Voting districts designed to increase the chances of electing minority candidates, a fixture in the South, could be dismantled if the Supreme Court invalidates a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

The court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case that challenges Section 5 of the 1965 landmark law. The section bars all or part of 16 states, including Louisiana, from making any changes to their election procedures without first proving the changes wouldn’t discriminate against minority voters. A ruling is expected in a few months.

If the court rules Section 5 is no longer necessary, states and counties and local governments subject to the provision would not have to submit new election maps to the Justice Department for review.

Civil rights advocates say that would open the door for jurisdictions like many in the South — where blacks tend to vote for black candidates and whites tend to vote for white candidates — to redraw districts in a way that makes it harder for minorities to get elected.

“There is no doubt in my mind that if there is no Section 5, the eight black (state) Senate districts in Alabama would disappear in the very near future,” said Democratic state Sen. Hank Sanders, who holds one of those eight seats.

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Most state legislatures would push more minority voters into one district, said David Bositis, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that focuses on issues affecting blacks.

“White voters in most of the Southern states, not all… are Republicans and so the whiter the district, the more likely it’s going to be a Republican district,’’ Bositis said. “They’re going to want to pack black voters into as few districts as possible.’’

Read more at the Shreveport Times.

In the days immediately following the presidential election, Martin Mendez was in a blue funk.

A Latino Republican, he watched with dismay as poll after poll revealed that not only did President Barack Obama win a second term in office, but he did so with a sizable portion of the Hispanic vote.

The loss was especially painful for Mendez, who spent hours knocking on the doors of Hispanics around Denver in an effort to convince them to give the GOP a try.

"Out in the field in Denver, the comments I got ... the feedback was Mitt Romney's for the millionaires. We're these poor Hispanics, so we're going to vote for Obama because he's for the little guy," Mendez said, his voice full of exasperation.

"There is this class warfare game that Democrats play every single election cycle. We have to start now, reaching out now and not sit on the sidelines until the next cycle," he said.

The growing influence of Latinos, blacks, women and young people in America is not a new story. Demographers have known that at some point the country would become more non-white than white. Social scientists knew that the American landscape was changing, and that change would begin to have profound impact on the nation's shifting identity.

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Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters -- who, according to U.S. Census figures released earlier this year, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year -- will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.

The coming political revolution could result in a massive changing of the guard on nearly every level of government, potential cultural clashes from big cities to rural towns, and the type of political alliances that are now considered rare.

"I do think that the era that began with Ronald Regan where there was a conservative dominance powered by conservative voters and Southern whites. That era is over," said David Bositis, a senior political analyst, at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Any candidate that wants to run a campaign [now] only at whites is going to lose."

Read more at CNN.

The 2012 election was historic for more than just the reelection of the nation’s first black president.

“2012 will be the last campaign where one of the major parties seeks to get elected solely with the white vote,” David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies said Wednesday in a forum to discuss the impact of the black vote during this year’s campaign.

“2012 very clearly showed that the country is multiracial, multiethnic” and successful candidates in the future – especially Republican candidates – “have to appeal to a much wider group.”

Further, Bositis said, the black vote was crucial in the so-called swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, the latter of which votes are still being counted and Obama holds on to a narrow lead.

The percentage of black voter turnout in those states increased substantially, Bositis said. In Ohio, particularly, the percentage of black voters voting increased by 4 percentage points, from 11 to 15 percent of the total turnout, compared to 2008. And Obama won 96 percent of the black vote on Tuesday.

Read more at Black America Web.

Despite efforts in some states to suppress the Black vote and predictions that African-Americans would not turn out at the rate they did in 2008, Blacks overcame all obstacles and were key to Obama’s re-election to a second term, an analysis of voting data shows.

Exit polls show that 93 percent of Blacks voted for Obama this year, down slightly from the 95 percent rate in 2008. But voting for all groups was down this year compared with the presidential election four years ago.

Obama carried every age bracket by at least 90 percent, but there was a gender gap among African-Americans, with 96 percent of Black women voting to re-elect the nation’s first Black president and only 87 percent of men supporting Obama. Four years ago, there was only a one-point difference separating the two groups, with women giving Obama 96 percent of their vote, compared with 95 percent for Black men.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney received only 6 percent of the Black vote, which was 2 percent higher than John McCain in 2008 but less than 11 percent achieved by George Bush in 2004 when he defeated John Kerry.

“The African American vote was crucial for President Obama in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia,” said David Bositis senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Read more at Black Voice News.

When black voters gave President Barack Obama 93 percent support on Election Day in defiance of predictions that they might sit it out this year, black leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That encouraged those leaders to try to leverage more attention from both Obama and Congress. Although they waver over how much to demand from the president — particularly in light of defeated GOP challenger Mitt Romney's assertion that Obama gave "gifts" to minorities in exchange for their votes — they are delivering postelection wish lists to the president anyway.

"I think the president heard us loud and clear. The collective message was, 'Let's build on where we already are,'" the Rev. Al Sharpton told reporters after a White House meeting last week with a collection of advocates representing largely Democratic constituencies.

Specifically, Sharpton said, that means keeping the brunt of the looming "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts off the backs of the middle and working class.

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Nationally, Obama's share of the black vote was down slightly from four years ago. But in some key states, turnout was higher and had an impact, said David Bositis, an expert on black politics and voting at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Blacks made up 15 percent of the electorate in Ohio, up from 11 percent in 2008. And 97 percent of those votes went for Obama, leading Bositis to say Obama's margin of victory in the state came from black voters.

In Michigan, the black share of the vote grew from 12 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2012, according to exit polls.

"Michigan was one of the states the two parties jostled around, and eventually Republicans decided they were not going to win, and one of the reasons was the big increase in the black vote," Bositis said.

Read more at U.S. News and World Report.

While advocates of voter identification laws say the goal is to prevent fraud at the polls, Rep. Elijah Cummings insists that what is really at work is voter suppression during a campaign that promises to be a tighter than ever race for the presidency.

“As many as one in four African-American voters, more than one in six Hispanic voters, and about one in ten eligible voters overall do not possess a current and valid government-issued photo ID,” wrote Cummings in a press release Sept. 18, citing a NYU School of Law Brennan Center for Justice analysis of a voter rights bill he co-introduced with 13 House of Representatives members.

The bill, introduced as the America Votes Act of 2012 by Cummings and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), targets the drive spearheaded by Republican opponents of President Obama to require voters to produce government issued identification at the time votes are cast.

Read more at The Afro.

Deidra Reese isn't waiting for people to come to her to find out whether they are registered to vote.

With iPad in hand, Reese is going to community centers, homes and churches in nine Ohio cities, looking up registrations to make sure voters have proper ID and everything else they need to cast ballots on Election Day.

"We are not going to give back one single inch. We have fought too long and too hard," said Reese, 45, coordinator of the Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Reese is part of a cadre of black women engaged in a revived wave of voting rights advocacy four years after the historic election of the nation's first black president. Provoked by voting law changes in various states, they have decided to help voters navigate the system — a fitting role, they say, given that black women had the highest turnout of any group of voters in 2008.

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African-American women, who number about 20 million in the U.S., have long been the largest group of Democratic voters in the country, said David Bositis, senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at ABC News.

While New Orleans has Mardi Gras, Tampa has Gasparilla and New York City owns New Year’s Eve, Washingtonians like to make their parties political, and few come bigger than tonight’s debate-watching festivities all around D.C.

The National Press Club is hosting a party at its headquarters downtown, just two blocks from the White House, starting with the debate at 9 p.m. Nearby, George Washington University College Democrats and College Republicans will watch together at a joint viewing party on campus. Speaking of joint events, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies parties at 805 15th Street NW. The Woman’s National Democratic Club and the Congressional Black Associates, the Urban League, Madyun Group and Cheeky Sasso Entertainment and Marketing Group are also hosting debate parties in the District tonight.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Enveloped by red, white, and blue, thousands of black and brown faces will stand out this week at the Democratic National Convention, mirroring an increasingly diverse America and contrasting with scenes from the Republican convention that just ended.

Led by a president with a black father and a white mother, Democrats will tout diversity and sell themselves as inclusionary, sensitive to the most marginalized, and hip to the nation's changing demographics. Of their delegates, one study found, 26 percent are black.

The same study found that 2.1 percent of this year's GOP delegates are black. Republican activists see themselves as defenders of hard work and merit without regard to creed or color - their presidential nominee, after all, is a Mormon - and they recoil at Democrats' use of an affirmative-action system to pick some delegates based on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

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"Having a party system based on race is not that different from the party systems in the Middle East based on religion," said analyst David A. Bositis, who compiled racial data on the delegates for the nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

A "chasm" now exists between Republicans and African Americans, Bositis said. Part of it is a response to the rise of the tea party, he said, which is perceived as hostile to blacks. He said only two of the 165 national GOP committee people are black.

Although Obama helped bring additional blacks into the Democratic column, Bositis said a bigger draw is some of the party's policies. He said that Obama's health-care reform law, for example, helps minorities more than whites because they are more likely to be uninsured.

Read more at Philly.com.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic studies today released its quadrennial report, Blacks and the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which tracks both African American participation at the event and, more broadly, the relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party.

The Convention Guide provides a comprehensive look at African Americans, their voting patterns and preferences and their relationship as voting citizens to the Democratic Party. It contains historical data about black voting patterns in recent decades and focuses on states where the black vote has the potential to affect the outcome of the presidential election as well as U.S. Senate contests.

Download the full press release below.