If the voters of even one of the states above were excluded from the count, there would be a national outcry; with a net impact equivalent to the exclusion of 12 states, the urgent need to address gerrymandering should be clear.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: require each state to draw districts that accurately reflect the political views of the American people. Accordingly, in a state in which voters are split between Republicans and Democrats, the representatives would also be split Depending on the number of districts, and where people live, it may not always be possible to perfectly align the population and its representation.
But the purpose of voter-determined districts is to align them as closely as possible. And thanks to map-drawing software, map drawers are better able to do that now than ever before. States simply have to take the tools that have been employed in recent decades to gerrymander and use them to draw fair districts instead. However, to ensure that the process is not manipulated to the benefit of a particular political party, the maps should be drawn by an independent commission, not elected officials.
Center for American Progress. From to , the people of Michigan cast more than 50 percent of their ballots for Democratic Party legislative candidates. They voted for Democrats 52 percent of the time for the Michigan House of Representatives; a little more than 50 percent of the time for the Michigan Senate; and 51 percent of the time for the U. House of Representatives. Instead, Republicans held a decisive advantage at every level of government.
Currently, districts in most states are drawn in ways that are gerrymandered—meaning the lines are manipulated to favor one group over another—because the process allows elected representatives to choose their voters rather than allowing voters to choose their representatives. Sign Up. The first step in addressing this problem is to create a process for drawing districts that is not controlled by incumbent politicians.
But changes to the process are not enough. Independently drawn maps can have the same effect as intentional gerrymanders if they are not drawn according to the right set of criteria. In fact, proposals that have gained widespread acceptance do not directly address the misalignment between voters and their representatives. This report provides data on the partisan skew of state legislative and congressional districts and explains why a shift is needed in the policy debate about redistricting reform.
It also explains some of the sensible reasons why the effort to stop gerrymandering has not, until now, been focused on drawing voter-determined districts. Finally, the report outlines how to implement voter-determined districts while also achieving two other critical goals: maximizing representation for communities of color and ensuring adequate electoral competition.
Although legislators should reflect the voters of their state, they often do not. In Maryland, for example, Republicans received 37 percent of the votes for the U. House of Representatives but won only 13 percent of the congressional seats. And in North Carolina, Democrats received 48 percent of the vote for the U. House of Representatives but won only 26 percent of the congressional seats.
Figure 1 shows how well legislatures reflect the voting patterns of the population for each state and at each level of government—state House, state Senate, and U. The percentage displayed for each state is the degree to which districts disproportionately favor 1 of the 2 major political parties, calculated by comparing the total percentage of votes cast for Democratic and Republican candidates to the total percentage of elections won by Democratic and Republican candidates, and excluding both votes and wins for nonmajor-party candidates.
Biases in favor of Democrats are highlighted in blue, and biases in favor of Republicans are highlighted in red. Moreover, it shows that biased districts are widespread—about two-thirds of all state House, state Senate, and U. House delegations are biased in favor of one party or the other by a rate of at least 5 percent.
Note one caveat to these data: While much of this bias can be eliminated, not all of it can. In some cases, the geographic distribution of voters makes it difficult or impossible to draw better districts. In Hawaii, for example, the 29 percent of voters supporting Republican U. House candidates are distributed relatively evenly throughout the state, so it may not be feasible to draw a Republican-leaning district. In two states, Louisiana and Mississippi, switching one U. House district from favoring Republicans to favoring Democrats would result in only a slight reduction in partisan bias—a bias in favor of Democrats instead of Republicans.
Figure 2 shows how biased districts for the U. House of Representatives translated into actual seats. On average, for each of the three elections from to , 59 seats would have changed hands to the opposing party if the percentage of seats won matched the percentage of votes cast. On net, Republicans won 19 additional seats each election because of districts biased in their favor. There are two reasons for these mismatched election outcomes. The first reason is intentional gerrymandering—purposeful manipulation of district lines by incumbent politicians.
After each decennial census, when new population numbers are released, and new districts are drawn, incumbent politicians interfere with the map-drawing process in order to create districts that protect them from competition and that favor their political party.
In fact, many states explicitly put incumbent legislators in charge of the map-drawing process. Intentional gerrymandering is the redistricting problem that is most well understood and that reform-minded advocates have been almost exclusively focused on addressing.
However, it is not the only problem. To understand unintentional gerrymandering, consider what would happen if a mapmaker drew roughly rectangular districts at random. In some lucky cases, the random districts might result in legislators that reflect the voting population. Much more often, however, because voters are not evenly spread out, the randomly drawn districts would result in a random gerrymander.
The districts are more likely than not to overrepresent one political party, even if that was not the intent. To make matters worse, unintentional gerrymandering does not affect both parties equally. Democrats are heavily concentrated in cities, while Republicans are more spread out across suburban and rural areas.
Therefore, randomly drawn, compact districts will tend to pack Democrats in a small number of urban districts, while giving Republicans more modest majorities in a larger number of rural and suburban districts—not unlike an intentionally designed pro-Republican gerrymander. Supreme Court decision.
Each map was randomly drawn, except that all the districts contained close to the same total population and were subject to a formula to ensure that they were somewhat compact. The authors then calculated how many seats Republicans and Democrats would be likely to win based on each map.
Sure enough, the average map would have awarded Republicans 61 percent of the legislative seats. Chen and Rodden then repeated a version of their process without the compactness criteria, drawing random maps. Again, all the maps were biased in favor of Republicans, producing a congressional delegation between 56 percent Republican and 76 percent Republican.
States vary in terms of how voters are distributed and how much unintentional bias is likely to result. However, the pattern seen in Florida appeared to be common nationwide.
Unfortunately, such politics-blind redistricting is currently the leading policy solution. There is an undeniable appeal to the idea that politics should be taken out of the redistricting process. And there has long been a focus on stopping intentional gerrymandering for a variety of practical and historical reasons that are explained further in the next section. Even under the approach offered below, however, there will occasionally be differences between votes and outcomes; this is an inevitable result of a political system that requires districts to be drawn.
But sometimes the process is used to draw maps that put a thumb on the scale to manufacture election outcomes that are detached from the preferences of voters. Rather than voters choosing their representatives, gerrymandering empowers politicians to choose their voters. This tends to occur especially when linedrawing is left to legislatures and one political party controls the process, as has become increasingly common.
When that happens, partisan concerns almost invariably take precedence over all else. That produces maps where electoral results are virtually guaranteed even in years where the party drawing maps has a bad year. While legislative and congressional district shapes may look wildly different from state to state, most attempts to gerrymander can best be understood through the lens of two basic techniques: cracking and packing.
Cracking splits groups of people with similar characteristics, such as voters of the same party affiliation, across multiple districts. With their voting strength divided, these groups struggle to elect their preferred candidates in any of the districts. Packing is the opposite of cracking: map drawers cram certain groups of voters into as few districts as possible. Some or all of these techniques may be deployed by map drawers in order to build a partisan advantage into the boundaries of districts.
Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party. In , Republicans — in an effort to control the drawing of congressional maps — forged a campaign to win majorities in as many state legislatures as possible. It was wildly successful, giving them control over the drawing of congressional districts. The redrawing of maps that followed produced some of the most extreme gerrymanders in history.
Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. States with divided partisan control: Finally, there are some states where the two parties are sharing power. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Louisiana each have Democratic governors and GOP-controlled legislatures, and that will mean some tense negotiations. A court could take a neutral approach, or act politically if the justices are so inclined for instance, Democrats have a majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but conservatives have a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
For another group of states — those using commissions to redistrict — partisan outcomes are more difficult to game out.
The commissions used in different states vary quite a bit, and much may hinge on precisely who is selected to them. All of the arcane gamesmanship described above would be irrelevant if the House adopted proportional representation with multi-member districts. In such a system, the seats in the legislature each party gets would depend on what proportion of the vote they win in the relevant area. Gerrymandering is so effective because the US uses single-member districts where there can only be one winner.
With proportional representation and multi-member districts, a party winning 60 percent of the vote in a state would get about 60 percent of the seats in a state. But that would be a major change in the way the House has long worked, with one member per district. Even Democrats were unwilling to go this far in their voting reform legislation. In many states, it is possible to draw a politically balanced and competitive map — but you have to try.
Put another way: If line-drawers were instructed to ignore partisanship entirely, they would be more likely to draw a map that favors Republicans, because of where Republicans and Democrats happen to live Democrats are concentrated in cities.
To draw a map that will incline toward fair partisan competition, you usually have to think about and try to achieve that outcome. Of course, in the abstract, any gerrymandering or geographical disadvantage can be overcome — you simply have to convince more, perhaps many more, people to vote for you. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The redistricting wars The battle lines for the next decade of US politics are about to be set. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. What is redistricting, and what is gerrymandering?
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