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Gerrymander observations:
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- If Republican lawmakers have total control over drawing Congressional district lines, they cannot be trusted. Maybe they will gerrymander for political advantage, maybe they won’t.
- If Democrat lawmakers have total control over drawing Congressional district lines, they can be trusted. They are certain to gerrymander for political advantage.
- Tradition says maps should be redrawn every 10 years after the census. It is not a law. There is nothing illegal about Texas drawing new lines mid-decade.
- There is no good definition of a “fair” or “correct” map. The Constitution does not tell us how to draw maps. The Supreme Court has only opined that certain maps are so extremely “unfair” that they are unconstitutional. The only criterion, so far, used by the Supreme Court to evaluate fairness has been racial, not political.
- There is nothing that says a 55/45 state should have its congressional delegation divided 55/45.
- If a state is 55% democrats, and each precinct is 55% democrats, then gerrymandering is irrelevant. No matter how the lines are drawn, each congressional district will be 55% Democratic, and it is likely the state congressional delegation will be 100% Democratic.
- No 55/45 state will produce a 55/45 congressional delegation by a random, neutral drawing of lines. Such an outcome requires conscious gerrymandering designed to reach that outcome.
- There are pleasant, non-partisan-sounding words that can be used to justify gerrymandering. If a cluster of people within the state has a collection of shared community interests, the political power of that cluster should not be artificially diluted by dividing the cluster up into multiple districts. For instance, drawing district lines to create districts that are consistently 55% urban and 45% rural is unfair to rural voters.
- If your goal is to make the percentage of your congressional delegation come close to the statewide party vote percentages, your best bet is to pass a law saying any map must receive a 75% majority vote in the legislature. If both parties can’t agree, the state sends no one to Congress. Modern gerrymandering only occurs when one political party has complete control over the process.
- If your goal is to have a map that looks normal, i.e., doesn’t look weird, have a computer draw it. Don’t tell the computer the political party information. Don’t tell the computer any racial information. Just tell the computer the census numbers and the number of districts you want. Tell the computer to keep cities and counties in the same district as best it can.
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- If you do this, you will get a map that looks logical, reasonable, and non-gerrymandered. But, the percentage breakdown of your congressional delegation may or may not have any resemblance to statewide voting percentages.
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- There can be no “national” solution. The Constitution gives each state sole authority to draw its own map. Congress cannot tell states how to draw them.
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Finally, nobody wants to be a sap. A “sap” is someone who does the right thing while everyone else does not. In the long run, either every state will gerrymander or no state will gerrymander. My money is on every state will gerrymander.
G-Pub
Discussion (17)
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I agree with everything in this post, except this part right here.
I think we should amend the US Constitution to place all redistricting authority in 5 statewide elected officials. Each state would have to elect a Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General and Treasurer for 4 years terms in statewide elections and these 5 people would have complete authority over redistricting.
This way, if the voters don't like the way the districts are drawn, they have the ability to change it by changing the people in those 5 offices. Those 5 statewide offices would be elected statewide, so the outcomes of those elections could not be attributed to gerrymandering, even if the districts drawn by those statewide officials could be considered a gerrymander.
The solution to gerrymandering, if any is to exist, would be in the hands of the voters every time one or more of the 5 statewide elected officials is up for election.
Then, quite whining about how the districts are drawn and start trying to win elections.
** In Texas, the Democrats have not won a statewide election for over 20 years. They can complain about gerrymandering if they want. But the reality is that the Democrats are just plain unpopular in Texas.
In California, Republicans have not won any statewide elections except when Arnold Schwarzenegger won in 2003 and 2006. The Democrats' problem is that in California the districts are drawn by a so-called non-partisan commission. But the commissioners tend to be partisan Democrats.
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It would interesting to do this as an intellectual exercise. The computer results could then be compared to the actual results, resulting in many years of analysis and discussion afterward . . .
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The thing is that when one says “have a computer do it” it’s just running software written by …humans. I live in a county where SCOTUS actually made Texas move us back out of one district. The state was trying to keep a district that ran along the border with Mexico in Republican hands (we are back in Chip Roy’s district now).
What shared attributes are most important when drawing district lines? Geography? County lines? Race and ethnicity? After all, the Voting Rights Act mandated racial gerrymandering.
Defining the terms for the software would be every bit as contentious as the current fights. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying, but we need to recognize the inherent problems.
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I blame this guy ...
... and his method.
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I should hope so, except in cases like North Dakota where there is only one Congressional district.
Now that the news mediaheads have decided that we are to think and talk about gerrymandering, I wonder what it is they don't want us to be thinking and talking about now. Any ideas?
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