Politics 101 - Week 5: Gerrymandering ::posted Wed, 15 Oct 2014 21:42:30 +0000:: ift.tt/1EZvWJf Welcome to this weeks Politics 101 post. The topic this week is: Gerrymandering Apologies everyone for the late post this week. Real life got in the way. However, the post will run until Friday afternoon to make up for the lost day. Gerrymandering in a Nutshell As always, lets start with some links and media to explain the topic in a succinct and easy to digest way. CGP Grey has a great video analogy of gerrymandering. Click here to watch it. Intelligence2 US had a debate about the two-party system in the US and they touch on the issues of partisan politics and gerrymandering. Click here to listen to the debate. and Click here to see the research information for the debate, including additional sources of information on gerrymandering. Here are a few articles about gerrymandering that might also be of interest: Arnold Schwarzeneggers OpEd in the New York Times The Economist: Why do politicians gerrymander? A multipart series from Bloomberg, which includes some wonderful graphics. You can view the graphics here. For those of you interested in a more detailed and scholarly explanation, you can read the pdfs below. A Citizens Guide to Redistricting The Brennan Center at New York U, School of Law. It is 139 pages. *Authoritative, extensive, easy to follow look at the complexities of redistricting, including recommendations on how states can fix gerrymandering. Redistricting, Risk, and Representation: How Five State Gerrymanders Weathered the Tides of the 2000s Election Law Journal, Nicholas M. Goedert (PDF). It is 13 pages, but very dense. Gerrymandering - What is it? Vox put together a terrific article that does a great job explaining all of the facets of gerrymandering. It is very detailed and definitely worth the read. Click here to read it, or you can read some of the text below: In the US, every state elects a certain number of people to the House of Representatives — a number thats based on the Census count of the states population. Pennsylvania, for instance, elects 18 House members. So Pennsylvania has to be divided into 18 congressional districts with roughly equal populations. In most US states, this process is controlled by the majority party in the state legislature. Partisan gerrymandering occurs when this map-drawing process is intentionally used to benefit a particular political party — to help that party win more seats in the legislature, or more easily protect the ones it has. The goal is to create many districts that will elect members of one party, and only a few that will elect members of the opposite party. You can see Pennsylvanias Congressional district map here. Youll notice thats not a very clean map. Its full of jagged edges and weird outcroppings and sharp turns. Thats no accident. The map was drawn by Pennsylvanias Republicans in 2010, and it did its job: though Democrats won the states popular vote in 2012 - House Republicans won only 49 percent of Pennsylvanias popular vote, they won 72 percent of its House seats. Additionally, it is worth considering that there are different kinds of gerrymandering. Nicholas Goederts defines 3 types of gerrymanders: Bipartisan Gerrymander: drawn to protect incumbents of both parties, usually when the state government is under split partisan control. Districts will tend to be ideologically homogenous, with few competitive elections, but a diverse group of legislators elected. Nonpartisan Gerrymander: A neutral committee draws a map designed to favor neither party. Incumbency may or may not be considered, but in general districts will not be drawn with the goal of electing a certain representative or type of representative. Instead, districts will be internally heterogeneous and competitive elections will be common. Partisan Gerrymander: One party controls the map-drawing process. They ‘‘pack’’ members of the opposed party into a small number of ideologically homogenous districts, creating some safe incumbents. But they also create a large number of districts that favor their own party. If the map-drawers create districts that tilt only slightly in favor of the majority party, they risk having the map ‘‘backfire,’’ losing many seats in the event of a modestly averse partisan tide. [Text provided by /u/flantabulous] How Does Gerrymandering Work? First, it is important to remember that redistricting is a necessary part of the democratic process. Redistricting is the process of redrawing district lines to better fit the census of an area so that its constituents can be fairly represented. Gerrymandering is a perversion of this process whereby a political party seeks to gain an advantage through the redrawing of these lines. The opportunity for this arises out of the once-a-decade district re-apportionment required by a set of 1960s Supreme Court cases. As voters move into different congressional districts, the population in each of these districts becomes uneven, which results in residents of relatively unpopulated districts having greater representation (because a single vote from a less populated district will comprise a greater proportion of the total votes cast). These Supreme Court cases require state legislatures to redraw districts every ten years (coinciding with the national Census) to ensure that legislative districts are roughly equal in population. In redrawing districts, officeholders can dilute the opposition party’s votes by “cracking” its voters across several districts, making it more difficult to construct a majority in any district, and can waste the opposition party’s vote by “packing” its voters into unnecessarily safe districts, reducing its capacity to compete in the remaining districts. Source: Politicsandpolicy.org Effects of Gerrymandering The New York Times published an excellent article on gerrymandering in 2013, which you can read here. Below are excerpts from the article that explore the effects in a far more eloquent way than I could: In the 2012 election, Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II. In 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor. We can quantify this effect using three different methods. First, Democrats would have had to win the popular vote by 7 percentage points to take control of the House the way that districts are now (assuming that votes shifted by a similar percentage across all districts). That’s an 8-point increase over what they would have had to do in 2010, and a margin that happens in only about one-third of Congressional elections. Second, if we replace the eight partisan gerrymanders with the mock delegations from my simulations, this would lead to a seat count of 215 Democrats, 220 Republicans, give or take a few. Third, gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, who also authored the above NYTimes article, also provides a small representation of the 2012 election results: State D% Vote R%Vote D Seats R Seats Entire House 50.4% 49.6% 201 234 Arizona 45.6% 54.4% 5 4 Michigan 52.7% 47.3% 5 9 North Carolina 50.9% 49.1% 4 9 Pennsylvania 50.7% 49.3% 5 13 Wisconsin 50.8% 49.2% 3 5 Source It is important to note that both the Democrats and Republicans do engage in gerrymandering, however it has been more prolific in the Republican Party, especially in recent years. The information provided above focuses on recent elections and as a result shows gerrymandering being controlled by the Republican Party. Alternatives to Gerrymandering Politicsandpolicy.org discusses the two most popular solutions to gerrymandering: Unlike in Australia, Canada, or most European countries, anti-gerrymandering reforms have failed to gain much political traction in the United States due to entrenched political interests, however alternatives do exist. The most commonly proposed tactic for eliminating gerrymandering is the creation of an independent and objective commission to draw the boundaries of electoral districts rather than leave this task to the legislature; the United Kingdom and Australia have specially designated commissions for this purpose. These commissions, in the few places where they have been implemented in the United States, are usually made up of relatively apolitical members, selected with the aim of achieving equitable representation of Republicans and Democrats. Option 1: Commissions At present, however, the only American state which consistently draws its electoral districts in this manner is Iowa, whose nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau has sole oversight of the process. Instances of bipartisan commission failure are more common however; one established by the Missouri legislature after the 2000 Census to redistrict that state infamously ended in intractable deadlock. In 2005 the voters of Ohio soundly rejected a ballot measure that would have established a state-level districting commission. Moreover, employing a commission is no guarantee that gerrymandering will not take place—California’s Congressional districts, for instance, are the result of a bipartisan gerrymander that effectively locks the balance of power in the state’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives at the status quo. This strategy was so effective that in 2004 not a single one of California’s 53 House seats changed hands. Option 2: Technology As an alternative to human intervention, some political scientists and mathematicians have developed computer programs and mathematical algorithms to create electoral districts. One examples is the “shortest splitline algorithm” created by the Center for Range Voting which uses a computer to divide a state into the appropriate number of evenly populated districts using the shortest possible straight lines. Another example is a program written by software engineer Brian Olson which places voters in districts such that the average distance from a voter to the center of his or her district is minimized. Although solutions of this kind do create unbiased districts, whether or not such districts are fair is subjective; since algorithmic solutions have no concept of “communities of interest,” they can result in splitting a single city into multiple districts or lumping communities with very different interests (but geographic proximity) into the same district. Discussion: What do you think about Gerrymandering? Is it a necessary part of democracy? Is it a net positive or negative? Are there any realistic solutions that can be implemented? What other solutions do you think there are that have not been mentioned here? Which solution is best? Ofcourse there are many other avenues of discussion, but those are just some jumping off points to get it started. Sources and credits are listed in the comment section. submitted by hoosakiwi[link] [3 comments] [Forwarded by the MyLeftBlogosphere news engine. Link to original post below:]
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 22:10:41 +0000
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