Texas enacted legislative district boundaries in June 2023 for use until the 2030 census due to legal concerns that the state’s 2021 districts could not be permanent since they were adopted in a special legislative session. The Texas Constitution requires that redistricting take place during a regular legislative session.
The districts the state adopted this month were the same as those the state enacted in October 2021. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed HB 1000—establishing state House district boundaries—on June 12, and he allowed SB 375—establishing state Senate district boundaries—to become law without his signature on June 18.
A note at the top of the home page for Texas Redistricting stated: “The districts identified in these acts are the same as the current districts and continue to apply to future elections along with the current congressional (PlanC2193) and State Board of Education districts (PlanE2106).”
The Texas Tribune‘s James Barragan wrote in January 2023 that Senate Legislative Redistricting Committee Chairperson Joan Huffman (R) said the state was re-doing the redistricting process “to ensure that Legislature had met its constitutional requirement to apportion districts in the first regular session after the publishing of the results of the federal census, which is done every 10 years. Because of the pandemic, census numbers were not released until after the end of the last regularly scheduled legislative session on May 31, 2021. Redistricted maps were passed in a subsequent special session that year.”
Texas originally enacted new state legislative districts after the 2020 census on October 25, 2021.
The 2022 state legislative elections in Texas were the first ones conducted with the new boundaries adopted after the 2020 census. In the Senate, the chamber’s Republican majority increased from 18-13 to 19-12. In the state House, the chamber’s Republican majority increased from 83-65 (with two vacancies) to 86-64.
Learn More
