The Constitution requires a national census every 10 years to ensure that congressional districts are approximately equal in population. Today, each district contains about 710,000 people. Massachusetts has nine congressional districts. The Cape and Islands are in the ninth district, represented since 2013 by William Keating.
The Trump administration has sought ways to undermine voting in three ways, two of which would directly affect voters on Martha’s Vineyard. The first is to restrict or terminate voting by mail. In the 2024 election, approximately one-third of all registered voters in the U.S. voted by mail, a figure matched by Vineyard voters, which reached 34.2 percent. In addition, according to the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office, in the September primary that year, 62 percent of the voters mailed in their ballots. Although President Trump himself votes by mail, he wants to end the practice, claiming without evidence that it encourages voter fraud.
Second, an effort by the Trump administration to require strict voter-identification standards would directly affect Island voters. While most Americans favor voter ID, many Island residents may not meet the strict requirements outlined in the so-called SAVE America Act that Congress is now debating. Voters must possess either a birth certificate, a passport, or a military or tribal ID. A driver’s license would not qualify unless it shows U.S. citizenship. Only five states include this type of identification, and Massachusetts is not among them.
Third and most damaging to equal voting rights is something called gerrymandering. It originated in1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry wanted to guarantee the victory of members of his party, the Democratic Republicans, in the state legislature. The result was a district that the Boston Gazette complained was shaped like a salamander. Accompanying the story was an image called the “Gerry-mander, a new species of monster.” Thus was born partisan redistricting known as the gerrymander.
Redrawing congressional districts typically occurs every 10 years when the U.S. Census is taken. President Trump encouraged Republican-controlled legislatures to reconfigure their boundaries well before the November elections to preserve Republican control of the House of Representatives. Massachusetts is not involved because as a heavily Democratic state, all representatives in Congress are Democrats. But in Florida, which has 28 congressional districts, Democrats have only four seats, even though they generally receive about 45 percent of the vote.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) was supposed to protect voter rights, especially for minority groups. After the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais in late April this year, the court ruled that states did not have to do so anymore because of increased participation by minority voters and the election of representatives to local, state, and federal offices.
After Texas officials then redivided their congressional districts to ensure Republican victories, several states followed suit, including California, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Democrats control only the California legislature.
The weakening of the VRA began in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, when the Supreme Court overturned its sections 4 and 5. Section 4 identified several jurisdictions, including nine states, 12 municipalities, and 57 counties, that had a long history of voter discrimination against people of color and other minorities. Congress never updated its list of jurisdictions after 1975. Section 5 required these jurisdictions to obtain permission from the U.S. Attorney General or a federal court before they made any changes in their voting procedures. The court, by a bare majority, ruled that the list of jurisdictions was outdated (thus, the end of Section 4). Therefore, they no longer had to appeal to the government to change their voting procedures (thus, the end of Section 5).
In 2019, the court ruled, again by a bare majority, in Rucho v. Common Sense, that while partisan gerrymandering threatened American democratic norms, only elected politicians, not unelected federal judges, should deal with it. Finally, the Callais decision ended Section 2 of the VRA, prohibiting racial gerrymandering, historically meaning to dilute or eliminate Black voting. The court ruled that when Louisiana created two minority-Black congressional districts, it intentionally discriminated against white voters, stating that “the State’s attempt … was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
Nearly 65 years ago, in Baker v. Carr, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that when it comes to voting, “appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate. In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people’s representatives.” The VRA may be dead, but the right to vote remains in our hands on the Vineyard and throughout the nation, to exercise in a meaningful and powerful way, despite the efforts of the Trump administration to undermine those rights.
Jack Fruchtman, who lives in Aquinnah, taught constitutional law and politics for more than 40 years.