Unusual Mid-Decade Redistricting Added to 2025 Texas Legislative Special Session 

The current maps are still being challenged in federal court. The State has consistently contended that race played no role in drawing existing districts, even though it was clear to this coalition that the maps purposefully obscured population growth among minority Texans in order to undermine their electoral power. 

According to the 2020 Census, 95% of population growth in Texas over the prior decade came from communities of color in suburban and urban communities. The State cannot have it both ways and claim to have both disclaimed and relied upon race in the same redistricting. The only consistency is that the State’s position will suppress the votes of people of color.  

The Fair Maps Texas Coalition, including the LWV, is firm in our belief that many of the maps drawn in 2021, both congressional and state legislative, fail to meet Constitutional requirements and are racially discriminatory. The court, however, has yet to determine all the legal and factual issues in that case. One thing is certain:  it is wrong – and unfair to all Texans – for the Legislature to take up mid-decade redistricting to further disenfranchise communities of color when the court has not even weighed in on the last round of discriminatory redistricting. Such constant moving of the ball evades meaningful judicial review of our district maps. The proposed mid-decade redistricting is particularly wrong when it is done in response to a clearly bogus legal allegation.

In the words of a member of our Fair Maps community: this redistricting proposal “is not just a political maneuver—it’s an existential threat to representation, resources, and rights for Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class communities. When maps are manipulated, it distorts the very foundation of democracy. It silences the voices of those already struggling to be heard. It’s about clinging to power at any cost.” 
 
District lines should preserve and protect the needs of the communities within them, particularly the needs of historically underrepresented minority communities, not bow to the whim of out-of-state political operatives and extreme partisans. Government is at its best when it works to solve the real problems of ordinary people: disaster relief, inflated prices, affordable housing, a living wage, accessible quality health care – and when the voices of all citizens are heard, not just special interests and racially polarized extreme partisans.