Once again, from the inbox:
Today, plaintiffs supported by the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF) filed a preliminary injunction to block the implementation of HB 4, which further gerrymanders the Texas congressional map. After filing a supplemental complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas challenging the map, now the NRF-supported Gonzales Plaintiffs are asking the court to block the implementation of HB 4 and order Texas to use the prior congressional map for the 2026 elections as this case continues in court. The NRF is directing litigation and providing financial support on behalf of the Gonzales plaintiff group in this case. The preliminary injunction can be viewed here.
Marina Jenkins, Executive Director of the NRF, issued the following statement:
“The court has already agreed to consider expediting the case against the mid-decade Texas gerrymander, and now we are asking them to block its implementation ahead of the 2026 elections entirely, because it illegally dilutes the voting power of people of color. Texas’s existing map was facing legal challenges for cracking and packing minority voters to limit their ability to elect the candidates of their choice. This new map exacerbates those fundamental flaws; it is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that intentionally discriminates against Black and Latino voters, and it must not be allowed to go into effect.”
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND:
Following the 2020 Census, Texas was the only state to gain two congressional seats due to significant population growth. The census data also showed that 95% of the state’s population growth came from communities of color. Despite this, in 2021, the state of Texas enacted a congressional map that reduced the number of districts where voters of color have a fair chance to elect candidates of their choice and increased the number of majority-white districts. Immediately after the congressional map was enacted, the NRF filed Voto Latino v. Scott, now renamed Gonzales v. Nelson and consolidated under LULAC v. Abbott, challenging Texas’s 2021-enacted congressional map for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Just two months after the trial in the case against the 2021-enacted map, at the request of President Trump, Governor Greg Abbott called for an August special session in the Texas Legislature to redraw the state’s congressional map. Coming out of the 2025 special legislative session, the State of Texas enacted a new congressional gerrymander that goes even further to diminish the voting power of communities of color.
In their supplemental complaint, the NRF-supported plaintiffs make several claims against the 2025-enacted Texas congressional gerrymander, including the following:
Intentional Vote Dilution: The new gerrymander was drawn with discriminatory intent in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Racial Gerrymandering: Several congressional districts on the new gerrymander are racial gerrymanders in violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Those districts are TX-9, TX-18, TX-22, TX-27, TX-30, and TX-35.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act: The newly enacted Texas gerrymander fails to include at least six additional Latino opportunity districts, in which Latino voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. In order to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Latino voters in Texas should see one additional opportunity district in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area, one additional opportunity district in Harris County, two additional opportunity districts in Central Texas, and two additional opportunity districts in the Rio Grande Valley. The new gerrymander does not include any of these districts.
Malapportionment: Given that the State of Texas used five-year-old data to draw a new gerrymander, the new map fails to account for shifts in Texas’s population. For example, recently, the Census has issued estimates that indicate rapid population growth in Texas in recent years, particularly driven by communities of color, which make up 60 percent of the statewide population. Therefore, the new gerrymander fails to achieve the precise mathematical equality required by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This creates a dynamic where Texas voters who reside in overpopulated districts will have their votes diluted by other Texas voters who live in underpopulated districts.
Unnecessary Mid-Decade Redistricting: The new gerrymander violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, because the Texas Legislature considered racial information and pursued a partisan advantage in an unnecessary mid-decade redraw.
Prior to the enactment of the new gerrymander, the NRF filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas asking the court to quickly set a hearing for a preliminary injunction that will be filed in order to block the enactment of a new gerrymandered congressional map. The court has scheduled a conference to hear arguments on that motion for Wednesday, August 27, in El Paso, Texas. To learn more about the NRF’s work, click here.
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See here for the background. You may ask what the difference is between the two filings. The first one was the actual lawsuit against the new map, laying out all of the ways in which the plaintiffs allege it to be illegal. The remedy they seek, in addition to declaring that all these things are in fact illegal, is for a new map to be drawn. Which is what these same plaintiffs are seeking with the original map, for which there will be a hearing on Wednesday about the other recent motion asking for an expedited hearing on the new map and a formal ruling on the current one.
This motion is the request that the court prevent this new map from being used while the lawsuit that was filed on the 23rd is being litigated, and to continue to use the current map instead. This is standard practice, on the grounds that the plaintiffs, who say they are likely to prevail on the merits, will suffer a needless injury if the thing they’re fighting against is allowed to happen in the meantime. The same request has been made with previous gerrymanders, and the recent history is that the courts – really, SCOTUS – have allowed the new map to be used while the fighting is in progress. We are using the 2021 Congressional map today and not the 2011/2013 map, after all. I would generally expect the plaintiffs to fail on this motion, at least at the appellate level, but given how weird and unprecedented this case is, especially in the way that the Republicans just blithely threw out all of their claims from the first case, there’s at least a chance that they could prevail. That would be a huge victory, since it would mean keeping the current map in place at least for this election. Again, I would not bet on this outcome, but I do think it’s not a sure thing.
On a side note, The Downballot has its analysis of the adopted map, using 2024 and 2020 data. I used 2018 data in my analysis because I think that’s the more useful comparison if 2026 is the kind of year we hope it will be, but this is a good cautionary note, and a reminder of how much hinges on the changes we saw with the 2024 electorate. Now we need to start recruiting candidates. I’ll have more to say on that another time.