Electoral Districts

You are filtering the news through a liberal lens when you write that the Supreme Court’s ruling on redistricting “makes it more difficult . . . to stop actions in the South that could reduce the clout of minority groups” (“Supreme Court Restricts Electoral Law Challenges,” May 13).

The practice of drawing voting district lines so that members of a particular group are crowded into an artificially meandering district has been well-known in politics for many years. It is called “gerrymandering,” and in the past it was done to reduce a group’s political power. The fact is (as political scientists have noted), distributing the voting power of blacks over two or three districts actually gives them more clout than putting them all in the same district, which only gives more power to black politicians, not black people.

RICHARD SHOWSTACK

Newport Beach