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Gothmog

(143,999 posts)
Tue Sep 10, 2019, 06:50 PM Sep 2019

Instead of Fixing Their Gerrymander, North Carolina Republicans Are Trolling the Court

North Carolina republicans are daring the court to hold them in contempt https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/north-carolina-republicans-gerrymander-trolling-court.html

After essentially flipping off the court, Republican legislators got to work drawing the new districts. They quickly settled on a plan to get around the ban on partisan gerrymandering. Lawmakers announced that they would work off maps created by Jowei Chen, a political scientist who served as an expert for the plaintiffs in this case.
Their stated plan is to identify which if Chen’s maps best comports to the court’s guidelines and adopt them with minimal alterations.

There are many problems with this plan. First, and most obviously, Chen did not draw the maps in public hearings, as the court demanded. The court even clarified that “any relevant computer screen” must be “visible to legislators and public observers” to prevent subtle chicanery.

Second, Chen’s maps were never intended to serve as a model for redistricting. Instead, they were created as evidence to gauge the severity of the existing gerrymander. Chen ran 1,000 simulations for both the house and senate maps using non-partisan districting criteria but allowing for incumbency protection. Every single map produced more seats for Republicans; not a single one exhibited “the same extreme level of Republican bias.” The court relied upon these maps to illustrate just how extensively the GOP gerrymander diluted Democratic votes. Legislators claimed that Chen’s maps can serve as a baseline for redistricting because they have already been “accepted” by the court. That is simply false. The court never said “accepted” these plans as remedial maps, but as evidence of the current map’s infirmity.

Third, working off Chen’s maps will allow Republicans to smuggle partisan bias into the new plan. These maps, after all, were drawn using a simulation designed to protect incumbents. And most incumbents at that time were Republicans because of the partisan gerrymander. As Chen explained, the maps therefore “distort[ed] the partisan distribution of voters across districts” to favor Republicans. In other words, they have a built-in partisan bias. Moreover, Republican legislators, who are very familiar with the partisan distribution of voters at this point, can easily assess which simulated maps have the most bias toward the GOP. They will then rank their favorite plans and use a lottery machine to select which ones they will use. This performance is a bit mystifying since the finalists will all be extremely similar—and, most likely, extremely favorable to Republicans.
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Instead of Fixing Their Gerrymander, North Carolina Republicans Are Trolling the Court (Original Post) Gothmog Sep 2019 OP
The Senate Redistricting Committee just brought in freaking lottery officials to randomly draw a map Gothmog Sep 2019 #1
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