Are Tarrant’s proposed redistricting maps racial gerrymanders? We asked experts
A proposal to redraw Tarrant County voting precincts has become the latest controversy to roil the commissioners court in recent weeks.
While redistricting is generally done every 10 years following the release of census data, the commissioner court’s three Republicans say new precinct maps are necessary after Tarrant County has seen rapid growth in recent years. They’re scheduled to vote on it June 3. (On Friday, 10 mayors including Fort Worth and Arlington’s urged the commissioners to delay the vote.)
The court’s two Democrats, and roughly two-thirds of people who spoke at the Tuesday, May 20, commissioners meeting, oppose the plan. They called it an attempt to racially gerrymander to oust Precinct 2 Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat who is Black, and get a Republican voted back into the seat in the 2026 elections.
Precinct 4 Commissioner Manny Ramirez, a Republican, did not attend a May 13 public feedback hearing on the plan in Azle, but he did say in a recent op-ed published by the Star-Telegram that redistricting will “help preserve the kind of leadership that has served Tarrant County well.” The plan is politically, not racially, motivated, he said.
Fellow Republican Matt Krause, commissioner of Precinct 3, concurred at Tuesday’s session, saying the Supreme Court “has said partisan gerrymandering is fine.”
So which is it? Is Tarrant County’s proposal a high court-sanctioned case of politically motivated redistricting? Or is this a case of racial gerrymandering? We asked several experts to get their analyses.
The Star-Telegram also reached out to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the Virginia-based “election integrity” law firm that the commissioners voted to hire along party lines for the redistricting, and to Adam Kincaid of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, who drew the maps. Neither has responded.
Ramirez, Krause and Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare did not respond to requests for comment.
What is racial gerrymandering, and what does the law say about it?
Racial gerrymandering is the act of redrawing the boundaries of a voting district in a way that dilutes the voting power of a minority language or racial group.
Protections against this dilution are found in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
The Supreme Court’s landmark 1986 decision in Thornburg v. Gingles created a three-part test to determine if a redistricting plan violates the Voting Rights Act. The test requires that a minority group:
Prove that it is large and geographically compact enough to comprise a majority in a single-member district;
Show that the it is politically cohesive; and
Demonstrate that a majority group, such as white people, votes sufficiently as a bloc for their candidate to defeat the preferred candidate of a minority, such as Black people, under normal circumstances.
In lieu of proof of intent to racially gerrymander, the Thornburg v. Gingles test has been used for decades to determine if redrawn electoral districts in effect dilute a minority group’s voting power.
Did the Supreme Court rule that partisan gerrymandering is OK?
Recent Supreme Court decisions have found that overtly political motives for redistricting do not violate the Constitution or federal law.
However, it would be incorrect to say partisan gerrymandering is “fine,” according to Kareem Crayton, a voting and redistricting specialist at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“What the Supreme Court said was, as far as federal law is concerned, the federal Constitution is concerned, there is no bar that they can see in the Constitution for preventing a district map from pursuing an overtly partisan agenda,” Crayton said.
The court did not say that Congress or local governments cannot bar partisan gerrymandering or that an assertion of partisan gerrymandering protects from racial discrimination claims like those brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Organizations like the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the National Republican Redistricting Trust, both of which Crayton described as “no fans of the Voting Rights Act,” try to cite partisanship as justification that protects them from any other claim.
This is incorrect, he said, adding that map data should be analyzed to determine that partisanship is not used as a “smoke screen” for racial gerrymandering.
The partisanship defense only stands if those who redrew the maps, “regardless of their intention,” can show that the new districts do not dilute minority groups’ voting power, Crayton said.
Tarrant County’s redistricting plan shows ‘telltale signs of racial gerrymandering’
Each of the five proposed maps for new precincts in Tarrant County appears to track the boundaries of areas with the highest shares of minority voters, per the latest census data.
This is one of the “telltale signs of racial gerrymandering,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor of constitutional and election law at Harvard.
Census data appear to show that minority groups in Precincts 1 and 2, whose boundaries would change most significantly, are geographically compact enough to create “at least a couple of districts,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University and law professor at the University of Minnesota.
The map drawers appear to be “carving the lines up in a way to prevent what looks like a racially and geographically cohesive community from being able to elect what looks like at least two members,” Schultz said. “Under the Gingles test, and subsequent court cases after that, we can make the argument that this is a racial gerrymander.”
Stephanopoulos said the maps look like a “potentially unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” meaning it appears that “race improperly predominated” in their design.
To successfully argue a Voting Rights Act claim, Stephanopoulos said, a plaintiff would need to compare precinct-specific demographic data with the results of an ecological inference study, which estimates voting behaviors based on aggregate-level election data.
Ecological inference estimates from Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic show that voting is dramatically polarized along racial lines in Tarrant County, which Stephanopoulos said would support a Voting Rights Act violation claim.
“The most important issue would be whether it’s possible to draw additional majority-minority districts” per the first prong of the Gingles test, he said.
What are the demographics of the redrawn Tarrant County precincts?
Redistricting experts at the voting rights organization Common Cause Texas found that in all of the maps, the non-white population of the new Precinct 1 would be around 80%. People of color currently make up 69.7% of the current precinct.
In the Republicans’ preferred map, Precinct 2 would drop from around 64% non-white residents to 49%.
That map would raise the number of Democratic voters in Precinct 1 from 60% to 70%, and reduce the number of registered Democrats in Precinct 2 from 52% to 42%.
“Under each of these proposed plans, undeniably communities of color will be the ones who lose out of proper representation,” said Anthony Gutierrez, Common Cause Texas’ executive director.
The maps appear to show packing of minority groups, which in Tarrant County largely translates to Democratic voters, into Precinct 1 in order to make Precinct 2 — currently represented by Simmons — more advantageous for Republicans, he said.
The organization entered the current precinct map and all five proposed maps into Dave’s Redistricting App, a census and elections data mapping tool. The app marks Tarrant County’s current map as having two precincts that lean Republican: Precincts 3 and 4, with 61.76% and 54.16% of voters, respectively.
Precinct 1 is marked as leaning heavily Democratic, with 60% of voters going blue at the ballot box. Precinct 2, where demographics would change most drastically under the proposed maps, is listed as being “in the 45-55% competitive range.”
You can check out the interactive maps and data sets for each of the proposed maps at the following links.
Proposal 1 (Republicans’ preferred map)
“The entire point of redrawing political boundaries is to ensure all residents have proper representation, not to advantage a political party,” Gutierrez said. “If (Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare) is doing this for purely political reasons, there is no way this process is going to end with Tarrant County citizens getting districts that are fair for all.”
This story was originally published May 23, 2025 at 3:12 PM.
