CfVR

The Center for Voting Rights is a voting rights project aimed at sharing voting rights scholarship and bringing to light contemporary challenges facing access to the ballot for racial minorities and lower-income voters

Onuoha H. Odim started the Center for Voting Rights in order to make voting rights scholarship easily accessible and to also further understand the laws that govern redistricting and ballot equality to assist voters in protecting the power to shape their local government

Onuoha H. Odim is currently a student at Columbia Law School. As a freshman at Duke University, he started a research project to understand how far the power to vote went for residents who do not look like their representatives. He was interested in learning what steps citizens could take to dismantle the structures that force some people to live in areas of high crime or rampant debris and litter, while other neighborhoods were afforded clean streets and an amiable police force. He was interested in what powers allow people to shape their community and protect their family most effectively.

He started his travels through his home state of Texas with Dallas’ Chief of Prosecution and Community Courts and participated in discussions about how a complete commitment in our own communities would be the most efficient and effective way to develop real systemic change. He engaged with attorneys and community representatives regarding their perspectives on how best citizens could have a say in the legislative direction of their communities. Each night, he read stories of race, history, and exploitation in America. Non-fiction books that speak to the reality of anxieties that grip so many citizens. From Mathew Desmond’s Evicted to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Onuoha spent his first summer in college searching specifically for what a voice means in a country where so many people are silenced, and he has spent the rest of his time since working in the issue of voting rights.

Contemporary voting rights necessitates an understanding of gerrymandering, and he was afforded the opportunity to learn more about the partisan and racial “shaping” of districts in a way he knew would pose the most challenge to his reading and writing inclined brain: coding. He traveled to Boston, Massachusetts and worked to understand federal redistricting requirements through data science. He even led a project to understand communities of interest, a geographic area with residents who share similar cultural interests, in an attempt to find the best way to split counties to cause the least disruption.

Onuoha brought his new knowledge with him back to campus. In his junior year, he started working on his senior thesis focused on measuring the relationship between segregation and voting preference in his home city – Dallas, Texas – a city that is known to be residentially segregated. But there is a certain level of detachment that any researcher can have while conducting data intensive research. Even though he grew up familiar to the socio-economic disparities of his city, it took working for the Housing Department for him to understand the dichotomic level of opulence and deprivation that families sitting just zip-codes apart experience. Through the summer, traveling between the City’s more affluent whiter areas and more poverty-stricken blacker areas, he used the law to play a role in dismantling some vestige of this inequity. He worked closely with the City Attorney’s Office and developed the first contract that moves vacant city owned land to affordable home developers for the creation of low- and moderate- income homes in Dallas neighborhoods with the most socio-economic disparities. The results create mixed income neighborhoods, with the goal of addressing the connection between the City’s high concentrations of poverty and its minority residents.

As he discovered in his research, economic opportunity falls along racial lines and so does voting preference. Within the City’s more segregated neighborhoods, residents are more politically cohesive in their voting preferences. With Texas’ restrictive voting laws, majority minority communities face the threat of having the power of their votes diluted. He has played only a small part in addressing that problem and alleviating the poverty that he has experienced for other families.

Onuoha Odim is optimistic about the possibilities that lie in political participation for lower-income and minority voters. His research so far has taught him that there is a significant amount of untapped energy and potential for progressive growth in politics that will allow large numbers of individuals who might not otherwise participate in politics to find more reasons to invest. He has been working to help clear the hurdles of political participation in order to propel the electoral system into more adequately connecting low-income and minority citizens who feel that voting in local elections and reaching out to politicians with their concerns is futile.