According to Vice, Thomas Hofeller, who died in 2018, was crucial to the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts across the country: He drew up tons of maps that the party used to make districts easier for them to win — sometimes at the expense of minorities’ voting rights. In an effort to defend their state’s political map in a lawsuit, Republicans had tried to keep Hofeller’s files secret.
This last Sunday, his daughter, Stephanie Hofeller put all of these secret files on a Google Drive for anyone to see at http://thehofellerfiles.com/. and also posted to Twitter saying:
Link to my drive is on, https://t.co/IlH9zmepNq
— Stephanie Hofeller (@SHofeller) January 5, 2020
“Stephanie’s Copy” is hypertext.
Check it out, download it, put it on the wall, stomp on it, sacrifice it to the god of your choice, make art, make noise, have fun!
Many of Hofeller’s files have already been made public through previous court filings and reports, so it is still unclear how much new information will be found in this recent file upload.
Stephanie had also released another document that dealt with a Supreme Court fight about the Trump administration’s move to add a citizenship question to the Census. Vice goes on to say the administration’s official explanation was that the question would be used to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but one of Hofeller’s unpublished studies from 2015 found that said that adding the question “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
In an interview with NPR, Stephanie explains how she came to possess her father’s secret files after years of not speaking to him. She was not aware of his death until weeks after it had occurred. She also discusses why she released them to the public.
“These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people. I won’t be satisfied that we the people have found everything, until we the people have had a look at it in its entirety” she states.
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