As lawmakers in states like Georgia, Texas and South Carolina sharpen their pencils to redraw the district boundaries for legislative and congressional elections, every move they make will be watched by Washington.
The U.S. Constitution gives states authority to design districts, but a civil-rights era federal law sets the parameters. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to ensure that white officials don't weaken blacks' voting strength, requires certain states with a history of racial voting discrimination to submit their maps to either the Justice Department or a federal court before they can take effect.
Indeed, it was because of that oversight that Georgia's current district map wound up in federal court where judges hired a college professor to redraw it to comply with safeguards in the law after the 2000 census.
The election of the first black president, Barack Obama, doesn't end the skepticism Southern whites are viewed with, according to Paul Smith, an attorney specializing in redistricting and the author of "The Realist's Guide to Redistricting: Avoiding the Legal Pitfalls."
"There was enormous racial polarization in the Southern states in the last presidential election, with blacks overwhelmingly supporting the black candidate and whites overwhelmingly supporting the white candidate," he said. "So, the Voting Rights Act will be applied with full vigor in that part of the country in this redistricting round."
Some observers think part of the reason for the intense scrutiny will stem from a bias the Obama administration harbors against Republicans. His Department of Justice could make major changes in how the law has been applied historically. After all, since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Obama is the first Democrat to serve as president during redistricting.
Abuses have occurred in the past. Georgia objected to Justice Department behavior in reviewing the state's redistricting following the 1990 census. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where it not only prevailed, but also won attorneys' fees, notes Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
"There are many career lawyers in the (Justice Department) Voting Section that, quite frankly, are very partisan, ideological," said von Spakovsky, who served in the department as counsel to the assistant attorney general during the second Bush administration. "I can just about guarantee that Georgia, Texas and South Carolina are not going to get an objective review."
Others dismiss those predictions.
"I think that's almost entirely politics rather than legal reality," said Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School. "I don't think the Obama administration is going to be more aggressive or less aggressive."
To play all the angles, a growing number of states this year are following a strategy that Georgia used 10 years ago when it submitted its maps to a three-judge panel on the federal court in the District of Columbia. The law allows that route as an alternative to Justice Department preclearance, and Democrats running Georgia at the time were dodging what they considered a biased Bush Justice Department. This year, some states are taking both routes.
Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens won't say which he's considering.
"I don't believe discussions before the process are helpful," he said.
That process begins in earnest soon. Georgia legislators on the House and Senate redistricting committees just wrapped up a dozen hearings around the state in preparation for an Aug. 15 special session. They will add a congressional seat and shift legislative districts northward to reflect growth in the Atlanta suburbs.
In Texas, the special redistricting session is going on now. Its main job is squeezing in four new congressional seats. Republicans are likely to put them where their supporters can elect GOP candidates, but Hispanics and blacks argue that much of the growth that earned Texas the seats stems from minority groups so they should get the new districts.
South Carolina lawmakers are in the middle of hashing out a map that makes room for a seventh congressional district. Internal fighting among the majority Republicans threatens to derail the GOP's railroading of a map that benefits them.
That's unusual because the majority party usually has enough votes to pass district designs that preserve and extend their dominance. The Voting Rights Act has often been described as the majority's most powerful tool.
"Democrats, when they control the redistricting process, hide behind the Voting Rights Act, but distort the Voting Rights Act to promote Democratic-leaning redistricting plans. When Republicans control the redistricting process, they distort process for Republican-leaning districts," said Edward Blum, author of "The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act."
Both parties use the law to justify how they allocate neighborhoods of black voters. Since blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, Republicans tend to pack them into the fewest districts possible to give up the least number of seats to the opposition while Democrats try to spread them across as many districts as possible to gain the most seats.
The law prohibits eliminating any existing districts in which blacks or other racial or ethnic minorities already control the outcome of elections. Since minority voters turn out in smaller percentages than whites, it usually takes more than a simple majority to control the district, often around 60 percent. What the precise percentage is becomes one of the debating points that only the federal officials can answer.
It's that minority voting strength that the Justice Department and federal courts are charged with ensuring isn't diluted by where the lines fall.
In many southern states, most of the Democratic officeholders are black or Hispanic. So, the law protects their districts from being wiped out.
White, elected Democrats are vulnerable, though. Some, like U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who represents Austin, Texas, expects the GOP statehouse to divvy up his voters among so many surrounding districts that he'll have little chance of re-election.
On the other hand, while the law limits avenues for punishing Democrats, that doesn't mean Republicans will take every opportunity left.
State Rep. Roger Lane, R-Darien, chairs the Georgia House Reapportionment & Redistricting Committee and says he's not out for any scalps. The nature of the state's population now already favors his party, he said.
"It would be kind of foolish not to be magnanimous because the demographics are there," he said. "The courts drew the maps we have now, and Republicans have won."