LITTLE ROCK — A white challenger beating a black incumbent senator in the May 22 primary election proves Senate District 24 was drawn to disenfranchise black voters, the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the state’s district boundaries said Friday.
The trial concluded May 10, but the U.S. District Court of Eastern Arkansas hasn’t ruled on the case. The plaintiffs’ attorney, James Valley, filed a motion Friday asking the court to consider analysis of the May 22 election results.
“Because the election was not stopped and was held, what we said would happen did happen,” Valley said. “It’s certainly a lot easier to rely on an opinion about what actually happened, rather than what might have happened.”
The three-judge panel considering the case, Chief U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes, District Judge Susan Webber Wright and 8th U.S. Circuit of Appeals Judge Lavenski Smith, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice, did not say Friday whether it would consider the analysis done by the plaintiffs’ expert, electoral consultant Lisa Handley.
The case is Future Mae Jeffers v. Mike Beebe.
Gov. Mike Beebe, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and Secretary of State Mark Martin are de- fendants. They make up the Arkansas Board of Apportionment, which is responsible for drawing state House and Senate district boundaries to account for population shifts found in the U.S. census that occurs every 10 years.
The attorney general’s office represented Beebe, Mc-Daniel and the board. Spokesman Aaron Sadler said the office received a copy of the petition and is reviewing it.
Plaintiffs in the case were part of lawsuits in the 1980s and 1990s that created some House and Senate districts where black voters are in the majority. The districts were created to enhance the influence of black voters. They sought to make up for lower rates of black voting caused, experts said, by institutionalized bias.
In this suit, the plaintiffs alleged that the boundaries of District 24, one of four majority-black districts, were drawn to dilute black voters’ chance to elect the candidate of their choice and that the dilution was intentional.
The lawsuit contends that Senate district lines, specifically the boundaries of District 24, violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1973 as well as the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which were ratified after the Civil War to protect blacks’ civil rights.
The black voting-age population percentage of District 24 is 52.88 percent. Before the boundaries were redrawn last summer, the district had a black voting-age population of 61 percent.
District 24 includes all of Crittenden County and parts of Cross, Lee, Phillips and St. Francis counties.
In the May 22 primary, Rep. Keith Ingram, D-West Memphis, defeated incumbent Sen. Jack Crumbly, DWidener, with 60.55 percent of the vote.
Handley’s analysis shows that Crumbly lost the May election because white and black people voted as a “bloc,” meaning “if you counted their votes separately, would they elect a different person?” Valley said.
The analysis shows that 86 percent of voters in predominantly white areas of the district cast their ballots for Ingram, while between 63 percent and 86 percent of voters in predominantly black areas voted for Crumbly.
“This basically helps to prove our case,” Valley said. “It’s consistent with what we presented in the trial.”
Valley acknowledged the judges may be reluctant to consider new evidence 2 1/2 months into their deliberations.
“I would imagine they are a long way down the line to writing an opinion,” he said. “They may already have a direction in which they are going.”
There is no deadline for when the court must rule. Any appeal of the court’s decision would go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 07/28/2012