San Antonio Express-News (Op-Ed): Texas needs an independent redistricting commission

From start to finish, the Texas Legislature’s redistricting process was rushed, secretive and undemocratic. In a matter of weeks, partisan legislators jammed through gerrymandered maps drawn to protect the politicians in power and silence voters’ voices, especially those of Black and brown Texans.

The new district maps were drawn almost entirely behind closed doors and approved in the middle of the night with hardly any input from the public.

Texans deserve better.

It’s time to give serious consideration to redistricting reform, including an independent commission that transfers power from the politicians to the people.

From the beginning, this year’s redistricting cycle was set up to fail. In September, Gov. Greg Abbott tacked redistricting on to a list of policy priorities to be addressed in a third special session set to end Oct. 20. As a result, the Legislature decided the fate of our elections for the next 10 years in just under 30 days.

Not only was redistricting hastily scheduled, there was hardly any effort to encourage the public to participate in the process. Instead, legislators created barriers to keep voters from having a say.

For the few public hearings that were scheduled, legislators gave voters just 24 hours notice of meetings, which were held during traditional working hours and required the public to register the day before the hearing to submit any comments. The hearings were so secretive even some state legislators didn’t know a meeting was scheduled.

It’s no surprise that a process without any trace of fairness or transparency resulted in extremely gerrymandered maps that deny fair representation to the voters.

Following the 2020 census count, Texas was the only state in the country to gain two additional members of Congress because of our state’s explosive population growth. More than 95 percent of that growth was driven by communities of color.

Yet, none of the new maps reflect our state’s changing demographics. Rather, the new maps were designed to erase voters of color’s representation and voting power — and that’s exactly what Abbott and partisan legislators wanted.

Instead of consolidating Latino communities into one majority-minority district, Republican legislators split heavily Latino neighborhoods in Dallas and eastern Irving into four congressional districts. By “cracking” Latinos into multiple districts, making them a small minority in each, state legislators denied this community a substantive say in their futures for the next decade.

Additionally, the maps protect the politicians in office now from having to lift a finger to earn our votes in the future. The maps were drawn to keep their seats “safe” from competition from other candidates. In fact, the same congressional district elections that experts described as “toss-ups” in 2020 now have double-digit margins.

It’s no coincidence that as Latinos, Blacks and Asian Americans emerge as a powerful voting bloc, this Legislature designed maps that deny them participation in our democracy; or that the politicians in power drew maps that would support their political ambitions instead of our communities’ needs.

It’s why only 39 percent of our state legislators come from communities of color, despite composing a majority of the Texas population since 2004. It’s why the state has been sued over gerrymandered maps that discriminate against voters of color every redistricting cycle for the last five decades.

This year’s process and these maps were approved against our will. In more than 10 hours of testimony on congressional plans, not a single Texan spoke in favor of the draft maps.

Without reform, we’re bound to repeat this flawed process in another 10 years. It’s time to put an end to a process that allows the politicians to choose which Texans they want to represent.

Anthony Gutierrez is executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy.