As the tired old Faux News line goes, "Both Parties do it." Every 10 years we have a census, and every 10 years we see fanciful district maps, where equally fancifully-shaped districts take flight like marsh birds at the sound of the hunter's gun. Maybe you have a non-partisan redistricting commission in your state? Congratulations. Bravo. Somehow you've put one over on your state's legislature, and you've managed to replace them with an unelected body that will do your -- the people's -- will (as opposed to that elected body that seems not to be doing your will). In so doing, you have deprived the legislature of one of their choicest privileges. So don't be surprised if they're a little, well, cranky now. (In fact, the AZ state legislature is so cranky they've ridden a lawsuit all the way up to the US Supreme Court to try to overturn the will of the people of Arizona. But nothing personal, Arizonans, it's just business. Here's some background on the Arizona issue: here and here. By the way, even non-partisan commissions often create 'safe' districts for each Party. They just do it in a less partisan way, meaning they create an approximately equal number of safe districts for each Party. Unfortunately, that still seems to carry at least a whiff of gerrymandering. The problem with gerrymandering isn't just that one Party gets a death grip on the Congressional seats of the state. The problem is that safe seats tend to corrupt their holders. And that means you can't really 'fix' gerrymandering by making an equal number of safe seats for each Party. The best strategy (I think) is to make every seat equally safe (or unsafe). What I'm proposing here is a set of ground rules for redistricting. Consider it a trial balloon if you like, but it's something that could be implemented nationwide, so that people in states without an initiative process might still start to have a say in how their Congresspeople are elected. And the beauty of this is that you can let the state legislature draw the boundaries pretty much how they like (remember, this is what the Constitution specifically says they can do), subject to a set of simple rules that could be imposed without violating the state legislature's Constitutional prerogatives. The idea is to have a ground rule that a state legislature would find difficult to overcome. Requirements that districts not look too ridiculous have usually been rendered meaningless with commendable speed (well, if anyone's handing out awards for that kind of thing), and states with complex geography usually end up with pretty silly-looking districts anyway, either at the federal level or the state level, or both. Even the Supreme Court is reluctant to take up what many consider an unmanageable problem. The problem is that none of the usual requirements I've heard proposed for district maps -- compactness, quantization (saying, for example, that districts must be made up of entire counties), connectedness -- really prevent gerrymandering. But I have an idea for something that might. Or might lead to something that might. Maybe not an idea, but the germ of an idea. Amend the Constitution (federal or state) to require "that the ratio of voters, by Party, in any district, shall be identical across all districts, and shall equal the ratio of voters in the state as a whole, as reflected in the most recent general election for seats in the House of Representatives." Every ten years there is a census. In that same year is a House election. That's about as up-to-date as you can get. Every state knows, down to the precinct level, exactly how many people voted Republican, and how many people voted Democrat in the last election. Every election wonk knows it, every 'campaign strategist' knows it. Notice one important thing here, though: this is the first time political Parties have been mentioned in the Constitution. Some of you will no doubt think this is a bad thing, as though we are giving the Parties some legitimacy by addressing their existence in the very text of the Constitution. Well, I have to agree, I find political Parties to be a cancer on our political system, too. But the Parties just chug right along, paying no attention to our disgust. Maybe it's time we admitted they exist? Now this ground rule won't eliminate stupid-looking district maps. But it seems likely to eliminate gerrymandering. More after the day-glo orange map of Maryland's 4th district.
First, an important point: a lopsided victory for one Party or the other is not the same thing as gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the process of moving district boundaries so that districts get safer than they would be normally. Utah's House delegation is entirely Republican right now, thanks to Mia Love's defeat of Jim Matheson. This may not be the result of gerrymandering, IMO, since 'true' gerrymandering might require at least one safe seat for the minority Party. Part of the problem with most attempts to regulate redistricting is that they don't attack the problem we actually want to solve. We talk about "compactness", and "connectedness". We marvel at the 35th District of Texas, with its thin little corridor that runs along Interstate 35 from Austin to San Antonio, with its suspicious-looking bulge around Lockhart and San Marcos. So what exactly is wrong with a Constitutional Amendment that says, "Congressional districts shall be drawn in such a way that the ratio of votes cast by the residents of each district for the respective Parties in the most recent regular Congressional election, shall be equal to the ratio of votes cast by the residents of the state as a whole in that same regular Congressional election."? I may be wrong, but it would seem that would fix gerrymandering. There may be a bias between the parties, but it's statewide. There are no more 'safe' districts. No district is more safe or less safe than any other. For either Party. And it's the safe districts that do the most to promote corruption. Even a state that has a large statewide bias in favor of one party or the other is (I believe) far less likely to become the lair of corrupt politicians if every district is as much in play as any other. Oh sure, Texas (I just love returning to Texas for my examples) has a lot of Representatives that have the rest of the country scratching its collective head and wondering, "How is this guy (or, in less than 10% of the cases, gal) still in office?" Henry Cuellar, for example, enjoys (oh that really is the right word for it) a heavily Hispanic district, and won his last election by more than twenty points over his Republican challenger. I honestly don't know anything about his Republican opponent in that election (James Hopson, if you want to look him up), except that I have to commend his willingness to undergo an almost certain steamrollering, just to maintain the integrity of his Party (I'm not sure the Democratic Party would have done so if the positions were reversed). That's one of the under-celebrated consequences of gerrymandering. It doesn't work just for the majority Party: it works just as beautifully for the minority Party. Suddenly every election is meaningless (or maybe it's better to say the threshold for an election to become meaningful -- the amount of blatant abuse of power necessary to get enough voters irritated enough to throw the guy out of office -- is so high that even Caligula couldn't get voted out of office in South Texas, if he was both a Democrat and Hispanic (hell, even Incitatus would be hard to vote out, although to be fair, I think Incitatus’ track record was better overall than Caligula’s, so maybe I’m burying the lead here).
Okay, let's stay with Texas. Traditionally, the Texas district map around each of its urban centers has had the following layout (I'll pick Austin as the district I'm most familiar with): one deeply Democratic district occupying the heart of Austin, then four other districts that each bite off a fairly large piece of Austin and drown it in a sea of Republican voters (many of them farmers and ranchers who hate big government for not giving them enough water). Then do the same for Houston. Then do the same for Dallas. Now, except for the fact that the architect(s) of the Texas Congressional district map went way, way too far, and the result was a large number of 'safe' Republican districts and a much smaller number of Democratic 'safe' districts, I'm proposing that we carve up the state of Texas exactly like that. Oh, yes, without the 'pure blue' district in the heart of Austin. It's a fact of life that cities tend to be heavily Democratic, while the suburbs and the rural areas tend to be much more Republican. I may hate gerrymandering (no; actually I'm pretty darn sure that I hate gerrymandering), but I don't think anyone is going to love the maps of these new Congressional districts. Sorry about that. So my proposal is to make every district demographically identical (to the extent possible) to every other district. A lot of courts have tried to solve the problem of congressional redistricting, and a lot of courts have decided the problem is insoluble. I'm suggesting here that the courts have failed because they've got hold of the wrong end of the problem. Another issue that tends to come up is the issue of 'minority districts', as in the case of Henry Cuellar above. Minority districts are districts that are 'reserved' for minority candidates. Obviously you couldn't have minority districts if the 'equal proportions' proposal was adopted, because minority districts are just another kind of safe district. Let me ask you: which do you think will produce a Congress more responsive to the needs of minorities, a Congress where the districts are drawn to reserve some seats for minorities, while the majority of districts contain relatively few minority voters -- or a Congress where every member of Congress has to court the same 10-15% minority of their own constituents? Well, not to worry (say some of us). Because 2020 will be a Presidential year! And Democrats always turn out in Presidential years. We can undo the gerrymandering then! Hah! That's the ticket. If you don't like gerrymandering, you work for dozens of upsets in dozens of state house and senate delegations between now and 2020. (And of course, after you get control of those state houses you hold onto them.) Then comes the long-overdue Democratic tsunami and we've killed gerrymandering dead, right? And you know as well as I do how good Democrats are at showing that kind of discipline, courage, focus and resolve. Why, it's practically a slam dunk. Let's all go home and celebrate. Now, before it's too late. Only, well, I hate to mention this, but your state house and senate districts are probably just as thoroughly gerrymandered as your (federal) Congressional districts. And the Democrats are going to be pretty hungry for payback when they finally get into the driver's seat. Darn. Well, maybe 2030 will be better. Or how about never? Does never work for you? Or you could change the redistricting process in your state through the initiative process, if you have one in your state. Some other proposed (or maybe even enacted) state constitutional amendments involve the map itself: make the districts 'compact', or 'connected', which are fun mathematical concepts to look up. Unfortunately, while they do constrain the map-maker's freedom, gerrymandering is still pretty easy. This idea seems to me to be a little different. You want a district that looks like that first unearthed fossil of Archaeopteryx? Fine, go right ahead; my proposal doesn't say anything about that. But I think, if this proposal is successful in eliminating gerrymandering, the mapmakers will lose much of their motivation for drawing the funny districts in the first place. But let me ask this as a serious question: if we could get rid of gerrymandering, would you still complain about the funny district maps? Because while I can offer a solution to the first problem, the solution is likely to make the maps look worse. Of course, maybe once gerrymandering is eliminated, people will just stop caring about the maps. Okay, so here it is, one (simple, I hope) set of rules for laying out congressional districts: 1. Every district must be composed of entire voting precincts, as their boundaries were drawn in the most recent general election. (In states where voting is done exclusively by mail, 5-digit postal zip codes shall be used as voting precincts.) This is pretty much a no-brainer, except for the fact that district maps are things that live in the future, while the voting precincts live in the past. This provision just ensures that the voting precinct data is unambiguous (no splitting of one precinct's voting data between two districts), and is tied to well-understood data. Next, I'm going to introduce something that the U.S. Constitution has been free of so far: the word "Party". It does amaze me that something so widely reviled by voters of all stripes, so pernicious, and yet so central to modern political life is not to be found within the pages of Antonin Scalia's favorite document, but maybe I shouldn't be: the only discussion of voting rights concerns 18-year-olds, freed slaves and how the electors will choose the President. Anyone reading it today might think that democracy was a secondary consideration (I only point this out because I think gerrymandering is yet another form of voter suppression). 2. The number of votes cast for each Party shall be separately enumerated throughout the state, and the ratio those two numbers shall be calculated. Every district in the state shall have the same ratio of voters for the top two Parties as has been calculated statewide. This ratio shall be maintained in every district, based upon the voting data compiled from the most recent biennial election. In plain English, you figure out how many Republicans and Democrats you have in your state, based on the most recent election. You compute the ratio of those two numbers. You then require that every district map have the same ratio of Republicans and Democrats. If your state in 55% Democrat and 45% Republican, then every district in that state must be 55% Democrat and 45% Republican. 3. No incumbent shall be forced to stand for election against another incumbent, unless the number of Congressional seats allocated to the state shall have been reduced as a result of the most recent census. This how the state legislature of Ohio got rid of Dennis Kucinich, by forcing him to run in a primary in a district that cut him off from most of his base, while pitting him against Marcy Kaptur, who was, as far as the Republicans were concerned, a far more palatable progressive (I think they're still happy with their choice, given Marcy's vote on the CRomnibus bill; it's like the word liberal no longer has any meaning when it comes out of the mouth of a Republican).
There are a couple of other problems I can see with this (and I really am asking for some help here). I've already talked about injecting the concept of 'Party' into the proposed Constitutional Amendment. What if one Party just refuses to contest a district (yeah, Democrats, I'm talking about you)? How does that skew the vote distribution in a census year? Or the ever-popular 'jungle primaries', where the top two vote getters in the primary for a House seat could be from the same Party? Or what if something really incredible happens, and the Greens (or the Libertarians) pick up a seat?