On January 19, 2022, the Austin Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission finalized changes to the City Council district boundaries that have now gone into effect. In doing so, a number of voters have found themselves now under representation by a councilmember they did not vote for.
According to local attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, 23,993 voters were disenfranchised by being moved out of the Council district in which they last had a chance to vote.
“Since when, in a democratic republic, does the government tell the voters who their elected representative will be, as opposed to voters exercising their right to vote on who represents them?” Aleshire asked.
Council Districts 1, 3, 5, 8, and 9 will be on the November 2022 ballot, but Council Districts 2 (Fuentes), 4 (Vela), 6 (Kelly), 7 (Pool), and 10 (Alter) will not appear on the ballot until 2024. The suit filed this week is calling for an across-the-board election for all ten council districts.
Aleshire said he has spoken with election administrators and he does not believe that adding the other five council seats to the ballot would come at any cost to the city itself.
Aleshire told KLBJ Thursday morning that the motivation for the suit is not political, but rather it’s an effort to protect voting rights.
“I call on members of the City Council who truly support voting rights to side with us on this lawsuit,” Aleshire said. “There are those, including among the City Council Defendants, who expressed outrage at procedural obstacles to voting that were adopted in 2021 by the Texas Legislature. Yet what is being done in Austin, to Austin voters, by the Austin City Council, is the outright denial of their right to vote at all.”
Aleshire noted that there has been no precedent set for something like this in any state court, nor in the Texas Supreme Court.
