See Jacksonville’s gerrymandered City Council districts for yourself with The Tributary’s new tool

The Tributary’s latest interactive allows you to explore how Jacksonville City Council gerrymandered its proposed district lines by race or political party.

This tool, launched today, builds off The Tributary’s previous interactive showing every person in Florida from the 2020 Census.

This time, we went more granular in Duval County so you can see how City Council has sliced neighborhoods to pack Black voters into four Black-majority districts.

SEE MORE: JACKSONVILLE’S REDISTRICTING PLAN RISKS RACIAL GERRYMANDERING CLAIMS, EXPERTS SAY

Using census blocks, the smallest geography available from the U.S. Census Bureau, the map randomly assigns dots for every person living in Duval County and then displays their self-reported race.

On top of that, you can switch from census data to election data, displaying every vote in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Duval County, courtesy of the Supervisor of Elections Office.

Duval has 199 precincts dividing the county. We randomly generated election dots within the residential and mixed-use zoning areas of each of those precincts.

Note: These dots are randomly assigned within small geographies, but they don’t reflect the actual people inside individual homes.

City Council District 7 needed to add more people in redistricting, but Councilman Reggie Gaffney expressed concerns about adding in too many white people to the 63-percent Black district.

As Gaffney considered which census blocks to add to his district from the neighboring white-majority District 2, he had City Planning Director Bill Killingsworth read off the racial demographics for each block.

The effect can be seen below, with the red dashed line representing the old district boundary:

As the Tributary previously reported, using race as a “predominant factor” in redistricting violates the U.S. Constitution unless a detailed analysis finds doing so is necessary to protect a racial minority from being disenfranchised.

Even then, it’s illegal to unnecessarily pack voters from a racial minority beyond what is necessary for those voters to elect the candidate of their choice.

Jacksonville is home to a congressional district, a senate district, a house district and a City Council district that allow Black voters to elect the candidates of their choice even though Black voters are a minority in those districts.

Gaffney’s district, after adding in the new census blocks, will now be 62 percent Black.

District	White %	Black %	Hispanic %
1	40.8%	38.6%	15.9%
2	59.8%	20.7%	10.2%
3	61.1%	13.1%	12.9%
4	49.4%	19.8%	18.9%
5	55.9%	18.9%	16.9%
6	71.0%	9.2%	10.4%
7	29.1%	62.0%	6.4%
8	23.7%	70.3%	4.3%
9	26.3%	60.6%	9.3%
10	25.7%	61.3%	9.1%
11	54.6%	17.9%	13.0%
12	50.0%	33.3%	10.8%
13	77.1%	8.4%	8.1%
14	61.2%	21.4%	11.0%
Duval County	49.4%	31.9%	11.3%

City law requires all districts be “as logical and compact a geographical pattern as it is possible to achieve”, and the “districts must take into consideration other factors, particularly compactness and contiguity, so that the people of the City, and their varied economic, social and ethnic interests and objectives, are adequately represented in the Council.”

Council members said one of their top priorities was to make as few changes as possible to the current maps, but that means they have chosen to continue dividing neighborhoods across districts.

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For example, Wesconnett, Murray Hill, Hillcrest, Ortega Farms and Riverside will continue to be split between Districts 9 and 14, with District 9 getting the parts of those neighborhoods with more Black residents while District 14 gets the parts with more white residents.

A decade ago, Florida voters approved Fair Districts Amendments for congressional and legislative districts, prohibiting the Legislature from trying to “favor or disfavor” a political party. But those standards don’t apply to local redistricting, which means the City Council can legally draw partisan gerrymandered maps.

The interactive tool also shows how split the county was in 2020’s presidential election when about 51 percent of Duval County voted for Joe Biden and 47 percent voted for Donald Trump.

Over the next month, the Jacksonville City Council rules committee will host four public hearings to collect input on its proposals.

We at The Tributary hope this interactive helps the public better understand how redistricting divides the city and county’s neighborhoods.

We plan to launch more interactives exploring the city’s and state’s redistricting efforts in the next few weeks.

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to email us at interactives@jaxtrib.org.