Diluting the Vote with Gerrymandering

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Diluting the Vote with Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering and money in politics are the two main ways in which the impact of our votes—after they’re cast and counted—is diminished, often to the point of irrelevance. American voters are aware of these, and their persistence and power may well account for why so many people don’t bother to register to vote, and only a fraction of those registered show up on any given election day.

Gerrymandering entails using the process of redrawing congressional districts to provide a substantial political advantage to one party at the expense of others. A gerrymander of state legislative districts in Wisconsin in 2012, for example, produced a map where Republicans lost the statewide vote for the members of the State Assembly by 47 percent to 53 percent, but the GOP nonetheless ended up with 60 seats in the 99-seat legislative body.

In 2017, Emily Bazelon of the New York Times reported the results of a Brennan Center study:

In the 17 states where Republicans drew the maps this decade—for 40 percent of the total House seats in the country—their candidates won about 53 percent of the vote and 72 percent of the seats. In the six states where Democrats drew the lines, for only about 10 percent of the House, their candidates won about 56 percent of the vote and 71 percent of the seats.110

Gerrymandering has been part of American politics since one of the founders, Elbridge Gerry, supervised, as governor, the redrawing of Massachusetts’s congressional maps to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party in the election of 1812. Both parties have done it since that era, although the Supreme Court, in a 1964 ruling, decreed that districts must at least have roughly equivalent population numbers.

On June 27, 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that while “racial” gerrymandering is still unconstitutional, it’s just fine for political parties to do “partisan gerrymandering.”111

Six Democratic-controlled states use nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional lines, a practice that has made elections more competitive and interesting in New Jersey and California. Thirteen states do the same for state legislative districts.

In every case, experience shows that nonpartisan districts produce results that most accurately reflect the makeup of the voter base, but now that five Republicans on the Supreme Court have told the GOP that they can gerrymander to their hearts’ content, it’s a safe bet that they’ll simply use political rather than racial considerations as their justification, and their billionaire friends will be dropping hundreds of millions of dollars into future state elections to ensure GOP control of the state legislatures that redraw district lines.

By going for nonpartisan commissions, the Democrats, assuming that the Supreme Court would limit partisan gerrymandering, essentially unilaterally disarmed. Time will tell whether they adopt Republican policies or if we’ll continue to see more and more states severely gerrymandered by the GOP as they did in North Carolina, for example: in 2018, a state that votes pretty much 50/50 Democratic/Republican sent three Democrats and 10 Republicans to the US House of Representatives.