Kansas Voters Challenge Gerrymandered Congressional Map with Support of National Redistricting Foundation
Kansas Voters Challenge Gerrymandered Congressional Map with Support of National Redistricting Foundation
Washington, D.C. — Today, with the support of the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF), Kansas voters and the nonprofit organization Loud Light are asking the court to strike down the newly-enacted congressional map with a challenge filed in Wyandotte County District Court. Specifically, the lawsuit claims the map to be a partisan gerrymander that also dilutes the vote of Black and Hispanic voters in and around Kansas City, in violation of a number of provisions in the Kansas Constitution.
“Republican legislators made it abundantly clear from start to finish that they were gerrymandering themselves to their desired political outcome, no matter whose rights they were trampling along the way,” said Marina Jenkins, Director of Litigation and Policy for the NRF. “Their map meticulously cracks apart communities across the state, diluting the votes and voices of Democrats, young people, and communities of color – communities whose votes are apparently inconvenient to Republican interests. Such a drastic reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map was not only wholly unnecessary, but is severely detrimental to the ability of Kansans across the state to participate in the democratic process and to have accurate representation in Congress.”
Based on the 2020 Census data, Kansas will maintain the same number of congressional seats over the next decade, and the most populous and diverse part of the state is the Kansas City metropolitan area. Instead of maintaining a largely status quo map, as supported by the trends demonstrated in the Census data as well as their own guidelines, Kansas Republicans enacted a congressional map that inexplicably shifts a large number of Kansans out of their prior districts, in violation of the state’s redistricting guidelines. This practice primarily targeted Wyandotte and Douglas counties, which include predominantly Democratic voters and voters of color.
Specifically, the newly-enacted congressional map cracks the Black and Hispanic communities of Kansas City into two separate districts, and dilutes the votes of those communities by lumping them into districts that are overwhelmingly white and Republican. Instead of preserving the Kansas City metro area in one congressional district, the new map unnecessarily divides the metro area in half. By using the I-70 interstate as a dividing line that runs through the middle of Kansas City, the new map follows a division that adds insult to injury for the communities of Wyandotte County. Initially built in the 1950s as part of the Kansas Interstate, the portion of I-70 traversing Wyandotte County divided up minority communities decades ago. The congressional map now divides that county along the same line, reinforcing those racial scars.
The map also splits apart Douglas County, which contains the City of Lawrence and is one of the more diverse counties in Kansas, with about one in four residents identifying as a member of a minority community. The enacted congressional map places Lawrence into a separate district from the rest of Douglas County in spite of a 2012 court ruling against this tactic. The 2012 court decision specifically said that the areas were “more appropriately placed entirely within” the same district. The splitting of these communities is a textbook case of “cracking.”
Click here to read the full brief.
Contact: Brooke Lillard | Lillard@redistrictingfoundation.org