| Jacob S. Hacker | The American Prospect |
Restoring these protections will require that a responsive Congress end the partisan mapmaking that Callais has now made more dangerous. A national redistricting law establishing independent commissions would undo much of the damage—even if those commissions don’t take race into account. That’s because, according to careful analyses, compact districts that ensure roughly party-proportional outcomes will also ensure voters of color have a fair chance to elect representatives of their choice. Callais is not a blow for color blindness; it’s a blow against equal representation.
”Progress toward political equality
A proportional voting system would address the underlying structural problem more directly, though the road to its adoption is much steeper. And multimember districts that use ranked-choice voting or similar proportional representation rules would allow smaller groups sharing common interests, whether based on race or ethnicity or another common bond, to have a much better shot at gaining representation than they do in our current system.
Our research shows that the VRA propelled our nation’s progress toward political equality. Although that progress is now at risk, the fight to defend it is far from over. Three weeks after South Carolina Republicans moved to eliminate Clyburn’s district, organized resistance helped persuade the state Senate to reject the plan. The kind of mobilization that won the VRA in the first place will be needed to make equal representation possible again. Whatever the path forward, it should be illuminated by evidence about how representation really works as well as by the light of justice.