The 2020 census will be run by a Republican who has defended gerrymandering and voter suppression

Democracy keeps getting hit on as long as trump is in the Oval office.



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The 2020 census will be run by a Republican who has defended gerrymandering and voter suppression http://mojo.ly/2qvwKrA

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Trump’s Pick to Run 2020 Census Has Defended Racial Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Laws
The census will determine redistricting and voting rights enforcement.

Ari BermanJan. 2, 2018 6:00 AM

Copies of the 2010 Census form. Ross D. Franklin/AP
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In June 2011, the North Carolina Legislature hired Thomas Brunell, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Dallas, to produce a report that would help defend the state’s new redistricting maps. The maps, approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature, concentrated black voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe Republican districts. Under the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina had to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes, and so it asked Brunell to provide a justification for the maps.

Brunell argued that clustering black voters into a few districts was necessary to maintain their political influence. Though North Carolina was a racially integrated swing state, where black officials represented majority-white districts and vice versa, Brunell’s report found “there is clear evidence for the presence of statistically significant racially polarized voting” in North Carolina, necessitating majority-black districts. When the maps were challenged in court, state Republicans paid Brunell $300 an hour for research and $500 an hour for testimony as an expert witness.

The strategy worked—for a time. With the new maps in effect, Republicans controlled 10 of the state’s 13 congressional districts after the 2014 election and had a supermajority in the Legislature. But in 2017, federal courts struck down two of North Carolina’s congressional districts and 28 state legislative districts, calling the state maps “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.” A unanimous three-judge court in North Carolina said Brunell’s “generalized conclusions regarding racially polarized voting” demonstrated a “misunderstanding” of the Voting Rights Act and “fail to demonstrate a strong basis in evidence justifying the challenged districts as drawn.”

According to multiple reports, Brunell will be appointed deputy director of the US Census Bureau and de facto leader of the 2020 census, which is constitutionally mandated to count every person in America. The census determines the level of representation for state and federal districts, and how $600 billion in federal funding is allocated to states and localities. (In addition to Brunell, the Trump administration has hired Kevin Quinley, a former research director for Kellyanne Conway’s polling firm whose clients included Breitbart News, as a special adviser to the Census Bureau.)

The deputy director of the Census Bureau has historically been a nonpartisan career civil servant. Brunell, a registered Republican, has no prior government experience and a deeply partisan background. He has testified or produced expert reports for Republicans in more than a dozen redistricting cases and has defended new voting restrictions passed by Republicans. His 2008 book, Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America, argued that extreme partisan gerrymandering should be the norm because, he claimed, ultra-safe blue or red districts offered better representation for voters than competitive ones.



“It’s breathtaking to think they’re going to make that person responsible for the census,” says former Attorney General Eric Holder.

The census, conducted every 10 years, forms the basis for redistricting, and its detailed demographic data is used to implement the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws. Voting rights lawyers and longtime observers of the census worry that instead of committing to accurately count every American, Brunell and the Trump administration will use the 2020 census to concentrate power, representation, and economic resources in Republican hands. “He would be a terrible, terrible person to be running the census,” says Allison Riggs, an attorney for the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which challenged the North Carolina maps in court. “In part because he has absolutely no qualifications to do so, but also because he’s a rank-and-file ideologue.” (Brunell did not respond to requests for comment on this story.).......................................