Census numbers won't be released until spring, but the Horry County Council is getting a jump-start on the decennial redistricting process now, and will be looking to the public for input.
The mandatory redrawing of district lines coincides with the census and happens on regional, state and federal levels. The process is designed to make sure voting districts are about equal in population.
District lines determine who can represent the people of each district, and those representatives determine the policies that will affect those residents.
But in the past, Horry County's efforts have been rejected more than once, and County Councilman Marion Foxworth, who's leading the council's ad-hoc committee, said he hopes starting early will allow the committee and council to come to a consensus and get it right the first time around.
The county faces a filing deadline of March 15, 2012, which may seem like a long time from now.
But before the reapportionment plan can be filed, it has to be OK'd by the County Council, which means reaching political consensus, and by the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division because South Carolina used to be one of the Confederate states.
Foxworth said the Justice Department won't only examine the re-drawn district map, it will look at every detail of the process itself, from meeting minutes and agendas to votes. He said the submission package will be huge, holding his hands about two feet apart.
If any part of the process is objectionable, the results will be rejected.
And if the council cannot reach a consensus the federal government approves, the county could be taken to court or have an independent panel of judges create the new district map.
"It could be taken out of our hands," Foxworth said. "Nobody wants that."
Foxworth said he and fellow committee members Jody Prince, District 10, and Carl Schwartzkopf, District 8, will meet a couple of times before the end of the year to determine the exact process to use in the redrawing.
Then, he said, they will hold a public hearing focused on the process. That will be just the first time the public is asked to help out.
One of the issues the committee will face is whether to have a minority-majority district. In Horry County's case, that means a district mostly made up of black voters.
"Preliminary figures show Horry County will have grown from 195,000 in 2000 to 265,000 this year," Foxworth said. "So the ideal district will have grown from between 16,000 and 18,000 to about 24,000."
Drawing a district with 24,000 black voters could make for some interestingly shaped boundaries, even leaving some council members living outside the areas they represent, and could draw fire, too.
It did one year when Councilman Paul Price sued the county and won because a district drawn from downtown Myrtle Beach to out past Aynor split communities.
Until 2000, Horry County tried to draw as many minority-majority districts as possible, Foxworth said, until the U.S. Supreme Court decided race can be considered when drawing a district, but it cannot be the only or overriding factor.
"Now, we have to meet a list of criteria," Foxworth said.
Political party, however, can be an overriding consideration, and USC political science and African-American studies professor Todd Shaw said that can mean even the most diverse socio-economic groups of black voters can become a district.
Blacks who live in the most rural parts of the county might have little in common other than race with black voters who live and work near the beach, Foxworth said - an issue that has been the basis for challenges to Horry County districts in the past.
"There are, at times, assumptions you have to make about how African-Americans see themselves as part of the larger political communities," Shaw said. "More often than not, even given the other diversity within the black community, it's not a problem to assume black voters are going to vote for Democrats."
"The candidates in those whiter districts then don't have to appeal to anyone else, they don't have to moderate their views, and it's more likely that the whiter districts will elect conservatives," Shaw said. "So for black voters, the question becomes whether to elect more blacks to office, or diversify other districts and elect more Democrats. And even when Democrats are the majority here, as they were in the mid-1990s, they can be conservative Democrats."
Politics plays a huge role in redistricting, said Dennis Lambries, professor of public policy at the University of South Carolina.
"The people in power want to stay in power," he said. "The party in power doesn't want to draw the districts in such a way that it hurts itself. But all the players want to strengthen their positions."
Another factor that makes redistricting easier said than done is the "moving target" of federal requirements, Foxworth said.
"Every couple of years, a Supreme Court case comes along that changes the criteria," he said. The committee's goal is to come up with a fair district map that also leaves no questions for the Justice Department, he said.
And all of this must be done while taking care of regular county business - including budget planning that starts in the spring - and, no matter which of the two candidates wins on Tuesday, breaking in a new chairman who has never been on County Council before.
It becomes easy to see why Horry County wanted to get a head start.
"If we're pushing the calendar and don't get the map approved by council until next fall," Foxworth said, "it becomes virtually impossible to get done in time."
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