Category Archives: redistricting

Orlando Sentinel: “A divided appeals court ruled Wednesday that Florida legislators should not be questioned under oath about whether they ‘intended’ to gain partisan advantage when they re-drew congressional maps last year.”

Tom Condon has this column in the Hardford Courant.

Watch.

News from Pa: “A federal district court judge denied a Latino group’s request for injunctive relief and dismissed its complaint regarding the legislative reapportionment plan in Pennsylvania.”

WSJ: “In a landmark ruling Monday, a Hiroshima court ruled the results of the December lower-house election invalid in two districts due to the disproportionate weighting of votes in those districts.”

Bloomberg reports.

Extensive Bloomberg report, and extensive graphics, focusing on gerrymandering in Michigan.

The Dayton Daily News reports.

Nick Stephanopoulos has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming UC Irvine Law Review).  Here is the abstract:

The two most significant approaches to redistricting to emerge in the last generation are both consequentialist. That is, they both urge authorities to design—and courts to evaluate—district plans on the basis of the plans’ likely electoral consequences. According to the partisan fairness approach, plans should treat the major parties symmetrically in terms of the conversion of votes to seats. According to the competitiveness approach, districts should be as electorally competitive as is feasible.

Unnoticed by the literature, a substantial number of jurisdictions, in both America and Australia, have heeded these calls from the academy. In sum, consequentialist criteria have been used to shape the district plans for close to three hundred elections over the last four decades. In this paper, I provide an initial assessment of the record of these criteria. The record, for the most part, is mediocre. Controlling for other relevant factors, partisan fairness requirements have not made district plans more symmetric in their treatment of the major parties. Nor have competitiveness requirements made elections more competitive. The likely explanations are the poor drafting, low prioritization, and need for unrealistically accurate electoral forecasts of most consequentialist criteria.

However, other common proposals for redistricting reform—in particular, the use of neutral institutions such as commissions—have performed much better. Elections in Australia, all of which rely on commissions, are much fairer and more competitive than their American counterparts. In the United States, commission usage increases both partisan fairness in state legislative elections and competitiveness in congressional elections, even controlling for an array of other variables. Ironically, it seems that consequentialist criteria cannot achieve their own desired consequences—but that non-consequentialist approaches can.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “A federal court gave groups suing the state broad access Monday to three computers used by the Legislature to develop Republican-friendly voting maps. The Legislature ‘must make these three computers available in their entirety immediately’ to the groups suing the state, the three judges wrote.”

John Sides and Eric McGhee:

Neuroscientist and election forecaster Sam Wang recently added fuel to the fire, calling the 2012 outcome “The Great Gerrymander.” He identified 10 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, as notable and egregious deviations from a fair outcome, suggesting that gerrymandering cost the Democrats 15 seats in the current House of Representatives and calling for redistricting reform to fix the problem. Wang’s conclusion resembles that of political scientist Nicholas Goedert, who suggests that the 2012 maps cost the Democrats 14 seats.

Is this right? Has gerrymandering allowed Republicans to defy the will of the people? The crucial question to ask when deciding whether redistricting “mattered” is: compared to what? What is the alternative set of districts—the “counterfactual”—to which you’re comparing the current districts? Once we consider some other alternatives, these claims about gerrymandering aren’t as strong as they first appear.

An important piece, with some great accompanying charts and data.

Richmond Times-Dispatch: “[Virginia] Speaker of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford, has ruled that the surprise changes that the Senate made to redistricting legislation are out of order, dealing a blow to GOP hopes to redraw districts.”

WaPo reports.

John Sides writes for WonkBlog.

Sam Wang oped in the NYT.

Wow:

Both Republicans and Democrats regularly exhibit such greed and dishonesty in manipulating electoral maps that a Columbia University expert who studies the practice likened his work to that of an anthropologist who observes cannibals.

“I have to replace normal human reactions of disgust and revulsion with fascination and curiosity. It’s the only way I can cope,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor who’s helped draw election lines in Maryland and other states.

The end.

WaPo reports.

NYT: Redistricting in Virginia Hurts Blacks, Democrats Say

WaPo reports.

WaPo: “Senate Republicans pushed a re-drawn state political map past flabbergasted Democrats on Monday, pulling off what would amount to a mid-decade redistricting of Senate lines if the plan gets approval from the House and governor and stands up to anticipated legal challenges. The bill, approved 20 to 19, would revamp the Senate map to concentrate minority voters in a new Southside district and would change most, if not all, existing district lines. Democrats, still scrambling Monday night to figure out the impact, said they thought that the new map would make at least five districts held by Democrats heavily Republican. The map puts two sitting senators, R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) and Emmett W. Hanger Jr. (R-Augusta), into a single district.”TPM:

As mentioned earlier, seizing on the absence of a Democratic senator who happens to be a veteran of the civil rights movement and was in Washington, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, for the second inauguration of the country’s first black president, Republicans in the evenly split Virginia state Senate pushed through a surprise mid-decade redistricting plan to try to gain decisive control of the body in the next election.

We’re not done yet.

At the end of this wild day, the “Senate adjourned in memory or (sic) General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson,” according to the minutes of the session. Jan. 21 is the Confederate general’s birthday.

Franita Tolson has posted this draft on SSRN (Notre Dame Law Review).  Here is the abstract:

The Framers of the United States Constitution created our system of federalism based on the principle that political safeguards would protect the regulatory interests of the states from overreaching by the federal government. While many of these safeguards have since failed, others have emerged to insulate the states from an ever-expanding federal presence. One such safeguard is partisan gerrymandering, which allows states to draw legislative districts that reflect the partisan affiliation of a majority of the electorate, and in turn, send a delegation to Congress that is as ideologically cohesive as practicable. In making this argument, this Article corrects a basic misunderstanding in the political safeguards literature: that the Senate is the only chamber that the Framers constructed to protect state interests. In reality, a politically cohesive House delegation can ensure that the state’s preferred policy preferences shape federal lawmaking.

This Article also illustrates that, in the context of congressional redistricting, the legal scholarship’s sole focus on ascertaining manageable judicial standards ignores the concerns about institutional legitimacy and judicially dictated political outcomes that are exacerbated by the federalism issues in this area. Despite the absence of standards, the broader structural implications of promoting “federalism-reinforcing” gerrymandering require the Supreme Court to craft rules that encourage the use of mid-decade redistricting and at-large voting schemes; that limit the authority of independent commissions to draw redistricting plans; and that promote strong state political parties, all of which will help preserve the states’ ability to utilize the federalism benefits that flow from partisan redistricting.

This item appears at Facing South.