Timothy Birdnow

The Democrats have been challenging redistricting in courts to avoid the GOP taking seats from them. And yet here we have a clear case of Gerrymandering in the north St. Louis County community of Florissant that is being hailed by the liberal Post-Dispatch because it gives minorities more representation.

From the article:

"It’s significant in St. Louis County’s largest city, where one in four residents is black and where Parson’s election comes less than a year after the city agreed to redraw the boundary lines of its nine wards so that each has roughly the same number of people.

The change in boundaries came at the urging of the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the country’s first civil rights law firm.

"We believe that the city’s current electoral plan may undermine the opportunity of black voters in Florissant to participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice,” wrote Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill and three other attorneys from the firm in a letter two years ago to Mayor Thomas Schneider.

"We, therefore, write to encourage the City Council to pursue a readily available fair and inclusive approach to elections that complies with the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act and other applicable laws.”

The letter was unexpected, Schneider said, and was the first indication that the city had used incorrect data when redistricting, something it is required to do after every decennial census.

"We were surprised by the letter, surprised that the data was flawed, then surprised at how flawed it was,” Schneider said. "It actually made the wards worse.”

The letter was written April 15, 2015, eight months after teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in neighboring Ferguson. The Legal Defense Fund attorneys pointed out that in addition to under-representation on their city councils, both communities have few black police officers, and officers make a disproportionate number of traffic stops involving African-American motorists."

End excerpt.

So florissant has redrawn her districts to increase the chances of blacks to win public elections, despite the fact that the Florissant election scheme goes back to redistricting in 2010, long before the community developed a large minority population.So the city of Florissant (one of the largest cities in Missouri) has essentially undergone a redistricting despite based on minority demands.

It should eb pointed out that Florissant is largely dominated by Democrats.

Last August a judge tampered with the school board elections in the Ferguson-Florissant school district in a similar way, as I chronicled at the time. The city of Florissant clearly feared legal entanglements and surrendered to the NAACP and the other aggressors.

Just another liberal coup dressed as "fairness".

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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