Challengers draw a line over political maps

Opponents rail against gerrymandering as high court prepares for landmark challenge

Beth Lawn’s neighborhood of modest duplexes has more in common with the rest of this struggling, crime-ridden city on the Dela- ware River next to Philadelphia than it does with the Amish farms of Lancaster County 50 miles away.

But the 71-year-old grandmother awoke one morning to find she had been moved from Pennsylvania’s 1st congressional district to the 7th, a labyrinthine monstrosity that winds its way through five counties and has been likened to a caricature of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

“I’m pretty sure I’m in Goofy’s thumb,” Lawn says. “I have a vote, but it really doesn’t count for anything.”

Jerry DeWolf had a similar experience across the border in Maryland when his largely rural 6th congressional district, home to 40 miles of the Appalachian Trail, was stretched to include wealthy suburbs of Washington. He wasn’t moved out, but a new congressman was moved in.

Both Lawn and DeWolf were victims of partisan gerrymandering — purposeful line-drawing by state lawmakers to maximize their political party’s strength in Congress and state legislatures and weaken their opponents. In Lawn’s case, Pennsylvania Republicans drew the maps. In DeWolf ’s, it was Maryland Democrats.

They didn’t take the creative penmanship sitting down. Both

are plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging the lines, which gave Republicans 13 of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts and Democrats seven out of eight in Maryland.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a landmark challenge to Wisconsin’s partisan gerrymandering in October, opponents of the process in other states aren’t just waiting for the justices’ verdict. They’re waging legal and constitutional battles of their own that could reach the nation’s highest court.

“We’ve been subjugated into irrelevancy,” DeWolf says of the conservative residents of western Maryland, who elected an even more conservative member of Congress for 20 years until the lines were redrawn after the 2010 Census. “All of a sudden, the rules were changed.”

A three-judge panel refused in a 2-1 decision Thursday to enter a preliminary injunction declaring the Maryland district unconstitutional.

The court put further proceedings on hold, pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case. Lawyers for the challengers said they would appeal the lower court decision to the high court.

Every 10 years in most states, the rules for drawing district lines for Congress and state legisla- tures are changed by the party or parties in power. If that power is shared — or, in a few states including California, if the process is governed by a commission — the lines might be drawn fairly. More often, one-party rule leads to partisan advantage.

The Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that race cannot be a major factor in the way lines are drawn, but it has yet to set a standard for how much politics is too much.

“The Supreme Court hasn’t really even defined what gerrymandering is,” says Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Wisconsin is one of several battleground states in which Republicans and Democrats fought to a virtual draw in last year’s presidential election. But because Republicans control the legislature, they designed election districts in 2012 that have given them a nearly 2-to-1 advantage in the state Assembly ever since.

A federal district court ruled 2-1 last year that those districts discriminated against Democratic voters “by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats.”

It demanded that the legislature draw new district lines by this November, but the Supreme Court blocked that requirement while it considers the state’s ap- peal. Oral argument in the case is set for Oct. 3.

Fueling challengers’ hopes is the existence of several datadriven models to measure election results against other factors. One of them — the “efficiency gap” — counts the number of “wasted” votes for winning candidates in districts packed with the opposition party’s voters, as well as for losing candidates in districts where opposition party voters were scattered.

The Republican gerrymanders are the most flagrant because they were created in states, including Pennsylvania, that are competitive on a statewide level.

“No matter who is doing the gerrymandering, it’s bad for democracy,” says Mimi McKenzie, legal director for The Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia. “It’s bad when Democrats do it, it’s bad when Republicans do it.”

McKenzie’s 18 plaintiffs, along with the League of Women Voters, are suing the Republicans who did it in Pennsylvania.

By drawing 13 congressional districts where Republicans win with an average of 59% and five where Democrats win with an average of 77%, the lawsuit claims, the GOP “packed” Democratic voters into some districts and “cracked” them among the others.

The design of Lawn’s 7th dis- trict is so creative that in King of Prussia, just west of Philadelphia, the only thing holding it together is Creed’s Seafood & Steaks. “The district is literally the width of the restaurant,” says David Gersch, another of the challengers’ attorneys.

Voters who object to the redesigned districts make two basic arguments: Their votes are either irrelevant or superfluous, which makes their status as constituents less important.

Lawyers for the state’s General Assembly argue in court papers that opponents of the district lines can’t prove they are shut out of the political process or ignored by their members of Congress.

“Alleged disproportionate election results do not lead to a lack of political power or denial of fair representation,” their brief states.

But that’s the way it feels to Rebecca Womack. The west Philadelphia resident’s street was split down the middle between two state Senate districts, and hers was stretched north into suburban Montgomery County. Now, if she wants to attend a community forum there, she has to travel an hour.

When she does travel to offer her objections to district lines, she brings along wooden pieces shaped like the state’s congressional districts.

“This puzzle is so visceral when you see it,” she says.