I understand that after every 10 year census Congressional districts have to be redrawn. But from what I understand, and I admit that my sources may be biased, the redistricting that occurred after the 2010 census heavily favored Republicans and is largely responsible for their gains in the midterm elections of 2012.
In fact, there is currently a movement in some states apparently to allocate electoral college votes by Congressional district and not in a winner-take-all, state-by-state manner - in which case, Romney would now be our president had the last election been decided that way.
So given the fact that the framers were pretty savvy and foresightful, did this just slip through the cracks or have there been changes since that time which corrupted their original intent or vision?
Note: before anyone asks, no I have no idea what the alternative would be or even what the exact mechanics of the present process are.
Redistricting lead to former Majority leader Tom Delay’s prosecution and prison sentence. The actual charges were for the money that was given to his PAC.
Like the OP I don’t understand why partisanship is allowed when redistricting. Or even the reason for redistricting.
The framers of the constitution supposedly were anticipating constantly shifting alliances and factions that were the norm in non-democratic countries. The idea that a single group could somehow command the blind loyalty of half the population is something they would never have conceived of, given the limitations in communications at the time.
Thus, the constitution doesn’t have very much protection against the sort of partisanship that’s taken over in the past century.
as for redistricting, it’s necessary because populations in different regions grow at different rates. The partisanship is allowed sometimes because there’s no way to stop it (who can overrule congress that isn’t partisan themselves?), and other times because both parties are involved, so some semblance of balance is expected.
OK, so it’s the development of a political hive mind that’s to blame - essentially. That seems cromulent. Seriously though, I can understand why that particular thought would have been something of an ‘outlier’ for them. Even today where most democratic countries have a parliamentary type of system, the US system is odd.
But in terms of reforming the system, couldn’t there be a requirement of sort to insure that the character of each district remained more or less the same? For example, couldn’t you have a requirement that when drawing up the new district lines, you had to include an equal number of people of each party? Although in cases where people don’t have to register a party affiliation I suppose that would be problematic. Even so, they must have some way of redrawing the lines now to make districts largely republican so why couldn’t those same methods be use to make the new districts party-neutral.
Of course I guess one counter argument there is that then all you’ve done is set the status quo in stone and I’m not sure that’s such a great idea either, but . . . that’s all I’ve got.
The Constitution doesn’t say anything about redistricting – each state decides whether their Congressional delegation is divided into districts or elected at-large by the entire state.
Once you get into the process of redistricting, pretty much anything goes. About the only thing the courts have consistently decided is that a) district lines can’t be drawn in a way that deliberately disenfranchises a minority group and b) districts have to be contiguous (although they can be as weirdly shaped as lines can be drawn.) And sometimes even a and b conflict.
Redistricting is up to state legislatures; however in California we voted in 2008 to have a non-partisan redistricting committee that must follow a set of rules for districts (they must be compact, contiguous, etc.) While I generally have serious problems with the California initiative process, this is one case in which it was valuable to have the people override the legislature in making the decision.
Party affiliations change dramatically with demographics. We see states, and specifically smaller districts within states, go from one party to the other all the time. Keeping the party affiliations stagnant would not reflect these changes, and over time would result in another type of gerrymandering: a district that has to be distorted in order to maintain a party balance that is no longer representative.
Of course not. Each state is wholly composed of some whole number of districts, and most states don’t have an equal number of people of each party. How are you going to divide an unbalanced state into balanced districts?
Alternately, you could require that each district must have the same partisan breakdown as the state as a whole, but far from stopping gerrymandering, that would actually require it, to an extreme degree. It’d mean that in a state where one party had, say, a 5% advantage, nearly every representative would be from the same party, instead of them being split close to evenly.
Yeah, the idea of balancing things by party probably did suck, especially since as SpoilerVirgin pointed out, these things can change strikingly and often over a fairly short time frame. But I do like that California law. That sounds like it has the potential to be a model statute.
And that a state has to put nearly equal populations in each district. A state with ten districts can’t just make each of its nine rural and one urban counties a district.
Allowing States to pick electors however they want was part of the original plan. Remember, it was a union of sovereign states that only begrudgingly were brought together. The original conception of the Federal government was a strictly enumerated government that could only do specifically what the Constitution said it could. Anything else was left to the states. Choosing of electors and districting were simply seen as outside the proper bailiwick of the Federal government. How a State drew its internal boundaries was primarily seen as the State’s business, not the business of other States or the Federal government.
The reason we even have an electoral college is complex. Some advocated Congress just elect the President outright. However, that had problems in that they wanted an independent executive, and they feared how it would look if the national executive was “selected in a cloakroom.” Some of the founders even then favored the idea of a popular election, but it was seen as a political impossibility. One of the key reasons is the slave states. While Virginia was the largest State by population early on, it still did not want popular vote elections of the President. The reason is simple, a popular vote can only measure votes cast. At that time only white, male, property owners typically over age 25 could vote. So those millions of slaves that Virginia had gotten counted as 3/5ths of a person for apportionment of House districts would not count a whit in a Presidential selection. (And the House district compromise scheme was developed prior to the electoral college.) In addition to all that, many of the founders were inherently afraid of concepts like “mob rule” and other such ills that had befall brief democratic governments in history up to that point (most of these were smaller Italian city states and such in the middle ages and etc so probably not the best comparison, but it’s all they had to work with.) So there was a desire for indirect election in general from many.
Redistricting is absolutely necessary. The founders were all smart, learned men who spent much of their lives as British subjects up to that point. They were thus very familiar with the British system and its laws and rules. Parliament never had a gerrymandering problem, because they never changed district boundaries, and rarely added new districts. The English, dating back to like the 1300s or whenever, could grant any town or other unit of government the right to elect two members of Parliament. (Elect probably meaning something very different in the 1300s than in the 1700s…and Parliament is older than the 1300s but I believe prior to that they were all peers and there was no MPs representing towns, but I’m rusty on that.) So random towns and villages and cities would be granted MPs as appropriate. The most famous was Old Sarum, a booming Cathedral town when it was given Parliamentary representation, but a better Cathedral was built in a more advantageous nearby location and Old Sarum largely became abandoned.
However, it kept its legal right to seat two MPs in the Commons, all the way into the 19th century. From the 16th century on it had no residents whatsoever, and by the 1800s when it was abolished its 11 voters were all absentee landowners who did not live within its borders. Basically, since Parliament never cleaned up old districts that became abandoned, and never changed the boundaries of existing districts, such foolishness could occur. At the time Old Sarum could seat two MPs, Manchester, one of the largest cities in the UK at the time, could seat none.
I have long been an advocate of statewide proportional representation. The states have the right to do it any way they want to, as decided by their legislature. Courts say, ‘don’t disenfranchise minorities’, but can’t really determine what is happening relative to parties.
I suggest states use the parties, as many as want to, to determine congress representatives and electors. Start with recognizing that your vote, in that state, would not be for a person, but for a party. The party, ultimately, will win a particular share of the seats and will decide which of their members will take those seats. Certainly, advertising the people you intend to send to Washington is a good idea.
Say there wind up four parties who get enough signatures to be allowed on the ballot. Call them A, B, C and D. In the election, voters give 48% of their votes to A, 44% to B, 5% to C and 3% to D. There happen to be 40 seats available, so (rounding off, always, A gets 19, B gets 18, C gets 2 and D gets the remaining 1.
Each party then convenes and selects the people to fill the seats. they might do it by seniority, or by voting, but they will send the people they want to Washington.
The only drawback is that people tend to want to vote for a person, rather than a party, but often vote straight party lines when it comes down to it.
How would that be done if there were different numbers of voters within the state as a whole for each party? Do you mean that each district would have the same proportion as the state-wide proportion? For example, if 60% supported party A and 40% supported party B across the state, would you want that 60/40 split in each district?
(The members of that state’s legislature from Party A would be trying to get something like that, because it would give Party A all of that state’s congressional delegation.)
Proportional representation does not require that voters choose between parties rather gthan between individual candidates. The Hare-Clark system, used in the Australian Senate and in some state parliaments in Australia, requires voters to choose between candidates and not between parties. In practice, to simplify voting, voters can vote “above the line” to choose to vote a straight ticket of a political party, or “below the line” for individual candidates, who can be members of a party or independents, but when the votes are counted, it’s done for candidates, not for parties.
So, if Party A gets 40% of the vote (as might be reported in media headlines), wht hat really means is that something like 36% of the voters voted above the line for the Party A list, and about 4% of the voters voted below the line for one of the Party A candidates (who are the same people as those on the Party A list). But, when the votes are counted, that 36% is counted for the top person on the Party A list.
(In this system, two or more independents can choose to be grouped above the line, even though they are not registered as a political party, and two or more parties can choose to be a single group above the line – this particularly affects the Liberal and National Parties, which have been a coalition since 1949, but which are formally two separate political parties.)
We’re heading towards losing one. It’s a pretty poor means of proportional representation in small states. But we’ve got more senators per square mile than all the rest of the states.
These matters have been discussed quite a bit in other recent threads. The bottom-line is that there are no easy answers. I like the idea of “non-partisan” boundary drawing, but that’s problematic. (There’s a standard kilogram in a temperature-controlled Paris vault; but I don’t know where you’re going to find a standard non-partisan arbiter.)
Yes. With a 6-4 voter split in a state with 10 seats, would a 6-4 seat split or a 10-0 split be “fairer”? You’ll get different answers with different criteria.
BTW, with a 55-45 voter split, the gerrymanderers would probably not try for all 10 seats – they’d end up with zero seats instead if voter sentiment shifted. Instead they’d district for, perhaps, 8 seats but with those 8 almost guaranteed even against significant sentiment shift.
Regulation of congressional elections is an enumerated power of Congress. The Constitution also says states can do it themselves if Congress elects not to, but Congress could enact a new district map tomorrow and states would just have to cry about it.