A redistricting challenge in Arkansas gets its first court hearing this month.

The lawsuit claims the Arkansas Board of Apportionment's new voting-district map for the state House of Representatives dilutes the voting power of Black residents. Filed by the ACLU of Arkansas, the suit alleges the map unnecessarily splits communities of interest, particularly African Americans living in the Upper Delta, Lower Delta, and Central and Southwest Arkansas.

Barry Jefferson, the Arkansas NAACP's political action chair, said the House map denies people equal opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice.

"It's hard enough to get people to go out and vote now, and when you do things like this, you're taking their voice away, people are not going to vote," he said. "So, we want the court to bring it back to the state and say, 'Hey, you have to do a better map that represents the people.' There were multiple maps that were given that was not cutting districts in half."

The suit was filed on behalf of the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel. The three Board of Apportionment members haven't commented on the lawsuit, although Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he's pleased with the redistricting process and believes the maps will "shape equal representation" in the state.

A federal judge has scheduled a Jan. 27 hearing in the case. The suit alleges the House map violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in election procedures.

When Black Arkansans are not adequately represented in democracy, said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas, it perpetuates the systemic inequality they already face.

"That means that the elected representatives are less likely to listen to these voters on the issues that matter to them," she said. "So, it has a tremendous impact - but over a decade, can really erode progress that we absolutely need to be making in the state of Arkansas."

The lawsuit names the Board of Apportionment members - Hutchinson, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Secretary of State John Thurston - as defendants. It contends five additional Black-majority House districts would better represent state demographics.

A new report found Texas likely undercounted the number of people who actually live in the state when gathering information for the 2020 census.

The census guides where federal money -- some $1.5 trillion -- is spent based on population. Texas was one of six states showing an undercount, while eight states showed an overcount.

Thomas Wolf, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the new data will not change the population numbers used for Congressional reapportionment or redistricting, but can have a direct effect on people's well-being.

"If your state goes undercounted, there's a risk that you'll end up with less funding than you should for things like education, health care, food assistance, highways," Wolf outlined. "Basically, the whole infrastructure of your community and state."

Before the census, advocates warned of a significant undercount in the Latino population after the Trump administration tried to add a question about citizenship to the census. Although the question eventually was excluded, experts say it could have triggered lower response rates from Latinos.

California, the most populous U.S. state, did not have a significant population undercount in the census, but Wolf noted it also spent $187 million in supplemental census outreach, while Texas declined to spend any money on outreach.

"The decision itself, regardless of the motivation, is sort of penny wise/pound-foolish," Wolf remarked. "Yes, you save money from not investing in census outreach, but what you get in return is an undercount that then deprives you of millions of federal dollars."

According to the Urban Institute, if the residents of Texas had been counted accurately in 2020, the state would have received at least $247 million more in 2021 federal Medicaid reimbursements. Other states among the top six likely undercounting their population include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi and Tennessee.

A new report found the 2020 census significantly undercounted the Latino population nationwide, by almost 5%, more than three times the undercount from the 2010 census.

By establishing population data, the census guides where federal dollars are spent.

Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the undercount could mean less money for dozens of programs benefiting children and young adults in Nevada, including Medicaid and food assistance.

"The federal funding implicates things like education, child care services, transportation, parks and health care," Saenz outlined. "There isn't really a federal program or even state and local decision-making that is not going to be affected by an undercount in the census."

An analysis from the Urban Institute last winter projected an undercount of more than 20,000 people of all races statewide, including a slight overcount of white residents and a net undercount of 2.19% for Hispanics living in Nevada.

Before the census, advocates warned of a significant undercount in the Latino population after the Trump administration tried to add a question about citizenship to the census.

Saenz believes the move was designed to trigger lower response rates, specifically from the Latino community.

"And even though many of those efforts were stopped in court, the public attention to them clearly had an impact," Saenz observed. "That means that the Latino community will suffer as a result of that undercount over the course of the next decade."

The pandemic made it much harder to obtain an accurate count, because so many people had to move after losing their jobs. Children, particularly those from low-income families who tend to be renters, have traditionally been the hardest for census-takers to count.

Wisconsin is pushing ahead with a Republican-drawn legislative redistricting plan, after a ruling Friday by the state Supreme Court held the GOP maps were the most race-neutral option.

The state high court previously chose Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' legislative maps, but the decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held the state court did not provide enough justification a new Black-majority assembly district called for in Evers' plan was necessary.

Mel Barnes, staff attorney for the legal firm Law Forward, argued in a discussion hosted by the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition Monday the Republican maps violate the Voting Rights Act, opening them up to further potential litigation.

"The purpose of legislation like this, that grew out of the civil rights movement and was a triumph that people around this country organized for and pushed for, was to make sure that we weren't drawing districts in a way that diluted these votes," Barnes asserted.

Under the GOP plan, Milwaukee County will now have five Assembly districts with a majority of Black voters, down from the current six and Evers' planned seven. The U.S. Supreme Court left in place the governor's congressional redistricting plan. Evers issued a statement Friday, writing the ruling was outrageous and "an unconscionable miscarriage of justice."

Republicans would have kept their majorities in the Senate and Assembly under Evers' maps, although to a lesser degree than in the new GOP-drawn maps, which put them a few assembly seats shy of a veto-proof legislative majority.

Sachin Chheda, director of the Fair Elections Project, pointed out Evers' maps were already based on lines drawn by Republicans in 2011, as a previous state Supreme Court ruling held new voting maps should be based as much as possible on the current ones.

"So that meant that every option was going to be a gerrymandered map," Chheda contended. "It was just how gerrymandered was it going to be?"

Voting-rights advocates argue Wisconsin's 2011 maps were among the most gerrymandered in the nation. The plan was also challenged to the U.S. Supreme Court, which tossed out the case in 2019 in 2019, arguing it did not have the authority to consider partisan gerrymandering claims. Barring future legal challenges, the new maps will be in place until 2031.