WASHINGTON — Government officials and legal experts have begun wrestling with an intriguing question posed by the evacuation of New Orleans: What happens to the politics of a region when a significant part of the electorate suddenly disappears?
The migration of hundreds of thousands of people from this urban center, many of them low-income and black, could have a dramatic effect on the political makeup of a state delicately balanced between the two major parties. If most of the evacuees choose not to return, Katrina's political legacy could be that it made Louisiana a more Republican state.
How Katrina may have rewritten the political map of New Orleans and of Louisiana is just one of many questions the Gulf states are pondering in the aftermath of a natural disaster of such scope that it may have permanently altered the region's demographics and economy.
Civil rights groups are focused on keeping track of Louisiana's displaced black voters and on ensuring that they can continue to vote in the districts they left behind until they make a decision to permanently resettle elsewhere.
Ernest Johnson, head of the Louisiana NAACP, called Friday for Congress to pass emergency legislation to extend special protections of the Voting Rights Act that expire in 2007. The law is meant to ensure access to the polls for black voters.
Johnson says the hurricane has potentially disenfranchised 1.5 million voters, many of them black.
"A lot of voters have been displaced, and they could be out of their voting jurisdiction, with toxins in the water, for a year or more," Johnson said. The expiring provision of the law requires jurisdictions in 15 states to clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to ensure the changes do not disadvantage minority groups.
"We were going to fight for the extension anyway. Now, we want to move up the debate, to talk about this in 2005 instead of 2007, so we do not have to worry," Johnson said. The provision, he said, would protect voters as precincts are moved and absentee ballots are mailed.
It is still impossible to know how many evacuees will choose to make new homes outside the Gulf Coast and how many will return to rebuild. In a briefing Thursday to a Senate oversight committee, a senior Federal Emergency Management Agency official said the agency thought it would need to find at least temporary housing for 450,000 families.
