Last summer, a Florida judge ruled that the state’s legislature illegally redrew congressional districts in 2012 to benefit Republicans. In his ruling, Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis ripped into political consultants who he said “made a mockery of the Legislature’s transparent and open process of redistricting” while “going to great lengths to conceal from the public their plan and their participation in it.”
Now, newly released emails published Sunday shed light on the lengths those political consultants went to tweak the state’s congressional districts in favor of the GOP despite a gerrymandering ban.
The emails, which were obtained by the Naples Daily News and the Miami Herald, detail how “paranoid” consultants with the GOP consulting firm Data Targeting kept their efforts to redraw some of the state’s congressional maps under wraps. Earlier this month the Florida Supreme Court ordered that the documents, which were a part of the original lawsuit accused Republicans of manipulating Florida’s political map, must be unsealed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas upheld that order on Friday, according to the Naples Daily News.
One exchange showed that the consultants discussed a map proposal that would kick longtime U.S. Rep. Bill Young (R-FL), who died last November, out of his seat.
“If you have to have a minority-majority seat, this does it,” Anthony Pedicini, a Tampa-based political consultant, wrote of a redistricting plan that he said would also “retire Bill Young,” according to the Naples Daily News.
That plan was never realized.
Another email thread shows Pat Bainter, Data Targeting’s founder, acknowledging that former state Sen. John Thrasher (R) did not live in his district centered around St. John’s County. Thrasher’s residency had been a sticking point when he ran for the seat in a 2009 special election, according to the Naples Daily News.
“He actually lives in Clay County and would hope to end up there,” Bainter wrote to another West Palm Beach-based consultant, as quoted by the newspaper.
The emails also show that consultants discussed “packing” Democratic-leaning minority voters into a single district in order to bolster the Republican vote in surrounding districts. Bainter and Pedicini had approached lawyers with a strategy to shift some of the population in GOP-leaning state Senate districts in the Panhandle region into Democratic-leaning minority districts, according to the Naples Daily News.
The Miami Herald also pointed to one instance where Data Targeting’s Michael Sheehan tried to carve white voters out of state Sen. Dwight Bullard’s (D) Miami-area district.
Sheehan wrote that Bullard’s district did “not have enough available non-minority population that we could reduce to effectively increase the minority population percentage. However we can create some long tentacles to reach out and grab enough black population to hit 50+%,” as quoted by the Herald.
It’s important to remember, as the Miami Herald pointed out, that the emails do not show evidence that consultants directly influenced lawmakers to evade the state’s gerrymandering ban.
New congressional maps approved by the state legislature in August altered the boundaries of seven of the Florida’s 27 congressional districts. The plaintiffs of the original lawsuit are appealing Lewis’ decision, though, because they don’t believe it went far enough.
Fucking crooks.
So were their actions felonious? Is anyone going to jail?
Bet this never makes the MSM news. Sigh.
The entire political system is in need of adult, non-partisan supervision.
But I am putting my money on ISIL and Mossad vacationing together as a more likely event.
Reduce the partisan influence on determining Congressional districts by overlaying each state with a square or hexagonal grid of predetermined size. Combine adjacent only squares or hexagons to equalize the population in each district. Let the voters fall where they may.