What voters will be faced with

in Georgia's 2002 elections is anybody's guess at this point, state Rep.

Lynn Westmoreland told a gathering of concerned citizens in Fayette last

week.

Westmoreland represents part

of Fayette and is the state House minority leader. He is traveling the

state conducting town hall meetings to explain to local Republicans, and

anyone else who shows up, how he views the effects on each county of this

year's reapportionment of state House and Senate and U.S. congressional

districts.

Republicans have challenged

the newly drawn districts, asking the U.S. Department of Justice to overturn

them, based on racial discrimination provisions of the federal Voting

Rights Act.

Gov. Roy Barnes has filed suit

asking a federal court to direct the Justice Department to conclude its

investigation of that challenge quickly, ruling in favor of the new districts

or, failing that, to render its own decision quickly so the matter can

be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in time for next year's elections.

In its answer to the suit,

DOJ says it simply doesn't have enough information to rule yet.

"If [the court case] is

not finished by the election, the courts may draw a temporary map"

for use in the 2002 election, Westmoreland told the local crowd.

Having spent two hours in a

deposition with DOJ lawyers last week, Westmoreland said he wasn't overly

optimistic that the new district maps will be overthrown.

"I asked one of the lawyers

who he represented, and he said, 'I represent you.' So I said, 'Then help

me overturn these maps,'" Westmoreland told the crowd with a chuckle.

He said the lawyer laughed and said, "I can't do that."

Republicans are claiming that

the new districts are not only unfair to Republicans, but also to minorities.

But Westmoreland said he has been unable to find a lawyer who can give

him a set of criteria for determining that.

The legal term used is "retrogression,"

he said, adding that the term means "you can't have less minority

participation than before" the reapportionment.

"It's going to be up to

an individual judge's discretion" to define the terms, he said.

Republicans claim that one

effect of the governor's suit is that it precludes comment by individual

citizens, because in order to comment on the redrawn districts, a person

would have to become an intervenor in the lawsuit.

Citizens had no input before

the maps were drawn, Westmoreland charges, because the maps weren't presented

until the day they were approved in a party-line vote. The lawsuit in

effect prevents any citizen input into the Justice Department deliberations,

he said.

Meanwhile, political maneuvering

takes place at each potential candidate's own risk at this point, Westmoreland

said.

Some lawmakers, whose districts

were redrawn so that they no longer lived in them, have moved so they

can continue to run for reelection, he said.

But if the newly drawn districts

are overturned, those moves will have been in vain, and the lawmakers

will be on the wrong side of a one-year residency requirement if they

then try to move back into the old districts.

"We're kind of out there

lost in space," he said.

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