[EL] message from Michelle Davis re: coalition districts"

[Frank Askin]

In Page v. Bartels, 144 F. Supp.2d 346 (D.N.J. 2001), a three-judge
federal district court rejected a Section  2 challenge to New Jersey's
legislative districting plan, finding that the African-American and
Hispanic communities in the affected districts often voted as a bloc. 
FRANK ASKIN




Prof. Frank Askin
Distinguished Professor of Law       and Director
Constitutional Litigation Clinic
Rutgers Law School/Newark
(973) 353-5687>>> Michael McDonald <mmcdon at gmu.edu> 7/20/2011 1:24 PM
>>>
A difficulty in establishing a Section 2 claim will likely lie in the
racial
bloc voting analyses to demonstrate voting cohesion.  

There are two potential scenarios I can imagine where there are three
or
more minority communities where none have sufficient population for a
district in their own right.

First case, there are small, distinct concentrated minority
communities.
Here, if there are near 100% minority percentages within a few
precincts, it
may be possible to use homogeneous precinct analysis to determine the
level
of cohesion. However, other statistical tests will likely fail to
provide
meaningful statistics because there are too few data points to
generalize
from. This will be your strongest case, since at least homogenous
precinct
analysis will provide meaningful statistics to build an argument for
voting
cohesion.

Second case, the minority communities are dispersed across several
precincts. In this scenario, there may be a few precincts in the 10 to
20
percentage point range of minority VAP.  Here, while there will be
more
precincts to analyze, statistical tests will likely fail to produce
meaningful statistics since there will not be enough variation in the
minority percentage across the precincts.

An expert may try to argue that they aggregated all the minority
communities
together and performed the requisite statistical analyses on the
combined
data, but the strongest claim will be where separate analyses can be
performed for each minority group.  Imagine the case where the largest
minority community has strong patterns of racial bloc voting and the
smallest does not. A racial bloc voting analyses on the combined
minority
communities will (essentially) average the racial bloc voting patterns
for
all the communities, where the patterns of the largest community will
predominate.

I can imagine some scenarios where you may be able to generate
meaningful
statistics to establish cohesion, such as there being three large
minority
communities and the goal is to create an additional district out of
unassigned fragments. But generally, without knowing the specifics of
this
situation, I believe that you will need to be prepared to defend these
analyses in court from the criticism that at least one of the three
minority
communities is too small to reliably analyze. 

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, George Mason University 
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

                             Mailing address:
(o) 703-993-4191             George Mason University
(f) 703-993-1399             Dept. of Public and International Affairs
mmcdon at gmu.edu               4400 University Drive - 3F4
http://elections.gmu.edu     Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu 
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of
Rick
Hasen
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 12:54 PM
To: Davis, Michelle; law-election at UCI.EDU 
Subject: [EL] message from Michelle Davis re: coalition districts"

On 7/20/2011 9:49 AM, Davis, Michelle wrote: 
 
 
Dear Colleagues, 
 
As you know the Supreme Court briefly discussed “coalition
districts” in
Bartlett, but have any lower courts considered coalition districts that
are
made up of more than two minority groups? If there hasn’t been any
court
test of this, what are your thoughts on the whether any successful
section 2
claim can be made on behalf of a coalition district whether its made up
of 2
or more minority groups. Could the totality of circumstances convince
a
court to recognize a coalition district?
 


 
Michelle L. Davis
Senior Policy Analyst; Redistricting, Election Law
Maryland Department of Legislative Services
Office of the Executive Director
90 State Circle, Rm. 222
Annapolis, Md 21401
 
 


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