UCLA Voting Rights Project report says “racial packing is evident” in all the proposed Tarrant County maps.
MAGA Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare has based his intentionally discriminatory mid-decade redistricting in Tarrant County on the cynical lie that his redraw is a partisan powerplay and not a racial attack.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Voting Rights Project conducted a detailed study of Tarrant County and the proposed maps made public by Tim O’Hare’s hand-picked and notoriously anti-voting rights legal advisors, the Public Information Legal Foundation (PILF). The full UCLA report can be read HERE.
The findings and conclusions by the nonpartisan UCLA experts are damning and directly refute O’Hare’s false claims stating:
“…each of the PILF-proposed maps employs a packing strategy that confines minority voters to a single district, thereby eliminating opportunities for minority communities to elect candidates of their choice in multiple districts. This structural approach effectively enhances white voter influence across the remaining precincts.”
Any rational person can look at the proposed maps and see that race is the dominant factor driving O’Hare’s map creator. Predominantly Black and other minority neighborhoods are carefully carved out of Commissioner Alisa Simmons’ Precinct 2 and packed into Commissioner Roderick Miles’ Precinct 1. Minority voting strength is destroyed in Simmons’ district and horribly diluted in Commissioner Miles’ district.
The UCLA report provides a deep analysis of the demographics and political performance of Tarrant County which O’Hare has refused to do. The report carefully compares the discriminatory proposed plans against the current Commissioner Court boundaries and concludes:
“The analysis confirms that racially polarized voting is a persistent and measurable feature of electoral behavior in Tarrant County. Black and Hispanic voters demonstrate strong political cohesion, while White voters consistently vote as a bloc against minority-preferred candidates. The current enacted map is reasonably drawn on traditional redistricting principles and does not discriminate against any racial group in the county. However, all seven proposed maps from the Public Interest Legal Foundation undermine this structure by concentrating minority voters into a single district, effectively diminishing their political influence elsewhere in the county. In contrast, the Enacted Map (altered to within 1% deviation) and the Quadrant Map adhere more closely to traditional redistricting principles and provide a practical path forward for fair representation in Tarrant County.”
Statement from Lone Star Project Director Matt Angle:
“The UCLA report throws a glaring light on Tim O’Hare’s career-long effort to divide people and use race to pit neighbor against neighbor.
Commissioner Precinct 2 is a competitive district now, but O’Hare and local Republicans aren’t willing to run a legitimate campaign to win it. There are many ways that O’Hare and his accomplices on the Commissioners Court could have reconfigured a map without ripping apart minority neighborhoods. They rejected a real political solution and instead launched a punitive attack on minority voters violating their rights and destroying their voting strength.
It’s the worst in gutter politics, but that’s where Tim O’Hare lives.”
Learn more about the illegal effort underway to destroy minority voting rights and voting strength in Tarrant County HERE.
