Why Florida's Redistricting Map is ILLEGAL!
There are a number of ways to see how this easily violates Florida's Fair Districts law.
Today, Ron DeSantis released Florida’s new Congressional map that easily violates the Florida Fair Districts law that is enshrined into Florida’s Constitution. According to the law, it says “no district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” Well, I’m not going to beat around the bush, and I’ll get right into why this map is downright illegal according to Florida’s Constitution.
Releasing the partisan map on FoxNews
This one is the most easily noticeable. FoxNews was the first ones to release the map, even before any official office in Florida. The map that they presented (shown below) easily shows the color by partisan leanings of the districts. It shows the Republicans having a partisan advantage in all but four of the Congressional districts. About 20 minutes later, probably noticing that they made an error, the governor’s office eventually released these maps, which don’t have partisan leanings. Basically, DeSantis showed his cards immediately on FoxNews.
Districts 1 through 7 have not been changed
All of the panhandle and North Florida districts haven’t been touched at all. The only Republican districts that have been touched are the ones that take votes away from Democratic districts, and Republican districts that now have to give those districts votes in order for the district to have an equal population. For example, District 15 (which was the old District 12), now goes into Tampa, also takes votes away from the old District 15, which naturally makes that district smaller. The old District 15 has now been put into the new Districts 11, 15, and 18. All of these districts changed because they needed to make up for the population gain for the new District 15, or the removal of the old District 14.
This alone shows that the only districts that have been impacted were ones that are connected to districts that took away votes SPECIFICALLY from Democratic districts, thus a violation of Tier 1 of the Fair Districts. Again, if this was a pure change, then there should have been changes to Districts 1 through 7, which there weren’t.
DeSantis’s “growth” argument is easily disprovable
The reason why DeSantis said that the maps needed to be changed was because the state had grown so much since 2020, and new Congressional maps needed to be created to make new districts to represent equal populations. There’s just one problem. The data that DeSantis uses is 2020 data, not data that represents any growth whatsoever.
Let’s take the 7th Congressional District, since it includes all of Seminole County. According to the data provided regarding the new redistricting, the population of Seminole County is 470,856. So, what was the population of Seminole County in the 2020 Census. 470,856. Exactly the same.
Let’s move to a district that has been changed, the new District 16. Manatee County, according to the “new” data, has a population of 399,710. What was the 2020 Census number? Yep, 399,710.
So, I might not be a rocket surgeon, but how can you make districts to “represent growth”, when the data you are using is the exact data that you claim is outdated because it doesn’t “represent growth”? This purely shows that DeSantis’s argument of “growth” is pure an utter bullshit, as it easily uses 2020 Census data!
Only Congressional Maps Have Changed
So, we know that the growth argument is total bullshit. But let’s go with it, let’s say it is true. Why are they only changing the Congressional map? Wouldn’t the State House and State Senate maps also need to be changed to “represent growth”? Of course, we know this “growth” argument is bullshit because of what I said before. But this just makes is bullshit wrapped up in dog shit.
So no, this map is not legal at all and is easily provable to not be legal. But there are many more standards that could be used as well. This should be an easy fight for the Florida Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the Florida Supreme Court will probably rubberstamp the map, but there could be some violations against federal law, especially in the Tampa area which removed all minority opportunity districts. We’ll see what happens next.