Galveston County redistricting drama turning into real soap opera

So far, rulings in alleged Voting Rights Act violations suit not going conservatives' way.

Because Galveston County commissioners failed to come up with a map that met a federal court's approval, next spring's primaries will use the above map.
Galveston County

Chron.
By Chris Gray
December 4, 2023

As presently drawn, Precinct 3 of Galveston County begins in the tiny unincorporated community of High Island, sweeps west through Crystal Beach and the rest of Bolivar Peninsula, before catching the ferry to include the eastern half of Galveston Island through about 45th Street. From there it follows I-45 north, enfolding pockets of Hitchcock, La Marque, and Texas City before petering out on the outskirts of Dickinson.

As the only county's precinct with a majority of Black and Latino voters, Precinct 3 is also the epicenter of a gripping political soap opera—“As the Map Turns,” perhaps—stemming from a federal lawsuit alleging the county’s Republican-controlled commissioner’s court has egregiously violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act with the map it adopted in November 2021.

In this new map, “Black and Latino communities were split up so that white voters could make up at least 62 percent of the electorate in each of the four precincts,” the Texas Tribune reported. “Because white voters in Galveston—like Texas generally—tend to support different candidates than Black and Latino voters, the new map effectively quashed their electoral power.”

In the case officially filed as Petteway v. Galveston County, Texas, the plaintiffs—including the Texas Civil Rights Project, the local council of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and three area chapters of the NAACP—said the commissioner’s court took advantage of a Supreme Court ruling that nullified a law requiring jurisdictions with a history of voting-rights violations to seek federal approval before drawing up new voting maps.

The trial in the redistricting lawsuit played out earlier this summer in Galveston's federal courthouse.
cmh2315 via Flickr

After a trial lasting several weeks, in October Trump-appointed U.S. district judge Jeffrey Brown found in favor of the plaintiffs; his ruling gave the county a week to come up with a new map. Instead, it appealed the decision to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, generally seen as the nation’s most conservative appellate court. A three-judge panel of that court agreed with Brown’s verdict but initially paused enforcement of that decision, granting the commissioners more time to (theoretically) come up with a new map.

Weeks passed with no new map. Then, last week, the Fifth Circuit announced its entire bench would hear the county’s appeal next May—and by doing so, negated the stay that prevented Judge Brown’s decision from taking effect, Houston Public Media reported. The next day Brown issued an order, effective immediately, that an alternate map (seen above as “Galveston Texas Map 1”) would be used in the upcoming 2024 primaries, scheduled for March 5. The secretary of state’s filing deadline is today.

“Given that the candidate-filing period for the 2024 election has already begun and that the defendants’ electoral map is  enjoined, it is no longer practicable to permit the commissioner’s court the opportunity to cure its enjoined map’s infirmities,” Brown wrote. “The court will proceed accordingly to carry out its ‘unwelcome obligation’ to devise and impose a remedy for the 2024 election.”

Hence, Galveston Texas Map 1. But why? During the trial, the Galveston County Daily News reported, an expert witness for the plaintiffs suggested the commissioners had redrawn the map out of pure mean-spiritedness, calling their efforts “a textbook example of racial gerrymander…I have never seen anything this bad. Because normally if a majority-minority district is in place, then you are not going to see a locality attempt to eliminate it unless [it] had no choice due to demographic changes.”

The lawsuit dates back to November 2021, when county commissioners redrew the above map to create white majorities in all four precincts.
Galveston County

In an editorial following Judge Brown’s initial ruling, Daily News editor Michael A. Smith suggested some possible reasons.

“One is a desire among commissioners, some of whom perhaps have ambitions to higher office, to show fealty to and curry favor among the arch-conservative politicians running the state of Texas,” Smith wrote. “A gerrymandered map would not be the only example of such motivation; declaring a local emergency because of the border crisis is another.” (Indeed, the county in 2021 agreed to send several law-enforcement officers and other resources to the border.)

The ongoing court challenge is already getting a little pricey for the county’s taxpayers. Last week, the Daily News reported that the county has already spent well more than $4 million in legal fees related to the suit, including putting lawyers up at the ritzy South Shore Harbour Resort and Conference Center. Current Precinct 3 commissioner Stephen Holmes, whose district would be effectively eliminated by the new map, called that figure “outrageous.”

For his part, county judge Mark Henry told the Daily News the suit is a fabrication of “the Biden DOJ and their circus of traveling lawyers.” 

“This case is not just about Galveston County, but is of great national importance because the Voting Rights Act does not require us to draw Democrat districts,” he insisted.