TPM Reader DB responds on gerrymandering …
Well, I haven’t read the TNR piece and don’t want to, but here are some thoughts on the subject:
The result of Baker v. Carr and its progeny (the “one man, one vote” revolution) was, indeed, a huge step forward for fairness and was bigger than any bad developments later. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been bad developments recently.
I worked in the Texas Legislature in the 1960s and was part of a counsel team that argued White v. Regester II, a Texas voting rights case, to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975.
Pre-Baker v. Carr was way more unfair than anything happening now. It’s hard to imagine, but it was OK to have one House district with a million people and another with 100,000, or any some such. In Texas, that was done–Houston, for instance, just got one House member for its whole county–just arbitrarily. At the time, Texas had about 23 house seats, and Houston had well more than one tenth of the population. Now, when that was legal, you could get away with anything. It was like Nineteenth Century England’s practice of “rotten boroughs” in parliament.
But that’s 40 years ago.
In post Baker v. Carr, the House districts must be very close to equal in population, based on the last census. So, what unfairness can be done under this system?
Well, the trick is–and DeLay did it very effectively in his now contested redrawing of the Texas lines–to draw a bunch of reliable say, 54-46% districts for your party. Absent extraordinary circumstances, your party wins all those. But you’re constrained by the need for the population splits of the districts to be equal and by the fact that the opposing party does, in fact, have a lot of voters in your state. Say, the two parties are even in voters. Well, the other party is going to have to win some districts as a matter of mathematical necessity. So, what you do is you have some districts where the opposing party wins, for instance, 80-20%. Now, every voter who votes for the winner and who was not needed to get a plurality of one vote is a “wasted” vote. In the case of the 80-20 district, your opposing party is wasting 3 of every 8 of its votes. But in the 54-46 district, the winning party is “wasting” less than ten per cent of its votes. So, you can force the other party to waste a lot more of their votes and thereby get a disproportionate amount of representation for your party.
Now, I cannot imagine that accomplishing this has not been aided by computer technology. No poly/sci analysis would convince me otherwise. I know lawyers who were advising the Republican members of the Texas Lege during the latest redistricting, and they certainly thought so.
I cannot imagine that technology has made it easier to force the other party to waste its votes; but I also cannot imagine that it has not made it easier to detect a purposeful and systematic effort to do that, as well.
What needs to be done–first–is outlawing the tinkering with districts for admittedly partisan purposes. (In the DeLay case, they have flat out admitted that their tinkering was for partisan purposes). And that will probably not be going far enough. The courts need to reject obvious attempts to force the other party into systematically wasting its votes. But it is hard to say where to draw the line. I suppose there could be a subjective “reasonable fairness” type standard as a means of throwing out the obviously offending schemes. Courts hate to have to get their fingers dirty about such things. But I think it is inevitable.
But it is true that it is fairer today than it was in, say, 1955. And my response to that is: So?
