nd it also can help, at least in part, to show the slow revolution in Congress that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but also the legislation being undertaken by conservatives across the country today.
Conservitives took their time to slowly erode voting rights.
replacing
What the actual fuck
“The backdrop is that in Texas, over 95 percent of the land is privately owned. There’s a culture and an ownership pattern that makes it very difficult to mobilize financial support from state and local governments.”
Basically we have to destroy nature in the interest of wealthy land owners...
gray-infrastructure projects.
Gray infrastructure refers to structures such as dams, seawalls, roads, pipes or water treatment plants. Adapting to the escalating impacts of climate breakdown — particularly for coastlines facing sea-level rise and stronger storms — requires changing our infrastructure.
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This is an annotation
today, intricate computer algorithms and sophisticated data about voters allow map drawers to game redistricting on a massive scale with surgical precision.
That is terrifying. They can mathmatically craft a district to win votes.
while sometimes gerrymandering results in oddly shaped districts, that isn’t always the case. Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party.
This is not the case in Houston, but I understand the concept of how it may seem normal in other cities.
Packing is the opposite of cracking: map drawers cram certain groups of voters into as few districts as possible. In these few districts, the “packed” groups are likely to elect their preferred candidates, but the groups’ voting strength is weakened everywhere else.
They take a group of voters from one district, and pack them together so that their power is weakened in other districts.
Cracking splits groups of people with similar characteristics, such as voters of the same party affiliation, across multiple districts. With their voting strength divided, these groups struggle to elect their preferred candidates in any of the districts.
Literally splitting up an area so that their voting power is diluted.