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Article snippet: SOUTH THOMASTON, Me. — A former mayor of Poway, a small city in Southern California, wrote a column in August in his local newspaper with this headline: “A gun to my head.” He was upset about how a state law had forced Poway to redo its voting districts so Latinos would have a better chance of winning elections. Reading the piece on his computer 3,000 miles away, Edward Blum knew he had found his newest case. Seeing one of his bêtes noires — racial gerrymandering — at work, Mr. Blum recruited the former mayor, Don Higginson, as a plaintiff, and on Oct. 4 filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the California Voting Rights Act. Mr. Blum is not a lawyer. But he is a one-man legal factory with a growing record of finding plaintiffs who match his causes, winning big victories and trying above all to erase racial preferences from American life. Mr. Blum, 65, has orchestrated more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action practices and voting rights laws across the country. He is behind two of the biggest such cases to reach the Supreme Court: one attacking consideration of race in admissions at the University of Texas, which he lost; the other contesting parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, widely considered one of this country’s most important pieces of civil rights legislation, which he won. Now, in his most high-profile cause of the moment, he has asserted that Harvard University’s affirmative action policies amount to an illega... Link to the full article to read more