Congressional redistricting and gerrymandering are back in the news. Texas Republicans are creating create five new safe GOP districts, and other red states are trying to do the same. Blue states — California, Illinois, New York — want to retaliate.
Gerrymandering is blamed — often wrongly — for safe seats, high incumbent reelection rates, ideological extremism, polarization, low voting turnout, poor representation, Republican control of the House of Representatives, and just about anything else that ails Congress
Why can’t we have sensible congressional districts? The answer is complex.
The Supreme Court has nixed racial gerrymandering, but distinguishing racial from political gerrymandering is not easy, given the correlation between race and partisanship. The court, however, decided it could not discover a clear standard to measure the effects of gerrymandering, concluding in 2019 by a 5-4 vote that such issues are nonjusticiable political questions outside the purview of the federal courts. States would have to deal with the problem; and several, including Pennsylvania, have.
Most reformers advocate removing the drawing of constituency lines from the hands of politicians. Some argue for judges to do it, as they often do when legislatures and governors cannot agree or when a redistricting plan is judged to discriminate against minorities. Some advocate for a neutral computer algorithm to solve the problems. Probably the most popular solution is to establish independent, nonpartisan or bipartisan bodies for the task.
Computer algorithms depend on assumptions and can be manipulated. Letting judges do the job injects the judiciary into politics even more than it already is; and why assume that judges, especially elected ones, are nonpolitical? Letting civil servants draw maps, as in Iowa where the legislature has the final say, assumes they have no partisan interests and can follow often vague guidelines.
Ten states have commissions to draft congressional district boundaries, seven have advisory commissions, and two have backup commissions in case legislators cannot do the job. More states use commissions for drawing state legislative districts. Commissioners usually are appointed by combinations of legislative leaders, governors, Supreme Court justices and others. Even nonpartisan commissions, however, are subject to political considerations in terms of appointments and operations.
The evidence on the efficacy of commissions is mixed. Early studies found that independent commissions tend to draw more compact districts, split fewer existing political entities (such as towns and counties), are more apt to preserve the cores of previous districts, survived judicial scrutiny better than legislatively drawn ones, and sometimes lead to fewer elections won by lopsided margins.
Some more recent studies challenge these positive results, finding that commission-drawn districts are not necessarily competitive and that commissions tend to protect incumbents.
The federal Voting Rights Law and Supreme Court decisions, along with state laws, provide criteria for congressional districting, but they often are imprecise. Five criteria are common:
Districts should (1) be equal in population (so said the Supreme Court, though it has allowed deviations); (2) be compact and contiguous (but there is no consensus on how to define or measure compactness); (3) not harm racial minorities and not waste their votes by spreading them across several districts; (4) enable minority groups to elect their own representatives (a criterion being challenged today); and (5) respect political boundaries and preserve communities of interest, such as ethnic neighborhoods.
A few states specify (6) that districts are to be competitive or at least not favor or disfavor an incumbent, candidate or party. These goals are not compatible. Insisting on compact districts, respecting existing political boundaries, and supporting communities of interest are likely to undermine competition.
To ensure electing a black or Hispanic candidate or to favor incumbents requires concentrating their supporters, often necessitating noncompact, weirdly shaped boundaries. Avoiding using race to determine districts conflicts with the goal of helping minorities elect one of their own. To foster competition in strongly Democratic urban or strongly Republican rural areas implies drawing lines that have to stretch well into strange territory and to cut across city or county boundaries.
If the purpose of the exercise relates to elections, should not districts be composed of equal numbers of eligible or actual voters rather than equal numbers of people? The Supreme Court denied a Texas claim that the Constitution required this but did not say that doing so would violate the Constitution. Calculating the number of eligible voters in a district is hard. How many residents of a district are citizens over 18? A census calculation can be years out of date, and it may not ask about citizenship.
One solution might be to limit the information that may be considered. Some state systems are not allowed to consider how given neighborhoods or towns voted in past elections or where incumbents live. Under such a veil of ignorance, district designers might produce more diverse and competitive districts.
Where partisans are concentrated, the mandates of “compact and contiguous” probably make for safe districts. Not knowing voting or demographic patterns, on the other hand, could make it difficult to follow a goal of taking care of minority groups.
In the end, as is true for almost all reforms, there is no magic bullet that avoids negative consequences and puts one goal against another.
This is a contributed opinion column. Jack Johannes is a retired professor of political science and the former vice president for academic affairs at Villanova University. He lives in Allentown. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author, and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. Do you have a perspective to share? Learn more about how we handle guest opinion submissions at themorningcall.com/opinions.
