In its ruling on the 2011 Texas congressional plan, the court found that the removal of Latino voters in Nueces County from a district anchored in South Texas and their placement in a redrawn TX-27 running to the north “had the effect and was intended to dilute their opportunity to elect their candidate of choice.”

Although the court-ordered 2012 interim plan (adopted by the Texas Legislature in 2013 as the state’s permanent congressional plan) made changes to other parts of the map, it did not change the configuration of TX-27. What this means is that the infirmities found by the court in the 2011 map also continue to exist in the current map, and, so assuming that the court’s decision isn’t reversed on appeal, changes eventually will need to be made to TX-27.

So how could the problems with TX-27 be remedied?

We don’t yet have proposals from either the plaintiffs or the state and no lawmakers have offered proposals either. But earlier proposals from 2013 suggest some possible avenues.

But first let’s start with a refresher on how TX-27 is currently configured, with Nueces County at the bottom of a district that runs north toward Houston and west toward Austin (a district that is about 44.6% Latino and 47.9% Anglo):

Now for some alternatives.

The first is from Plan C262 offered jointly by the LULAC and Perez plaintiffs in 2013, which would join Nueces County to a South Texas coastal district and next to it create an additional Latino majority seat. (Ignore the district numbers which vary from proposal to proposal).

In 2013, Senator Royce West (D-Dallas) offered similar but slightly varied proposal in Plan C242 and similar districts appear in a number of other proposed maps.

Senator Watson (D-Austin) and State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin), likewise, offered another proposal in Plan C245 that would have placed most of Nueces County in a South Texas district, but joined the rest to a district that incorporated heavily Latino portions of Bexar County that would need a new home after the dismantling of TX-35 (the Latino majority district in the current map running between Austin and San Antonio - more on fixes needed in Central Texas later).

Now, it remains to be seen what the parties propose this time when it comes time to redraw the map. But these earlier proposals are at least suggestive of how the plaintiffs might offer to fix TX-27.