The Abbeville City Council is redrawing its voting districts in response to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2023.
The city may have corrected its lopsided populations across voting districts. However, it still fails to address the issue of racial gerrymandering by packing Black voters into a single district, Ahmed Soussi, senior staff attorney for the SPLC, said.
A new map, presented at the Tuesday council meeting, creates an average deviation of 0.57% across districts, a far cry from previous maps that saw a swing as much as 19% from the city’s most and least populated districts…