![]() ![]() SCHNEIDER: None of the more than half a dozen lawyers representing Galveston County would comment on the ongoing litigation. We're talking about school boards, city councils, county commissioners, to the daily lives of Texans and people across the country. SARAH XIYI CHEN: Galveston County is not the only place where people do not have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice in their local government. Sarah Xiyi Chen is a lawyer representing civil rights groups in the Galveston case. Alabama is holding a special legislative session to consider a new voting map. Just because local jurisdictions no longer need federal permission to redraw maps, the justices ruled, doesn't mean they can discriminate. SCHNEIDER: That decision held that the state of Alabama violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by racially discriminating when redrawing its congressional maps. RICHARDSON: Milligan affirmed the last 40 years of legal precedent is correct and that it should be applied. Richardson says the June Supreme Court decision known as Allen v. Two other cases challenging the new map, including one filed by the Biden administration, have been consolidated with hers. SCHNEIDER: That's Valencia Richardson, an attorney representing current and former county officeholders. VALENCIA RICHARDSON: Galveston County was actually one of the first local jurisdictions to attempt to enact a discriminatory map after Shelby County came down in 2013. Supreme Court struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act that required many Southern states to get permission from the federal government before changing their election laws in a decision known as Shelby County v. The GOP majority had good reason to think they'd be able to make that map stick. SCHNEIDER: The new map means incumbent Democratic Commissioner Stephen Holmes, who is Black, is very likely to lose his seat when he runs for reelection next year. And voting has been one of those primary mechanisms by which control has been asserted. He says the redistricting was a step backwards.ĪNTHONY P GRIFFIN: It's been sad to watch how Texas has done everything it can to exclude people. Griffin spent nearly three decades bringing voting rights cases against the city and county of Galveston. That's even though Galveston County is nearly half Black and Latino. But under the new map, that's no longer the case. One of the county's four precincts used to be made up of a majority of Black and Latino residents. SCHNEIDER: It's a practice known as cracking. LUCILLE MCGASKEY: The original Precinct 3 has been carved into four different precincts, and I thought, basically, that it was illegal for you to do that, to break it up like that because you took away our voting strength. Lucille McGaskey is a longtime community activist based in Texas City. In 2021, the Republican-led Galveston County Commissioners Court redrew its map to eliminate the sole precinct represented by a nonwhite Democrat. Houston Public Media's Andrew Schneider reports.ĪNDREW SCHNEIDER, BYLINE: Texas counties are each made up of four voting districts known as precincts. This is a redistricting case in Galveston County, and people who draw local election maps elsewhere will be watching. Supreme Court upheld a key portion of it in June. East Coast ports are installing larger cranes and dredging channels to fit these ships, which are 2.5 times the capacity of the current largest ships that pass through the canal.Next month, a federal trial in southeastern Texas will be the first serious test of the Voting Rights Act since the U.S. So too, are the channels these “ mega vessels” will cruise through: a $5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal, which carries 5 percent of the world trade, will double capacity by 2015, allowing access for larger (and more) ships. Various countries are gearing up to meet this demand by building new terminals to accommodate bigger ships than ever before. But nearly every port on the map exhibits a steady increase of traffic in the last decade, mirroring a trend in global seaborne trade, which has expanded by 3 percent every year since 1970, reaching 8.4 billion tons in 2010. Since the 1990s, the tons of cargo passing through the Port of Shanghai has quadrupled. Such standardization is necessary so that containers can be efficiently stacked one of top of the other, a tight network visible for each port on this map.Ī bird’s eye view of these ports and channels shows it’s clear China leads the way in TEUs in fact, six of the world’s 10 busiest ports are located along the mainland. Most containers are 20 feet long and eight feet wide, hence the term TEU. The world’s top 50 largest ports see millions of Twenty-foot Equivalent Units each year, the name given multi-colored, cargo-carrying containers. Container-laden ships traverse countless supply chains from continent to continent, a method of transportation that accounts for more than 90 percent of the world trade by volume. ![]()
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