There’s been a lot of Gerrymandering going on recently, most notably by the GOP, but the Democrats don’t exactly have clean hands either. Basically, the party in power tries to stay in power by whatever means necessary. I’ve often thought that redistricting should not be a power of government, but of some body, an NGO, not so swayed by power, and which would use objective criteria for creating the districts.
In many fields there are such NGO’s that do a lot of the thinking for legislators, and their thoughts are then accepted into law. The U.S. Pharmacopeia is one. The National Fire Protection Association is another. And there are many, many more. Note that the regulations that such associations prescribe are not themselves law, but are subsumed into law by acts of legislatures.
Is there any NGO that similarly advises on redistricting — one that uses objective criteria to derive legislative districts? If not, why don’t we create one? (I am aware that courts sometimes refer redistricting to bipartisan commissions, etc., and those may indeed to a fine job in many cases, but even those commissions would benefit from the advice of a nonpolitical NGO that relies on objective criteria.)
To recommend fair districts, our NGO would need the same data on populations by party, race, ethnicity, household income, and every other distinguishing characteristic that might go into redistricting decisions, fair or otherwise. This information would have to be known both state-wide and precinct by precinct. Fortunately, in this day and age, such information is fairly readily available.
The Wikipedia article on the subject lists four common means of gerrymandering: Cracking, Packing, Hijacking and Kidnapping. (The latter two pertain to existing legislators and candidates, but the former two relate specifically to districts and their constituents. See the Wikipedia article for full descriptions.) The avoidance of these practices should be the main goal of redistricting suggestions this NGO would provide to the legislature. Of course, “fair” is a somewhat subjective criterion, but it is clearly unfair if certain populations lose their clout due to these practices.
Notably, Gerrymandering’s original reference was to the peculiar shape given to the Massachusetts’ “South Essex” district. Hence, one significant criterion might be for reasonably shaped, contiguous districts — not new “gerrymanders.” Districts will never end up being perfectly tessellated hexagons for many reasons, but perhaps some geometrically-derived numeric score could be given for district shape, where the unachievable circle would be “best” and intricate, winding gerrymanders, much worse.
As to Hijacking and Kidnapping, these refer to actions taking by one party to target specific legislators, most likely those of the other party. Our NGO would have to avoid inadvertently creating such districts (which mostly won’t be a problem) by taking into account the residences of current legislators and candidates. I would expect this would be the least of the issues, however, especially as legislators are fee to move residences, and even not infrequently maintain a less-used “residence” in their district, spending more time elsewhere.