Our elected officials should be working for us
EDITOR:
Freedom is a deeply held value for all Americans.
Our representative government protects our freedoms; therefore the right to vote in free and fair elections is essential to all citizens and to our democracy.
This right to vote is so important that people have died for it, from our ancestors in the Revolutionary War to the activists in the 1960s civil rights movement.
How we elect our representatives is important at every level, from the County Commission to the Tennessee General Assembly to Congress.
How districts are drawn is key to the fairness of the electoral process. Mr. Ragan’s recent opinion column of Jan. 26 claims that the redistricting process was smooth, bipartisan, fair, and equitable.
He claims that “every district is properly represented.” Nothing can be farther from the truth.
The redistricting maps developed by the Republican supermajority were not drawn in a bipartisan manner; only Republicans actually had input into the process. The maps are certainly not fair or equitable.
The maps have been radically gerrymandered, i.e., drawn to give Republicans a numeric advantage. Thus Republicans have representation in the General Assembly and Congress far higher than the proportion of Republicans in the state.
Only approximately 60 to 63-percent of Tennessee voters vote for Republicans while almost 80-percent of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation is Republican.
One of the most egregious examples of gerrymandering, although not the only one, is the division of Nashville among three different congressional districts. These districts dilute the votes of Black voters by drawing their districts to extend into rural, predominantly white areas of the state. In one of these districts, urban black voters are combined into a district with people over a hundred miles away in a rural county. Meanwhile, their Nashville neighbors are put into different districts that are also overwhelmingly white.
In 1995, the Supreme Court decided in Miller v. Johnson that racial gerrymandering is a violation of constitutional rights.
Clearly, the maps drawn by the Republican supermajority are a violation of the constitutional rights of the citizens of Nashville and Tennessee.
Likely they will be challenged in court.
Our elected officials should be working for us, not illegally manipulating our maps to grab more power. Despite the claim that they are working for the wellbeing of the state, clearly they are more focused on the wellbeing of their own power.
Ellen Faby
Clinton
