Texas Democrats are campaigning on the issue of how lawmakers draw political maps ahead of the 2018 elections. They say partisan gerrymandering is solely a state issue right now, because the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule this term on whether the practice is legal. Partisan gerrymandering is when lawmakers draw up political districts to favor one party over the other. In Texas, Democrats have spent the last several years in court fighting maps they say overtly hurt Democratic voters. The Supreme Court, however, decided not to hear the state’s gerrymandering case. Justin Nelson, the Democratic candidate for Texas attorney general, is making it a big part of his campaign. He highlighted gerrymandered districts in Austin during a bar crawl last week.
The event started at Shangri-La on East Sixth and covered two other bars on Sixth Street – all within a couple blocks of each other. Each of the bars was in a different congressional district.
“It’s crazy – no sane person would ever intentionally draw districts like this unless it was designed for a purpose,” Nelson said. “And the purpose of these districts is to discriminate.”
Full Article: Texas Democrats Take On Partisan Voting Maps, After Supreme Court Punts The Issue | KUT.
