Facets of Gerrymandering

Fivethirtyeight, the web site that uses data to track both politics and sports, recently completed a sixpart series on gerrymandering. You may recall that I’ve said there are more important topics, in part because intentional gerrymandering is less a problem than how people self-sort, locating themselves near people who vote like they do.

But that doesn’t mean gerrymandering isn’t a problem. The thing is, it’s a tough one to solve.

First, there is racial gerrymandering, a practice that has been used many times to reduce the influence of minority groups. This can take place in at least two ways, cracking and packing. Cracking is when you disperse a group’s voting power by scattering their voters evenly among a large group of districts. Imagine if, as is common in the south, the vast majority of black voters vote for one party and the vast majority of white voters vote for another. If forty percent of the voters are black and you scatter them across all districts, they’ll almost never get enough votes to elect the candidate of their choice.

That’s a common misunderstanding about the Voting Rights Act. It doesn’t exist to enhance the chances of a minority group electing its own members. It is designed to help them elect people of their choosing, whether members of their own group or not.

Packing is essentially the reverse of cracking. It’s when you pack as many members of a minority group as possible into a small number of districts so that you can maximize the number of districts where they have no influence.

The Supreme Court has ruled that racial gerrymandering is illegal, but the bigger problem may be partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court has never ruled on that, though some members have signaled that it could be illegal if we can only come up with a reasonable definition and line to draw.

That line may have been crossed by a number of states, notably Wisconsin. Their maps, drawn after the 2010 census, were so extreme that Republicans received less than 49 percent of the vote for the Assembly in 2012, but got more than 60 percent of Assembly seats.

What’s at issue is whether voters get to choose their representatives or if representatives get to choose who they will represent. Should the results be predetermined by district maps?

It wasn’t just Wisconsin. After the 2010 census, Republican-drawn maps in Texas, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are among those that have been challenged recently. And even if the courts overturn them, as some have, they’ve been used for nearly a decade, so the damage to democracy has been done.

Republicans did such a job redrawing districts across the country that in the 2012 House election, they lost the popular vote for the House by more than a full percentage point, but still won 242 seats to just 193 for the Democrats. And this is the House of Representatives, the part of congress that is supposed to be most representative of the people.

But don’t Democrats do it too? In many cases, yes. Republicans hold the advantage now because they won big in the 2010 elections and maps were redrawn after the census that year. Things could change in 2020, if they can overcome the advantage Republicans have. Because of where people live, Republicans would have some advantage even with fairly drawn maps.

But not all states are doing this. In red Arizona and blue California, districts are now drawn by independent commissions. These committees are not completely immune from partisan influence, but they seem to do a better job than legislatures. When this was proposed in California, I called it a “common sense, useless reform” because it wouldn’t address larger problems with districting, ones better dealt with through proportional representation. But though it hasn’t solved every problem, it has proven something better than useless.

When governor Shwartzenegger proposed the change, he got pushback from leaders of both parties. This is largely because in California, districts were not drawn for partisan advantage, but rather to protect incumbents. In some years, almost no incumbents lost re-election. That has changed.

In Arizona, part of the reform goal was to maximize district competitiveness. The lack of competitive districts is a major deterrent to voting. Some Republicans complained, thinking this would benefit Democrats, and it likely has compared to districts drawn by a partisan legislature. But Arizona remains a red state and likely will be for at least a few more years until demographics shift.

There are far more details than I could cover in this column. For data and political nerds, the entire fivethirtyeight gerrymandering series is worth a listen.