All areas must be contiguous unless there is compelling geographical reason that they can’t be so. (thinking of MI’s UP here)
An area/perimeter-squared test. This would tend to limit the classic tadpole shape frequently employed in gerrymandered districs. Setting a lower limit of A/p^2 = 1/16 would allow rectangles with 2:1 aspect ratio. Allow a straight line approximation for boundries that follow a state, or county border, or a geographical feature (river for example).
A county or municipality can only be a part of as many congressional districsts as required to represent the population +1. This would prevent fracturing a city into quadrants, each part of rural district, yet still allow a bit of a city to be fractured off as may be needed to equalize population amongst districts.
In fact, that Prop would have perhaps done just the opposite. “Retired Judges” could very well be just as subject to party division as the Legislature, and coudl well have gerrymandered like crazy. From your cite “Sponsors want you to believe Prop. 77 makes government better. Don’t be fooled! Read the fine print: Voters lose their right to reject redistricting before it becomes effective; politicians pick judges to draw districts for them; it costs taxpayers millions; and cemented into our Constitution” and one of the other arguments against it was that since the GoP couldn’t gerrymander CA districts through the legislature, they’d do it through this Prop. :dubious:
Or perhaps Prop 77 would have ended most gerrymandering in CA. Who knows?
Anyway- someone has to set districts and it’s hard to ensure by law that that *someone * is politically neutral and fair. So far, they haven’t come up with a way to do it.
A few more details on the Texas Redistricting. Traditionally, our Legislature considers redrawing the lines every ten years, just after the National Census. However, Tom DeLay decided that too many Democrats were still being elected. He had Governor Goodhair make redistricting a priority in the 2003 legislative session. Texas Democratic legislators fled Austin for Oklahoma at the end of the session; without a quorum, no redistricting occurred. Of course, other issues were neglected also–like school finances.
Our Governor called 3 (expensive) Special Sessions to deal with Redistricting; he didn’t care about the schools. Our Legislature meets every other year, so special sessions are common. But enough Democrats went to New Mexico to prevent a vote. Finally, one Democratic Senator returned & the bill passed.
Here’s a map of the new districts.
Former Rep. DeLay’s PAC’s promoting Eternal Republican Majorities are being investigated. Financing is said to be a bit dicey.
The GOP is usually portrayed as the bad guys here, but this redistricting pushed by Delay can also be viewed as a correction of Democratic gerrymandering. Texas is a heavily Republican state and yet before this redistricting the Congressional districts still favored Democrats. The legislature failed to rewrite the districts after the 2000 election and a court decided on the lines (I’m not sure what criteria the courts used). Then when the GOP took more decisive control of the legislature in 2002, they decided to rework what they saw as Democratic-gerrymandered districts to reflect the GOP-tilt of the state.
I’ll just point out in that one ruling (see post #4 for link) 4 SC justices pretty much agreed
with me (unless they voted that way for other often obscure reasons). I’m sure that if Thomas
J and John Adams were made aware of just how widespread gerrymandering has become
they undoubtedly would have inserted some specific language in the Constitution somewhere.
Yes I know the old “Original Intent” argument-perhaps I’m just wary of the mindset that
several justices seem to take, where if it isn’t mentioned specifically and explicitly in the
Constitution somewhere that the right doesn’t exist.
If I was there 220 years ago I’d probably argue for proportional representation, tho I am
certainly aware of the new cans of worms that can open up too. That way if 5% of my
fellow Floridians vote (along with me) for a Green Party candidate, I finally have someone
in Washington looking over my interests.
Gerrymandering could be eliminated by amending the Constitution (probably the state Constitution) to specify a formula and require that the districts maximize some equation that describes the ideal characteristics of a districting scheme (say, reasonably same-population geographically local districts).
Of course, getting that passed in the first place would require a populace who understands math and a legislature that actually wants to end gerrymandering, but there’s no reason that an actual human decision has to be part of a particular districting plan.
So, come up with one. :dubious: One that makes each district more or less the same size. Indeed, Prop 77 alludes to such a formula, but still requires the retired judges. The debate swirling around that Prop seemed to say that without a deliberative body to make some decisions, no purely mathematical forumla could work. I don’t know myself, but AFAIK so far, no one has come up with one that works, which makes me :dubious:
Quite disengenuous to quote the “against” argument only, and imply that that was the gist of my cite. It’s standard practice in CA to have an “against” analysis and a “for” analysis, and both are listed in the voter guide. I don’t claim that this would end gerrymandering, but it puts it one step removed from the political process.
I don’t want to GD this, but two wrongs don’t make a right. This is a pretty good example of an answer to the OP’s question: there is no independent non-partisan body in charge of drawing districts. Whoever’s in power makes them, and it makes them to their liking.
Well, sure. But you- for most intents and purposes- used the “for” argument. Anyone going to that cite would see both arguments and could even look at the full text. The point is- perhaps Prop 77 would have made gerrymandering harder, and made redistricting less political- or perhaps the very opposite. The voters shot it down, and it seems like to me they did so out of suspicion that it would have made things worse, not better. We don’t really know either way, but there was informed agument on both sides. Thus, your claim “it would likely minimize it” is only one of two sides of the debate. The voters seemed to think otherwise.
“Prop 77 was put on the ballot by politicians who want to change the Constitution’s redistricting rules and give themselves more power. They want to hand over redistricting to three unelected and unaccountable retired judges. But redistricting California, a diverse state of 37 million people, is too big and too important a job for just three unaccountable retired judges. Giving one set of politicians more power over another is no reason to change the Constitution. Say NO to the Redistricting Power Grab.”
I have no real sides in this. My point is that many have argued strongly that Prop 77 would not have minimized political gerrymandering. Perhaps they were wrong, sure. But it ain’t a slam dunk either way.
No need for a formula. See my earlier post. Just remove everything but the number of people from consideration.
What will keep the redistricting honest? The same process that regulates it now, in terms of the requirement for an equal number of people and the prohibition against using primarily race.
Why not just put the entire process into the hands of an independent commission? In Australia, our AEC does the job very well. Here’s how they handle redistributions of electorates.
There is no part of the constitution that is violated by gerrymandering for political gain. There are cases where the practice violates the constitution by attempting to discriminate against a protected class (e.g.: African-Americans), a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But “Democrat” and “Republican” are not protected classes, nor are you being denied the right to vote.
One could easily argue the biggest “gerrymander” of the entire country is the state of West Virginia (created solely to allow the Unionists of the mountain counties to be represented seperately from the rebellion sympathizers of the lowlands).
As a general rule, gerrymandering is considered by the courts to be outside their sphere of inquiry; it is a “political” question, as it were. And, it is one that a good argument can be made doesn’t bother the average joe on the street, given that California’s residents soundly defeated an attempt to de-partisanize the process, and a similar attempt in Ohio also went down to ignominious defeat.
There is software that will do just that (as well as software that lets them gerrymander like a mofo as they do now). Make it open source, so that any bias is apparent, and let it do the job. If you’d like, you could have the three judges do nothing but respond to complaints of perceived bias in the results, to give them something to actually do.
The 15th and 24th Amendments to the Constitution, as represented by the Voter Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voter suppression. However, it’s too specific, and doesn’t prohibit redistricting for party affiliation. In fact Governor George W. Bush won a case in Texas that went against redistributing for racial advantage to minorities.
I started reading a few of the replies before I realized this is a six year old thread but it did get me interested. The Illinois Fourth Congressional District is so crazily drawn, it’s comical and worth reposting a valid link.
Here’s the plan I’ve come up with: Every member of the state legislature is allowed to propose a map. All maps are required to have population within a certain range in each district. For each map, the total length of the boundaries is measured, and the map with the shortest total boundary length wins. If you want, you can make existing geographical boundaries like bodies of water or county lines discounted or free, to encourage the districts to match the existing geography.
It’s a nice simple concept that the voters can understand, and if either party tries to gerrymander too far in their favor, all it takes is one legislator from the other party to propose an objectively better map (and it’d be easy to do so, if real gerrymandering is going on), and the new map would take it.
And you wouldn’t have to worry about trusting that a computer algorithm is truly optimal, or about the programmers who wrote the algorithm. Individual legislators (or more likely, members of the public working with them) could use any algorithm they liked, and you’re not worried about getting the fairest map possible, just the best one out of those submitted.
I repeat my post from 2006. It isn’t unconstitutional because it doesn’t violate the constitution of the United States. Whether it is a good, bad, or otherwise idea is beside the point.
The problem is some degree of gerrymandering is inevitable. Florida’s 4th congressional district is designed to create a Republican majority that can outvote a Democratic minority. If you redesigned the district more “fairly” wouldn’t you have a Democratic majority outvoting a Republican minority?
Suppose you have a state where 60% of the voters belong to one party and 40% belong to the other. Do you design each district to reflect this 60/40 split? The result is the 40% party elects nobody.
On the subject of gerrymandered districts, I was living in Beacon, NY back when this thread was new. At the time it was part of NY’s 22nd District. I was astonished to find I was in the same Congressional District as Ithaca - a city that’s 180 miles away. (Beacon has since been redistricted.)
