Gerrymandering race to the bottom: how does it end?

Politics & Elections
21

The place where the political culture is lacking is the lack of a value that some things are above politics. Right now there are elected officials deliberately choosing to game district maps to their advantage - they don’t view this as something which should be above politics. If the two partoes passed a federal law saying that they were required to appoint civil servants to draw the districts, there’s no requirement that they can’t choose people that similarly will game the districts. The only the civil servants will be nonpartisan is if the people hiring them have as a value the belief that they should be nonpartisan.

There is at least enough of a view among democrats that if they want to get rid of their nonpartisan districts in the states that where that was a legal requirement they should change the law and get public input to do so rather than maintain the veneer of nonpartisanship.

22

White White White, How White Can We Make It?

23

You need to work on the of your fantasies, you are selling yourself very, very short.

That’s precisely how the Canada Electoral Boundaries Commission and the Australian Electoral Commission and the Boundary Commission for England amongst many others work.

We don’t get so burnt up about straight lines. The state’s boundaries themselves are often not straight and there are natural boundaries like rivers etc. If you are insistent on straight lines and equal numbers then the district line will need to be drawn between city blocks or even through buildings. Much more practical to include a small degree of tolerance.

And no need to flap your arms and fly to Mars, spot me the airfare and with some off-the-shelf mapping software (exactly the stuff currently used to produce the byzantinely complex gerrymandered maps you have now) and the task could be done in a couple of days. The outrage, of course would last an electoral cycle. Worth it, but.

24

It’s a cause of befuddlement for me that Canadians think that non-partisan government bodies are stable, when they have a living, breathing example of it breaking down just over the 49th parallel. We used to have non-partisan government bodies, too. They work until they don’t.

What do you do if the folks who are supposed to be non-partisan start acting in a blatantly partisan manner? The answer I’ve gotten is that they get fired. OK, so who fires them? What happens if that person starts abusing their office, and fires only the ones who aren’t partisan (or, of course, are partisan but of the other party)? Somewhere up the line, eventually you get to an openly-partisan politician who’s tearing up the whole structure. Which is where the US is right now.

The proper solution is not to try to pretend that any group can be nonpartisan. The proper solution is to set up a system that works even if the people implementing it are partisan. Which is not impossible: It’s like the old one-person-slices-the-cake problem. For instance, start by defining a mathematical measure of how gerrymandered a map is. My preferred definition is based on the total length of the boundary lines (with some modifications, like discounts for lines that follow natural geographic features or city or county boundaries). Then, you ask every legislator, in ascending order of seniority, to propose a map. After the most-senior legislature has proposed their map, the map with the shortest total boundary length wins.

25

The question is not if/how they work. The question is how do you get everyone to agree not to undermine their independence.

26

I’m not insistent on straight lines; natural boundaries are perfectly acceptable, as well as using highways or existing municipal areas. What irks me is boundaries that result in weird shapes which are done for the sole purpose of isolating or excluding a particular group to restrict their choices.

27

I’ll leave specific question on the Canadian system of government to the Canadians.
@Northern_Piper is usually very good. You would have read detailed posts on his bailiwick previously. I find them engaging and definitive. YMMV.

In the local situation the Australian Electoral Commission is non-partisan, despite that it’s three members ie the Chairperson, the Non-judicial Member: and the Electoral Commissioner are direct appointees of the Federal Government.

Electoral boundaries get redrawn after most elections, according to established guidelines. No Australian electorate has a regular shape, or even vaguely approximates one. In many cases the proposed boundary change represents not much more than snugging reflecting population changes. In other cases an electorate/district is merged, abolished or substantially moved.

Politicians consider the first draft. They (and other bodies with vested interests) can make suggested amendments. The AEC considers these submissions then publishes a final draft.

It is simply the expectation of the public that the AEC acts in a non-partisan way, in drawing the boundaries and conducting subsequent elections. No expectation that the partisan appointees will seek advantage or to win at any cost. Which political party has nominated any of the AEC board is not factor. Only an infinitesimal proportion of Australian would know, or care. The AEC task is expressly “to deliver the franchise: that is, an Australian citizen’s right to vote, as established by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.”

There have been instances where the Electoral Commissioner tenure has been terminated by the government that appointed them because a batch of ballots went missing, even after they were counted and there was no impact on the result.

For most of the democratic west, this is an expectation not some pretense for these bodies. We, collectively would consider this to be entirely proper. If the US has carved out it’s own divergent, descending path and further deems that only US solutions will work for US problems I guess whatever consists world’s best practice, even merely general good practice represents a bridge too far. But it’s not hard, simply a mindset.

In any district/electorate with a diverse population distribution it would be a trivial exercise to construct an electoral map where using short, even straight boundary lines causes gross disproportional representation, even if not as profound as the grotesquely shaped boundaries commonly seen stateside where the politicians chose their voters rather than the reverse.

28

For a moment you were on the path to describing Carnegie Mellon’s “divide and choose” plan.

29

I think this is the right thread for this.

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack today: [Free to read, free to subscribe, arrives daily in your email, so you can begin each day despondent]

Re gerrymandering:

Today Tennessee state representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate battle flag in the rotunda of the Tennessee State Capitol in protest of the legislature’s redrawing of the state’s congressional district maps to erase the majority-Black 9th Congressional District. By cracking the city of Memphis into three pieces and joining them to white suburbs, the legislature turned all the state’s districts into Republican seats.

The actions of the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are a direct response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais , which found that in creating a second congressional district to enable Black voters to elect a representative of their choice, as mandated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Louisiana legislature unconstitutionally took race into account when drawing the district lines. Although the Supreme Court’s clerk normally waits 32 days to finalize an opinion, the Supreme Court made the decision effective immediately to allow Louisiana, where the primary election was already underway, to redraw its maps.

Immediately, Republican-dominated state governments rushed to redistrict their states to eliminate majority-Black districts, thus slashing through Democratic representation in their states. …

…

Although a federal court injunction forbids Alabama from redrawing its maps before the 2030 census, Republican governor Kay Ivey called for the state to do so, and Republican attorney general Steve Marshall has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to let the state revert to a map struck down in 2023 because it was racially gerrymandered.

Trump began this gerrymandering arms race last year, pressuring Republican Texas legislators to redistrict the state to help Republicans win the midterms and protect him from investigations and possible impeachment. As of today, Patrick Marley of the Washington Post noted, Republican-dominated legislatures in Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida have redistricted to pick up Republican seats, while Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama are engaged in that process. In retaliation, Democrats have temporarily redistricted the states of California and Virginia.

Tennessee is now expected to send only Republicans to Congress…

…

Cohen is right that the Republicans recognize the only way for them to win going forward is to skew the maps so that Democrats can’t win, because right now, at least, the administration is a dumpster fire.
…

My bold.

The rest of her piece deals with

  1. The CIA reporting that the so-called trump administration is LYING about how the war-that-isn’t-really-a-war is doing in Iran.
  2. Gas prices in the USA are at a new high.
  3. The ratcheting up of the war on immigrants, illegal mostly…
  4. Trump’s war with the Pope. Does he know that the Pope is never going to back down?

And it ends with:

And finally, today the president himself is in the news…or, rather, out of it. Trump, both of whose hands have been covered in makeup lately, apparently to hide bruises, was supposed to have a meeting today with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil at 11:15 that was open to the press. The reporters waited three hours, but the event never happened. At 1:22, Trump’s social media account simply posted that “[t]he meeting went very well” and that representatives from the two countries would continue to meet.

30

The thing that jumps out at me about the Tennessee revamp is how unnecessary and mean-spirited it is. This isn’t about maintaining MAGA control in a closely divided state. There was one lonely blue district in a state-wide tsunami of red. It’s not like the Dems could accomplish anything politically. The Republicans were going to do what they want when they want, regardless of what the Democratic districts or minority voters wanted. They did not need to do this to implement whatever agenda they wanted. And yet, they did. It was nothing more than an f-you to minority voters. No pretense whatsoever that this is even about politics. It’s about hate and racism, plain and simple and out in the open and proud of it.

Another state I will never set foot in if I can help it.

31

I won’t set foot in Tennesee if I can help it either and I 100% don’t agree with the redistricting - but this wasn’t about the Tennesee legislature. If it was, you’d be correct - the Dems in the Tennesee legislature couldn’t do anything to keep this redistricting from happening. It was about US Congressional seats - right now it’s something like 217 R - 212 D. Picking up one in Tennesee gives the Republicans more of a margin. It’s about MAGA control in a closely divided country.

32

What is killing me is the hypocrisy. In Louisiana the governor halted elections after voting had begun in order to redraw districts. That is legal. Here in Virginia the people voted to redraw districts temporarily for the next election but this was blocked by the courts. The reason? The proposed Amendment needs to be proposed by the legislature twice, once before an election and then after. While it was proposed before the last general election, since some early voting had happened the Amendment was technically not valid. So in a blue state the people’s vote can be ignored because it wasn’t proposed far enough in advance of a prior election while in a red state the governor can unilaterally halt an election in order to redraw districts for that same election.

33

Sorry for not reading all of the above posts but does this USSC decision effectively end hopes for flipping the house?

34

Not even close. Gerrymandering can backfire, biblically in some circumstances, if the wave is big enough. If enough Democrats come out and vote, a state that gerrymandered for Republican benefit could end up losing more R districts then they started out with.

The answer is still voting. Gerrymandering won’t be enough if enough people vote.

35

Quite possibly. There are a number of plans along those lines, and I don’t claim that mine is necessarily the best. But any of them is better than hoping that a “nonpartisan” body can remain partisan in the face of malfeasance, and they’re certainly better than what we have now.

36

Nope. Not everyone in those red states who voted for Trump last time is a MAGA who just does whatever Trump wants. Some of them might vote D or at least not show up specifically because of the gerrymandering. I’m not saying the House will flip - but it’s still possible.