President Donald Trump\u2019s gerrymandering war is mostly over for this year. The GOP emerged with an unearned edge of roughly ten seats in the fight for control of Congress \u2014 skewing the midterms before a vote has been cast.<\/p>\n
But the episode has degraded our democracy in another way, too: by denying large numbers of voters \u2014 especially from minority communities in the South \u2014 the ability to elect representatives that care about and respond to their needs.<\/p>\n
Jen Rice found<\/a> one of the most striking examples yet. After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston this month, the local member of Congress, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), jumped into action, demanding an independent investigation and doing everything she could to hold the Trump administration to account.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as Jen explained, thanks to Texas\u2019 Trump-driven redistricting last year, Garcia\u2019s district is being split up \u2014 and the neighborhood where the shooting took place, known as the East End, will this fall be part of a GOP-leaning district that stretches out into rural east Texas. The Republican nominee for the seat, favored to win it, is an election denier who, in response to the killing, has offered only a single statement praising law enforcement and didn\u2019t respond to Jen\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n That will likely mean that East End residents, desperate for answers about Araujo\u2019s death, will no longer have a member of Congress even trying to get them.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a reminder that fair maps matter not just to ensure that the parties are competing on an even playing field in elections. They\u2019re also how we guarantee that voters \u2014 especially those from marginalized communities with few other ways of asserting power \u2014 can elect leaders who will work to address their most basic needs and interests.<\/p>\n Jen\u2019s report powerfully brings to life what happens when politicians ignore that. I urge you to read it<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But after you do, come back here because there\u2019s plenty more Democracy Docket reporting to catch up on from the week.\u00a0<\/p>\n For one thing, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a new \u201celection integrity\u201d website to track its crusade to obtain state voter rolls. Yunior Rivas took a close look<\/a> and found that it\u2019s riddled with errors and inaccuracies, including actions said to have taken place on dates that haven\u2019t happened yet, and the invention of a county in Massachusetts that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n That\u2019s perhaps not surprising, given the amount of screwups we\u2019ve previously uncovered<\/a> in DOJ\u2019s voter roll campaign. But soon after Yunior\u2019s story appeared, many of the errors he identified were fixed. Nice to know they\u2019re reading.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, we\u2019ve been closely following New Jersey\u2019s admission \u2014 seized upon by the Trump administration, of course \u2014 that a software error led to around 6,600 noncitizens being mistakenly added to the voter rolls.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yunior explained<\/a> why, despite the sturm und drang from the right, the incident does nothing to support GOP claims of voter fraud. He followed up by reporting<\/a> that DOJ wasted little time in opening a federal investigation into the mistake, which the state had caught and fixed. And Natalie Haussman added<\/a> that Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) doesn\u2019t sound eager to cooperate with the probe, warning that DOJ will aim to \u201cweaponize\u201d any data the state turns over.<\/p>\n Finally, Arizona\u2019s primaries Tuesday offered<\/a> a stark reminder, if one were needed, that the GOP remains deeply in thrall to Trump\u2019s election lies.\u00a0<\/p>\n For governor, Republican voters nominated Rep. Andy Biggs<\/a>, who voted to overturn the 2020 election and has continued to deny that President Joe Biden won the contest.\u00a0<\/p>\n For attorney general, they picked state Senate President Warren Peterson<\/a>, who recently handed over to the Trump administration records from a flawed \u201caudit\u201d of Maricopa County\u2019s 2020 presidential vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n And, perhaps most troublingly, for secretary of state they chose state Rep. Alexander Kolodin<\/a>, who filed the infamous \u2018Kraken\u201d lawsuit, which used baseless allegations of hacked voting machines in seeking to overturn the 2020 vote.<\/p>\n