at both the federal and state level that would have guaranteed Republican control of the US House and state legislatures for at least a decade.
The cat is out of the bag, and the files will be the basis for a new wave of state-level lawsuits to rid the nation of the scrounge on democracy that is gerrymandering.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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