After the events of Tuesday evening, redistricting has become a concern. According to the N.Y. Times, Republicans on the state level will probably have the ability to unilaterally draw 190 Congressional districts, compared to 70 districts for Democratic state legislators.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming have only one representative for the entire state. In 33 states, the state legislature has primary responsibility for drafting district lines, with the governor of the respective state signing off on the plan. In five states (Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, New Jersey and Washington), redistricting is done by independent commission. Iowa and Maine give independent bodies authority to propose redistricting plans, but the legislature has final approval. In Tuesday's election, voters in California, Florida, and Minnesota voted for a non-partisan redistricting processes. However, in Florida's case, the matter is headed to court.
So this got me to thinking about which are the most gerrymandered districts out there?
Redistricting, when practiced by politicians, first & foremost is about protecting incumbency & then moves on to screwing over the opposition. There are districts where it would probably take the member of Congress being caught with a "dead girl or a live boy" to get them out of the seat, because the district lines have been gerrymandered to make it uncompetitive. In this election cycle, as bad as the damage in the House of Representatives may be, remember that less than 25% of the seats (only about 100 of 435) were considered competitive. This is comparable to the situation in 2006 when Republicans had their ass handed to them. All of that leads to the question of whether Representatives can truly be responsive to their districts if more than three-quarters of the House doesn't really have to worry about losing their seats in a general election?
This is also an issue that gets into race and what are called "Majority-Minority" districts. For example, with the just passed amendment to the Florida Constitution.....
From the Miami Herald:
Two members of Congress on Wednesday challenged a new amendment to the Florida Constitution that sets rules for drawing congressional districts in Florida, just hours after it was approved by voters. U.S. Reps. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., filed a lawsuit challenging Amendment 6 in federal court in Miami. The lawsuit asks that the amendment be declared invalid and stopped from being enforced.
Florida voters on Tuesday approved Amendments 5 and 6 by 62 percent of the vote. Amendment 5 sets rules for drawing legislative districts but it is ignored in the lawsuit.
Brown and Diaz-Balart claim the new standards set out in Amendment 6 could threaten Florida's six congressional districts where blacks and Hispanics are either the majority or close to being in the majority, a contention strongly disputed by the amendment's supporters. "I can't imagine how this can be anything other than more effort by politicians to try and have districts drawn with no rules," said Ellen Freidin, campaign chairwoman of FairDistrictsFlorida.org, the group leading the push for the amendments. "There is not even a redistricting plan proposed, yet, much less drawn. The idea that there could be a lawsuit is kind of strange to me."
The amendment requires districts to be compact, equal in population and make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries. The amendment prohibits drawing districts to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party and says districts should not be drawn to deny minorities the chance to elect representatives of their choice.
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, violation of Section 2 (42 U.S.C. 1973) of the act occurs when "any state or local government [uses] election processes that are not equally open to minority voters, or that give minority voters less opportunity than other voters to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice to public office." A remedy to this is Majority-Minority districts, in which the district lines are drawn in a way to ensure the majority of residents are racial or ethnic minorities.
So, for example, this is Corrine Brown's 3rd congressional district in Florida which snakes over 100 miles from north to south.
African-Americans are around a quarter of North Carolina's population, but before the early '90s there wasn't a single minority in the congressional delegation. That changed when Mel Watt & others were elected in 1992. Watt's 12th Congressional district in North Carolina is a Majority-Minority district created after the 1990 census. This is its latest form.
However, in order to achieve these districts, you have to gerrymander them by packing African-Americans and other minority voters into one or just a few districts. The result of this is to make all of the other districts around the Majority-Minority district "Whiter" & more conservative, by taking away a group of people who tend to vote for Democrats.
CNN's Jeffrey Toobin had an article in The New Yorker back in 2003, discussing how Republicans seized on these districts in order to create a structural advantage. And I have no doubt they'll attempt to pull the same kind of shit this time too.
Republicans recognized the value of concentrating black voters, who are reliable Democrats, in single districts, which are known in voting-rights parlance as "majority-minority." As Gerald Hebert, a Democratic redistricting operative and former Justice Department lawyer, puts it, "What you had was the Republicans who were in charge for every redistricting cycle at the Justice Department—’81, ’91, ’01. And there was a kind of thinking in the eighties and in the early nineties that if you could create a majority-minority district anywhere in the state, regardless of how it looked and what its impact was on surrounding districts, then you simply had to do it. What ended up happening was that they went out of their way to divide and conquer the Democrats." The real story of the Republican congressional landslide of 1994, many redistricting experts believe, is the disappearance of white Democratic congressmen, whose black constituents were largely absorbed into majority-minority districts.
But not all weird looking, gerrymandered districts are Majority-Minority.
Just for comparison, Iowa lets computers draw the lines with the requirements being 1) population equality; 2) contiguity; 3) unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and house districts within senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts); and 4) compactness.
See how contiguous those areas are? Well now look at California's 46th Congressional District, represented by Republican Dana Rohrabacher, which snakes along the beach to barely keep contiguity between Rancho Palos Verde and Long Beach.
Florida's 8th Congressional District, a Republican leaning district just lost by Alan Grayson, takes in parts of Orange County, Lake County, Marion County and Osceola County. To the southwest is the 11th congressional district, represented by Democrat Kathy Castor, which uses the shoreline around Tampa Bay.
There's something about bodies of water & district lines. Also using the shoreline idea, here's New York's 9th Congressional District and California's 23rd Congressional District.
This is Illinois' 4th Congressional District, represented by Democrat Luis Gutierrez. It was created to group Chicago Hispanics together. To keep contiguity, the district basically runs up a couple lanes of Interstate 294.