Gerrymandering

URL	https://Persagen.com/docs/gerrymandering.html	Gerrymandering: different ways to apportion electoral districts. [source]
Sources	Persagen.com \| Wikipedia \| other sources (cited in situ)
Source URL	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
Date published	2021-11-22
Curation date	2021-11-22
Curator	Dr. Victoria A. Stuart, Ph.D.
Modified
Editorial practice	Refer here \| Date format: yyyy-mm-dd
Summary	Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an arguably unfair political advantage for a particular political party or group by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems.
Key points	2021-11-22: Georgia Republicans pass a congressional map giving them 64% of House of Representatives seats in a state Joe Biden won with 49.5 percent of the vote. 2021-11-18: Ohio Republicans pass a congressional map giving them at least 80% of seats in a state Donald Trump won with 53 percent of the vote. 2021-11-04: North Carolina Republicans pass a congressional map giving them 71-78% of seats in a state Trump won with 49.9 percent of the vote. 2021-10-18: Texas Republicans pass a congressional map giving them 65% of seats in a state Trump won with 52 percent of the vote. Source for the above.
Related	Filibuster Redistricting in the United States
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Contents

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Background

Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an arguably unfair political advantage for a particular political party or group by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts, which is most commonly used in first-past-the-post electoral systems.

Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).

In addition to its use achieving desired electoral results for a particular party, gerrymandering may be used to help or hinder a particular demographic, such as a political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, or class group, such as in Northern Ireland where boundaries were constructed to guarantee Protestant Unionist majorities. Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

The term gerrymandering is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard "g"; "Gherry") - Vice President of the United States at the time of his death - who, as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander. The word is also a verb for the process.

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Additional Reading

[FiveThirtyEight.com, 2022-02-28] Texas May Have The Worst Gerrymander In The Country. Senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich [local copy] explains why several advocacy groups have argued that Texas’ new congressional map discriminates against people of color. Rakich also breaks down what this gerrymander might mean for the 2022 United States elections.

[MotherJones.com, 2022-02-08] Supreme Court Reinstates Alabama's Racial Gerrymander.

In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) on Monday [2022-02-07] halted a lower court ruling that had required Alabama to redraw a gerrymandered congressional map [gerrymandering]. The move signals the new conservative majority's willingness to eviscerate one of the last remaining components of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: the provision that bars the use of racial gerrymanders to dilute the voting power of Black Americans. The SCOTUS order functionally guarantees that in 2022, Black residents of the state will be able to elect their preferred candidate in only one out of seven congressional districts, despite making up 27 percent of the state's population.

In January [2022-01], a panel of three federal judges blocked a congressional map drawn by the Alabama Legislature, which folded most of the state's Black voters into a single, creatively shaped district. The panel, which included two Trump appointees, ordered that the map be redrawn to include an additional district "in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it." Instead of rushing to draw up a new map, Alabama officials filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to stay the lower court's decision on the grounds that it would cause a "massive disruption" to the state's elections. Yesterday [2022-02-07], the Supreme Court agreed to issue a stay, practically reinstating the discriminatory maps and ensuring that they will be used in the upcoming congressional election.

The order was so extreme that Chief Justice John Roberts - one of the main architects of the long campaign against voting rights by the court's conservative justices - joined the liberal SCOTUS justices in voting against it. In his dissent, John Roberts argued that the court should have taken up the case but that there was no reason to stay the lower court's ruling in advance of the 2022 United States elections, writing that the three-judge panel had properly applied existing law "with no apparent errors for our correction."

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the conservative majority to impose the stay, justified the order by arguing that changing election procedures close to the deadline would be hard on "candidates, political parties, and voters." "Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences," Kavanaugh wrote.

Yesterday [2022-02-07]'s order was a quintessential example of what law professor William Baude has deemed the " shadow docket" [Wikipedia: shadow docket], a range of orders and decisions handed down with little explanation or advance notice. The shadow docket allows the Supreme Court to functionally change the law without having to justify its reasoning, before a case has been fully briefed and argued. In a furious dissent joined by fellow liberals Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan attacked the conservative majority for using its shadow docket to alter the law "in a disconcertingly long line of cases." The court's order "does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished - in violation of a law this Supreme Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy," Kagan wrote.

[NPR.org, 2022-02-05] North Carolina's Supreme Court strikes down redistricting maps that gave GOP an edge.

A divided North Carolina Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's new maps for congressional and General Assembly seats Friday [2022-02-04], declaring that state courts had authority to throw out lines engineered to secure a long-term Republican advantage in an otherwise closely divided state. By a 4-3 decision - with the justices who are registered Democrats making up the majority - the state's highest court directed the GOP-controlled legislature to redraw the plans by 2022-02-18 and provide an explanation of how they calculated the partisan fairness of the new boundaries. Any replacement maps would still be used for the 2022-05-17 primaries.

The court's decision reversed a ruling last month [2022-01] from a panel of three trial judges that let the electoral maps stand, and declared partisan gerrymandering found in the redistricting approved by the legislature in 2021-11 violated several provisions in the Constitution of North Carolina. They include the right to free elections, freedom of speech and equal protections of citizens.

The North Carolina legislature violates the Constitution of North Carolinaconstitution "when it deprives a voter of his or her right to substantially equal voting power on the basis of partisan affiliation," read the order of the court's majority, signed by senior Associate Justice Robin Hudson. "Achieving partisan advantage incommensurate with a political party's level of statewide voter support is neither a compelling nor a legitimate governmental interest." The trial judges had found ample evidence that the legislature approved maps that were "a result of intentional, pro-Republican partisan redistricting." But they declared it wasn't the judiciary's place to intervene in mapmaking - a duty left to the legislature - when partisan fairness in those plans was challenged.

Friday [2022-02-04]'s ruling is a major victory for state and national Democrats and their allies who had invested greatly in overturning the maps. It could also make it harder for Republicans to retake control of the United States House of Representatives this fall [2022]. A group associated with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee - led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder - supported a bloc of voters who sued. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper can't use his veto stamp to block redistricting plans, but he filed a brief urging the Supreme Court of North Carolina to throw out the maps.

The lawsuits were bolstered by mathematicians and electoral researchers who presented evidence of their analysis of trillions of electoral map simulations. They testified the new lines were likely to give the GOP 10 of the state's 14 U.S. House seats as well as state House and Senate majorities in almost any political environment. Republicans currently hold an 8-5 seat advantage. The state gets a 14th seat this year because of population growth reported in the census.

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It was a North Carolina U.S. House map approved in 2016 that became the subject of a landmark 2019 U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision on partisan gerrymandering [Rucho v. Common Cause; SCOTUS ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles", the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the remit of these courts.]. A majority of justices declared that while federal courts aren't the place to settle partisan gerrymandering disputes, state courts could adjudicate these matters.

[CommonDreams.org, 2021-12-30] ACLU Files Suit to Block 'Brazen' Effort in Georgia to Thwart Black Voters. "There's no legitimate justification for drawing maps that deny Black voters an opportunity to elect representatives who will fight for them in these critical state House deliberations." | "Politicians don't get to choose their voters - voters get to choose their politicians." | "The new maps systematically minimize the political power of Black Georgians in violation of federal law."

Alleging that Georgia's new GOP-drawn Georgia General Assembly district maps violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and attempt to disenfranchise Black voters, civil rights groups on Thursday [2021-12-30] filed a federal lawsuit against the Republican Secretary of State of West Virginia in a bid to block the maps. The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Georgia, and WilmerHale [Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, known as WilmerHale] on behalf of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the Sixth District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and individual Georgia voters against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

"These newly drawn district maps are a brazen attempt by Georgia politicians to undermine the political power of Black voters," Sophia Lin Lakin [local copy | see also], deputy director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project [local copy], said in a statement. "State legislatures are responsible for laws and policies that profoundly impact our daily lives," Sophia Lin Lakin added. "There's no legitimate justification for drawing maps that deny Black voters an opportunity to elect representatives who will fight for them in these critical state House deliberations. Politicians don't get to choose their voters - voters get to choose their politicians."

The suit alleges that "Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 makes it illegal for states to draw district lines that water down the voting strength of voters from particular racial groups. Yet Georgia's newly-adopted legislative maps do just that." "The new state Senate and state House maps dilute the voting strength of Black Georgians," the document contends,"because they fail to include more than a half dozen additional districts where Black voters could form a majority and have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice."

The lawsuit continues:

Georgia is one of the fastest growing states in the nation - and that growth has been driven entirely by Black Georgians and other Georgians of color. Over the last decade, Georgia's Black population grew by 16%, while the population of white Georgians fell during the same period.

Black Georgians today comprise a third of Georgia residents, and people of color now make up nearly half of the state's population. The growth of the state's Black and other minority communities is driving Georgia's continued economic growth and its increasing prominence on the national stage.

Yet the new legislative maps for Georgia's General Assembly, which were rushed through the legislative process in a week and a half, do not account for the growth of Georgia's Black population. Rather, the new maps systematically minimize the political power of Black Georgians in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit claims that the new district maps "negate the unprecedented growth of Black communities in Georgia, unnecessarily packing Black Georgians together in some places, dissecting areas with large, cohesive Black populations in others, and ultimately diminishing Black Georgians' true voting strength statewide and in specific districts." "Especially in light of Georgia's legacy of racial discrimination against and subordination of its Black population and the ongoing, accumulated effects of that legacy, the state's maps will prevent Black Georgians from exercising political power on an equal playing field with white Georgians," it states. "Georgia can and must do better than this," the lawsuit asserts. "The state's manipulation of the redistricting process to dilute the political strength of Black voters robs fellow citizens of the ability to engage in politics with equal dignity and equal opportunity, violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Earlier this year, the United States Department of Justice sued Georgia over a law passed by the state's GOP-controlled legislation and signed into law in 2021-03 by Republican Governor Brian Kemp that the Biden administration and civil rights advocates allege is meant to disenfranchise Black voters.

[CommonDreams.org, 2021-12-09] "Big Step for Democracy:" N.C. Supreme Court Delays Primaries Over Gerrymandered Maps. "These rigged maps will go to trial with the North Carolina Supreme Court next month - and, if there's any justice, be consumed in fire directly afterward," said one progressive advocacy group. | "If the North Carolina GOP takes over the state Supreme Court, fair elections in North Carolina are over until someone dies or retires."

Voting rights advocates on Wednesday [2021-12-08] hailed a state Supreme Court order in North Carolina [North Carolina Supreme Court] as a victory for democracy as the court cited the North Carolina's gerrymandered district map as its reason for delaying the 2022 primaries [2022 United States Senate election in North Carolina] by two months - but noted that the fight for a fair map is not over yet.

Following the N.C. Supreme Court's preliminary injunction, voters in North Carolina will go to the polls on 2022-05-17 instead of 2022-03-08 due to ongoing litigation over the new district map, which was drawn by Republican (GOP) state lawmakers and was expected to give the GOP at least 10 safe seats in the United States House of Representatives out of North Carolina's 14 seats.

"The fight continues but this is a very, very BIG step for democracy and fair maps in North Carolina," tweeted Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, which filed a lawsuit regarding the map.

In a state [North Carolina] that's fairly evenly split between Republican and Democratic voters and which former President Donald Trump won by just over one percentage point in 2020, critics say the district map should give Democrats the opportunity to win six or seven seats.

The North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, which brought one of the cases that resulted in Wednesday's ruling, welcomed the decision. "If the North Carolina GOP takes over the state Supreme Court [North Carolina Supreme Court], fair elections in North Carolina are over until someone dies or retires." "We will continue going to bat for voters so they will vote under fair maps for elections next year and beyond," Carrie Clark [local copy], the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters's executive director, told the The News & Observer "This is the only way our people will get a North Carolina General Assembly and North Carolina Congressional Delegation that protect every North Carolinian's right to clean air, clean water, and clean energy."

Following a 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States which said political gerrymandering is not unconstitutional, a North Carolina court overturned North Carolina's district map and ordered GOP legislators to draw a new one, resulting in the party's current advantage.

The GOP party divided up the state's largest counties to dilute the voting power of Democrats - doing away with the seat held by Democratic Representative Kathy Manning and leading another Democrat, Representative G.K. Butterfield, to announce he would not seek reelection with the new districts in place.

The nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave North Carolina's map an "F" grade, saying it gave Republicans a significant unfair advantage.

[ ... snip ... ]

[NPR.org, 2021-12-06] The Justice Department is suing Texas over the state's redistricting plans. | Most of Texas' new districts are majority white, diluting power of voters of color.

The United States Department of Justice on Monday [2021-12-06] sued Texas over the state's redistricting plans for Texas' congressional delegation and the state legislature, alleging that they put minority voters at a disadvantage. The lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas says the state's redistricting plans violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act [local copy]. "Our complaint today alleges that the redistricting plans approved by the Texas state legislature and signed into law by the governor will deny Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the voting process and to elect representatives of their choice," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said at a news conference. "Our complaint also alleges that several of those districts were drawn with discriminatory intent," she added.

Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the lawsuit "absurd" and said it is "the Biden administration's latest ploy to control Texas voters." "I am confident that our legislature's redistricting decisions will be proven lawful, and this preposterous attempt to sway democracy will fail," Paxton said.

In its lawsuit, the United States Department of Justice says that Texas' population increased by roughly 4 million people over the past decade, 95% percent of which is attributable to minorities. But, it says, the state's legislature refused to recognize the growing minority electorate in its redistricting plans, which the department alleges were enacted through a rushed and opaque process with minimal opportunity for public comment. "Despite the significant increase in the number and proportion of eligible Latino and Black voters in Texas, the newly enacted redistricting plans will not allow minority voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. "Instead, our investigation determined that Texas' redistricting plans will dilute the increased minority voting strength that should have developed form these significant demographic shifts."

The complaint points to the two new congressional seats Texas was awarded following the latest census and says the state designed those congressional districts "to have Anglo voting majorities." It also says that the state "surgically excised" minority communities from the core of the Dallas-Fort Worth area by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties and that Texas "intentionally eliminated a Latino electoral opportunity" in a West Texas congressional district where courts had identified Voting Rights Act of 1965 violations during the previous two redistricting cycles. "This is not the first time Texas has acted to minimize the voting rights of its minority citizens," the United States Department of Justice says in its complaint. "Decade after decade, Texas has enacted redistricting plans that violate the Voting Rights Act."

The U.S. Department of Justice is also suing Texas over the state's restrictive new voting law.

[MotherJones.com, 2021-11-22] Republicans Are Rigging Elections for the Next Decade. Gerrymandering is turning swing states like Georgia and Ohio deep red. | The congressional lines adopted by Georgia Republicans entrench white power by diluting the votes of fast-growing communities of color - a defining feature of GOP gerrymandering across the South this year.

In Georgia, Republicans passed a new congressional map on Monday [2021-11-22] giving the Republican Party 64 percent of United States House of Representatives seats in a state Joe Biden won with 49.5 percent of the vote.
In Ohio, Republicans passed a new congressional map on 2021-11-18 giving their party at least 80 percent of seats in a state Donald Trump won with 53 percent of the vote.
In North Carolina, Republicans passed a new congressional map on 2021-11-04 giving their party between 71 to 78 percent of seats in a state Trump won with 49.9 percent of the vote.
In Texas, Republicans passed a new congressional map on 2021-10-18 giving their party 65 percent of seats in a state Trump won with 52 percent of the vote.

You get the idea. In state after state under GOP (Republican Party) control, Republicans are passing extreme gerrymandered maps that will allow them to pick up enough seats to retake the U.S. House in 2022 and lock-in dominance of state legislatures for the next decade.

This has not been a fair fight. While Republicans are doing everything they can to consolidate and expand their power, congressional Democrats have failed to overcome four Republican filibusters of voting rights legislation that would ban partisan and racial gerrymandering. That means GOP-controlled states have undertaken extraordinary efforts to undermine voting access and fair representation but Washington Democrats have taken no action to protect the right to vote. This huge partisan asymmetry is occurring because centrist Democrats Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) claim that the filibuster promotes bipartisanship, an increasingly comical assertion given how Republicans are locking Democrats out of power for a decade on simple majority, party-line votes.

"Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act," more than 150 leading democracy scholars wrote in a letter on Monday [2021-11-22]. "But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching. To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form - in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor - would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over."

These flagrantly undemocratic maps have been adopted through flagrantly undemocratic processes. GOP legislative leaders in Ohio brazenly ignored a 2018 ballot initiative supported by 75 percent of Ohio voters to make the redistricting process more bipartisan and transparent and instead ordered that heavily partisan new maps be drawn in secret, going so far as to freeze out other Republican members of the state's redistricting commission, including the secretary of state, who favored fairer maps.

The final congressional map was introduced last Monday evening [2021-11-15] and passed by the full state Senate by Tuesday afternoon [2021-11-16], taking less than 24 hours to draw congressional districts giving Republicans upwards of 80 percent of seats in a state where they average 54 percent of the vote. The Ohio House passed the map through committee on Wednesday with no public testimony and the full chamber voted to send the map to the governor by Thursday afternoon [2021-11-18], who signed it on Saturday [2021-11-20].

"We should no longer call this the People's House," said Democratic state Representative Paula Hicks-Hudson of Toledo, Ohio on the House floor. "The map does not reflect the will or the voices of the people."

Georgia Republicans followed a similar script, introducing a new congressional map at 10:30 a.m. last Wednesday [2021-11-17] that extended their party's advantage in a state that is trending Democratic and beginning hearings in the legislature just three hours later, giving lawmakers and members of the public almost no time to analyze the impact. A map that will last for a decade was passed and debated in less than a week.

The Congressional lines adopted by Georgia Republicans entrench white power by diluting the votes of fast-growing communities of color - a defining feature of GOP gerrymandering across the South this year. Georgia gained 1 million new residents over the last decade - all from communities of color - and is now a majority-minority state, but the congressional map increases representation for white Republicans and decreases representation for voters of color in spite of these demographic changes.

[ ... snip ... ]

[CommonDreams.org, 2021-11-22] 'Total Asymmetric Warfare': Georgia GOP Redraws Political Map as U.S. Senate Dems Do Nothing. "It's beyond enraging that Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) continue to say voting rights legislation needs 60 votes," while Republicans are "rigging elections and shutting Democrats out of power for next decade on simple majority party-line votes," said one expert. | "Congress must pass federal voting rights legislation. We can't wait any longer."

Voting rights advocates within and beyond Georgia ramped up calls for congressional action after the Peach State's Republican lawmakers became the latest to approve a gerrymandered political map intended to give the GOP a political advantage for the next decade.

"Congress must pass federal voting rights legislation. We can't wait any longer."

Following similar moves by GOP-controlled state legislatures in Ohio and Texas, the Georgia General Assembly sent the new congressional map to the desk of Republican Governor Brain Kemp, who is expected to sign it into law. These redistricting efforts have come as right-wingers in the evenly split United States Senate block various voting rights bills and a few Democrats refuse to support killing the Filibuster.

The Georgia GOP's map is designed to increase the number of Congressional districts the party controls from eight to nine, leaving Democrats with just five. According to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Though Georgia's voters are split between the two political parties, none of the state's 14 congressional districts would be competitive."

It's not just the new congressional districts that serve Georgia's GOP. Democracy Docket noted that "the state House and Senate maps... were criticized by Democrats for cementing a Republican advantage in the Georgia General Assembly and failing to account for the growth of Georgia's minority population."

Common Cause Georgia executive director Aunna Dennis [local copy] said in a statement Monday [2021-11-22] that "when the redistricting process is led by the politicians, the maps will be drawn to benefit the politicians - and that's exactly what state legislators have done today."

"While these maps might be beneficial to the politicians in power, they are a complete disgrace to the voters of Georgia," Aunna Dennis declared. "None of the maps accurately reflect the changing population of our state." "Our preliminary analysis shows that despite population growth in the state being driven largely by Nikema Williams, Latinx, and Asian populations, and despite the state's share of the white population decreasing by about 5% from 2010 to 2020, the amount of majority-BIPOC districts in these proposed maps have extremely marginal increases," Aunna Davis noted. "In fact, the new congressional map decreases the amount of majority-Black districts from the former district map."

Aunna Dennis said the maps were "intentionally designed to silence" communities of color and accused state leaders of continuing "to ignore the voters throughout the entire process." She also reiterated her group [Common Cause Georgia]'s support for independent redistricting commissions, saying that "district lines need to be drawn putting the interests of people, not politicians, first."

The The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia Representative Miriam Paris [Ballotpedia entry] said the new district lines endanger two Democratic Black women in the state's congressional delegation, Congresswomen Nikema Williams, and .

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