Voting wrongs.

• Author: Meacham, John
• Position: Racial reapportionment

North Carolina's new 12th congressional district was conceived, appropriately, during a brief political tryst at an interstate motel. One day in 1991, Thomas Hardaway, a Democratic state representative, met with John Men-itt, an aide to incumbent Democratic Rep. Charlie Rose, at a Howard Johnson's off Interstate 95 in Gold Rock, North Carolina.

The purpose of the rendezvous? To plot how to draw majority-black congressional districts without jeopardizing existing Democratic districts. "I guess it was kind of funny, meeting like that," Hardaway says. The resulting district, the 12th, is equally amusing, or at least equally bizarre: It runs along three interstates, has a perimeter of 907 miles and is, in places, only as wide as the road. A majority-black seat now held by a black freshman Democrat, the district toddles and twists 141 miles across the state, connecting clusters of racial minorities in four major cities. The district respects no county lines, no city limits, no test of common sense.

Welcome to the new world of racial gerrymandering. What made the North Carolina district possible--and others like it in Georgia, Texas, Illinois, Florida, New York, and elsewhere-was the partisan manipulation of the relatively obscure Voting Rights Act of 1982. Originally intended to guarantee Southern blacks the fight to vote, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was amended in 1982 to give racial and ethnic minorities the fight to "elect representatives of their choice." The amendment presumes that those representatives of choice would belong to the same racial or ethnic group: Blacks would want black congressmen; hispanics, hispanic congressmen.

Although passed by Congress 10 years ago, the 1982 law affected its first congressional election in 1992, after the once-a-decade redrawing of districts. And, ironically, the initial signs are that the newly gerrymandered districts may actually hurt those who most eagerly lobbied for them: minorities and Republicans.

The good news for minorities is that historic numbers of black and hispanic representatives were elected to Congress (58 minority representatives, 52 of whom are from majority-minority districts, up from 38 minority representatives in 1990). In that light, the 1982 amendment seems a fine, bipartisan piece of legislation. But while there may be a greater number of minorities in Congress, it's also true that minorities are now in a more tenuous position. A minority voter in a majority-minority district--virtually all of which are heavily Democratic--has no real choice to make between the two major parties. Democrats are the only players on the field.

And a minority congressman, once in Washington, has few common points of interest with the representatives of neighboring, snowy-white districts. This state of affairs is no accident. During reapportionment, Republicans decided to press for minority districts, figuring (correctly) that quarantining minority voters would necessarily create competitive districts next door.

"For us, it was sort of, 'What the hell, let's maximize our suburban base,'" says Tony Snow, who was Bush's deputy assistant for media affairs. Minorities, as a result, are exiled to political reservations and given a few voices in Congress, while white Democrats and Republicans represent overwhelmingly white districts.

This means that one casualty of the 1982 law's enforcement could be, ironically, the particular concerns of the minority community. Says Clarence Carter, director of African-American political affairs for the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1992, "It's intractable, really: The...