Who's Gerry Mandering?
There has been a lot this week or two. I have been baking this one for a few days now, though, so I didn't want to do a NewsThoughts.
Gerrymandering has been front and center in the news, with one of the most recent developments being the narrow vote in Virginia to redraw the congressional district lines to more heavily favor Democrats, which was recently approved by the Virginia High Court.
This conflict began in earnest in Texas last year when alleged grafter and current United States President Donald Trump asked Governor Greg Abbott to redraw congressional district lines in Texas, despite not being a census year. This was done to rig the House elections to favor Republicans by suppressing the voice of people such as me by loading up my district with so many rural Trump voters that my vote effectively does not matter at the House level. This means fewer Democrats in the House of Representatives.
In the many years Iāve been teaching geography, this is the first year Iāve taught gerrymandering, and the students were actually interested before they saw how it works. Gerrymandering is part of the AP geography curriculum, and Iāve found an activity that really helps with the students' understanding.
Letās say we have a map of a state below. Each letter represents a population cluster. This example is a purple state: 15 areas that mostly vote Republican, 15 that mostly vote Democrat, and five that straddle the line pretty consistently.
This is the āstartingā point I show the students. I tell them that congressional districts need to have roughly equal population within their borders, as demonstrated by the five population centers in each district. I have students count up how many districts have majority Republican, which are majority Democrat, and which (if any) are balanced.
There are three districts that likely vote Republican, three that likely vote Democrat, and one that is a flip seat. Then I have them count up the numbers to discover that, population wise, the state is pretty well balanced.
Then, we get to the actual exercise.
I have students pick the party of their choice, and draw the lines in such a way that their party of choice has a solid majority. Since I am what the pollsters would call a ālikely democrat voterā, I will gerrymander this state to favor the democrats. The rules for the activity is that, like a real district, the gerrymandered districts must have roughly the same population (5 population centers in this case each).
As a side note, I never give them an example at this point because I don't want to imply my political leanings to them.
You can see here I have adjusted the district borders to favor Democrats. Same location, same voters, but now a purple state (3 R/3 D/1 I) is now a blue state (4 D / 3 R). But, now that weāve got the basic idea mastered, letās really suppress some voters.
Look at this abomination. Same neighborhoods, same votes, but now what is a purple state by popular vote is now a Democrat stronghold: 5 fairly strong Democrat districts and 2 very strong Republican districts. This has been done by simply and creatively drawing the lines through Republican population centers to outnumber them with Democrat population centers. This is very similar to what happens in actual gerrymandering, except that the scale is even more extreme - crossing at times between homes and neighborhoods to redistribute voters across districts to the plot.
The students are usually shook. āWhy is this legal?ā
I love it when I can make students see the value in my class.
Butā¦ why?
The answer to this can be found in the 2018 landmark Supreme Court case: Rucho v. Common Cause
North Carolina had long been gerrymandered to favor Democrats until 2011 when the stateās district lines were redrawn to favor Republicans. A Democrat coalition challenged the map in court. There were already several questions of partisan gerrymandering already floating around the courts at the time.
The decision came down on a 5-4 split along ideological lines, with conservative Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority opinion. The courtās decision was to dismiss the charges of partisan gerrymandering as a nonjudicial question. In essence, this protects the ability of a State to draw its lines however it wishes outside of a few fringe cases - which contributes to that sub-national authoritarianism I wrote about in my NewsThoughts last month.
To quote the opinion of the court: āThe claim is said to present a āpolitical questionā and to be nonjusticiableāoutside the courtsā competence and therefore beyond the courtsā jurisdiction.ā Basically, this is a question outside of the purview of the courts.
The second point the court made was that gerrymandering has been happening in the United States since before there was a United States. And that people have always been frustrated with it. Because it was in the very bones of the country, it was outside of the realm of the courts to counter. I disagree with this decision, but Iāll quote the decision here again because it includes a really neat story:
āIn 1812, Governor of Massachusetts and future Vice President Elbridge Gerry notoriously approved congressional districts that the legislature had drawn to aid the Democratic-Republican Party. The moniker āgerrymanderā was born when an outraged Federalist newspaper observed that one of the misshapen districts resembled a salamander.ā
The other major reason why the SCOTUS couldnāt rule on this was because the intention of the framers was to leave those decisions in the hands of the states. This has directly led to what we are seeing now. The Supreme Court has declared that, for all intents and purposes, partisan gerrymandering is not only okay, but practically an intended power of the states. State legislators, partisans themselves, are perfectly suited to draw lines how they wish - with a few fringe examples such as those involving race. The current scrambling of the Republicans to try and win the midterms and elections by changing the board is a feature, not a bug, of this system. This is why the Democrats are perfectly within their rights to suppress Republican voters in their states.
A system that is broken
This is one of those situations where you can only just shrug your shoulders and point in dismay at a broken system. States can regulate the maps themselves - but as seen, even those states that have regulated themselves to have limits on gerrymandering have ways to get around it. Governor DeSantis, right now, is planning to just go around the Florida Constitution to gerrymander the state anyway.
Unfortunately, the United States operates under winner-take-all single-district-pluralities (SDPs). This means that your representatives are in your community, but it also means that if it rains on election day, you may suddenly have no one truly representing you. I always explain it to my students that if thereās an election, and one dudes wins 50.1% of the vote, and the other dude wins 49.9% of the vote... Well, there can only be one winner.
I firmly believe that gerrymandering - as a power to suppress opposition and deny representation in government - is destructive to our democratic institutions. It puts those who control government through funding above the common voter.
The reason why we canāt address this problem of gerrymandering is because it is baked into the bones of the USAās rule of law. Short of a constitutional amendment that either bans partisan gerrymandering or shifts to a different system (such as proportional representation), gerrymandering is here to stay, and firmly in the hands of state legislatures until damnation.