Prison Gerrymandering Ruled Unconstitutional

[Content Note: Carcerality; voting rights.]

This is big news:

The Federal District Court for Florida's Northern District ruled Monday that the prison gerrymandering in Florida's Jefferson County unconstitutionally dilutes the voting power of its residents. By packing inmates who can't vote into a district, but counting them when drawing electoral maps, District Judge Mark Walker said the county had violated the "one person, one vote" principle in the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.

The American Civil Liberties Union's attorney, Nancy Abudu, argued the case on behalf of Jefferson County residents who felt the prison gerrymandering watered down the strength of their political power by unfairly stacking the deck for residents who live in the same district as the non-voting prisoners.

"If I want to get a road fixed, if I want a law changed, if I want more impact on a school board member or county commissioner, I have more power because my representative has to deal with fewer people," she told ThinkProgress. "It's about access and the ability to influence, and making sure officials are responsive to their electorate."

Abudu emphasized that not only do the inmates in Jefferson County lack the right to vote, the vast majority are not residents of the county, but were arrested in other parts of the state and shipped hundreds of miles away to serve their sentence.

According to the ACLU, of the nearly 1,200 inmates in the correctional center, only nine were convicted in Jefferson County. Yet the inmates make up a whopping 43 percent of the voting age population in District 3. "It skews the numbers so dramatically in this instance," Abudu told ThinkProgress.

...Unless the county appeals, officials will have to redraw their voting maps before the qualifying election in June for commissioners and school board members.

This is a very important, and very good, decision by the district court. What will be even better is if and when the courts decide that incarceration is not a justifiable reason for disenfranchisement in the first fucking place.