Lying to Defend Racist Vote Suppression

It’s a core principle for the Republican Party now:

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Common Cause accused Republicans of lying about their use of racial data in redistricting. Because it was fixing a racial gerrymander, the district court ordered that data “identifying the race of individuals or voters shall not be used in the drawing of legislative districts in the 2017 House and Senate plans.” Republicans told the court that “data regarding the race of voters was not used in the drawing of the districts, and, in fact, was not even loaded into the computer used by the map drawer to construct the districts.” They added that “we have not had and do not have racial data on any of these districts” and “there was no racial data reviewed in the preparation of this map.”

The Hofeller files reveal, Common Cause wrote, “that none of the above statements were true.” In fact, his computer seems to have had data “regarding the racial composition of the proposed districts for each and every iteration of his draft maps.” Hofeller even displayed the black voting age population in some draft maps, and “had racial data on the draft districts in Excel spreadsheets.” As Republicans swore to a court that they would not incorporate racial data—not even look at such data—their mapmaker was, the evidence shows, doing exactly that.

Well, John Roberts’s claim that Congress had forfeited its authority under Section 2 of the 15th Amendment because racism is over has sure held up well.