Suit is part of larger effort to fight practices that organization argues are attempts to suppress minority voting

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued the state of Connecticut on Thursday, over how it counts its prisoners when crafting legislative districts. The NAACP lawsuit argues that urban districts are weakened while rural districts with fewer minorities benefit unfairly, in a practice critics call “partisan gerrymandering”.

The civil rights organization hopes the case can become a template for suits it may file in other states where inmates are included in the population counts of areas where they are imprisoned, rather than their home districts.

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Including incarcerated people in population counts for the Connecticut general assembly districts where prisons are located is unfair to those living in the districts where the inmates originally came from, said Derrick Johnson, NAACP president and chief executive.

“It gives disproportionate weight to oftentimes rural parts of the states, justifying disproportion in terms of representation and the allocation of state and federal funds,” Johnson said. “If you consider where individuals are from, you allow for a more accurate representation and allocation of public funds.”

The Connecticut attorney general’s office “will review the complaint and respond at the appropriate time in court”, spokeswoman Jaclyn Severance said.

The suit, filed in federal court and announced at a news conference in New Haven, is part of a larger effort by the NAACP to fight practices the civil rights organization argues are attempts to suppress minority voting. Those efforts include putting limits on same-day voter registration and failing to allow early voting, said Bradford Berry, NAACP legal counsel.

Prison gerrymandering can affect power in state legislatures across the country. Urban legislative districts, with larger minority populations, lose out because there is essentially an undercount in their communities, Berry said.

The lawsuit contends this practice dilutes the vote and therefore violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the US constitution.

Rich Medina, a member of a Yale Law School group of students working with the NAACP on the case, said a vast majority of states apportion legislative districts the same way as Connecticut. Only Maryland, Delaware, California and New York have enacted laws that require inmates be counted toward the populations of their home districts for legislative redistricting purposes.

The NAACP is taking legal action on this issue after several failed attempts to pass similar legislation in Connecticut. The most recent effort fizzled in 2016.

“Pretty much the only avenue that we must take now is through the courts,” said Scot X Esdaile, chairman of the state NAACP chapter. “This is about power, and nobody gives away power. You’ve got to take power.”

In past years, Connecticut lawmakers with prisons in their district complained they could lose funding from state grants if population figures were compiled differently. Republican state senator John Kissel would be most affected by such a change. There are thousands of inmates in his district, which spans seven towns, farmland and six rural prisons near the Massachusetts border.

While Kissel has said he might support legislation that changes how inmates are counted, he has pointed out there are other communities affected by other transient populations, such as college students.

“What about all the kids at UConn?” he asked in 2016. “What about other areas of the state where people are counted in terms of voting districts but they may not necessarily be there year-round?”

When crafting district lines, states rely on figures from the US Census Bureau, which counts people wherever they live or sleep most of the time. For an inmate, that is behind bars.

Medina said the lawsuit calls for Connecticut’s current legislative boundaries, which rely on the last census numbers, to be redrawn before the 2020 elections. The next census will be conducted in 2020.