Opinion: Democrats are gerrymandering ruthlessly. Good for them.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

I live in a heavily gerrymandered congressional district. IN 2020 my district was TFG +1% and now it is TFG +22%. No decent candidate is running for the Democratic nomination in my district this cycle due to the gerrymander. Partisan gerrymandering is legal now. The Freedom to Vote Act would have outlawed Partisan gerrymandering but since that act is dead, I am glad that the blue state Democrats are fighting fire with fire.

I would strongly prefer that all partisan gerrymandering was illegal but since this is not the case, I am pleased that blue states are fighting back and are using partisan gerrymandering to good effect

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But there is some hope, at least at the congressional level. And the vehicle to end the scourge of gerrymandering? It’s gerrymandering itself.

It’s something of a long shot, at least for now. But let’s consider the news from New York, where Democrats who control the state look like they’re about to secure a few more vital House seats.

How did they do it? With a ruthlessness Democratic voters often accuse their party of lacking. The state’s current House delegation contains 27 seats, divided 19 to 8 in favor of Democrats. The state will lose one seat after the 2020 Census, and in a new map released by Democrats in the legislature on Sunday, the divide could wind up being 22 to 4 in Democrats’ favor.....

You can call them hypocrites (which Republicans do), but the truth is that right now we have two parties that practice gerrymandering, but only one that is willing, even eager, to get rid of it if they have the chance. And if gerrymandering is the tool they use to make that day possible — and to stay competitive in the meantime — it’s hard to blame them.

I am glad that the NY Democrats are fighting back.

[TheRealNorth]

1. I agree

The Cons on SCOTUS say it's legal, so there is no reason Democrats should unilaterally disarm, especially when Democracy itself is at stake.

We got to have power before we can and try to fix it.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. This makes me smile

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[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. Democrats are on track to net 2-3 seats from new maps vs. old ones.*

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[lees1975]

4. It is illegal

but you have to get courts to enforce it. Pennsylvania 2018 is a great example.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

6. SCOTUS stated that Partisan gerrymandering is legal

I have been volunteering on voter protection issues for a very long time. One of the key provisions of the Manchin proposal is the elimination of partisan gerrymandering. I have testified before the Texas state house and Senate committees a while back on the Texas redistricting plans and had fun following the Texas redistricting case. MALDEF used part of my testimony to contest the state house maps in my county which were heavily gerrymandered, but the court was unable to do anything due to the SCOTUS ruing set forth below. I first heard of the efficiency gap theory a while back from a presentation by Chad Dunn (the lawyer who won the Texas voter id/voter suppression case) and this concept is in effect a major part of the Manchin proposal

Racial gerrymandering has been illegal for a while but the SCOTUS has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not covered by the Voting Rights Act https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/731847977/supreme-court-rules-partisan-gerrymandering-is-beyond-the-reach-of-federal-court

In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Trump Threatens Census Delay After Supreme Court Leaves Citizenship Question Blocked
Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution.

Partisan gerrymanding is a method where districts are drawn so that Democratic voters are packed into districts with large majorities while republican districts are drawn so to maximize the number of seats won by GOP candidates

Republicans managed to both maximize their advantage and minimize Democratic power by drawing district lines to pack as many Democrats as possible into three districts, and then cracking other potentially Democratic districts in half or thirds, diluting the Democratic vote to create safe Republican districts.

The League of Women Voters, one of the challengers in the case, pointed out that the GOP had even split predominantly Democratic Greensboro so that half of the dorms at historically black North Carolina A&T State University were put in one Republican district, and half in another.

You can combat partisan gerrymandering with a concept called the efficiency gap where one attempts to draw districts so that GOP and Democratic voters are in effect spread more equitably. Here is a brief explanation of this concept by the Brennan Center https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/How_the_Efficiency_Gap_Standard_Works.pdf

The efficiency gap is a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering that is currently at the heart
of the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Whitford v. Nichol.

Developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and
Eric McGhee, Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, the efficiency gap counts
the number of votes each party wastes in an election to determine whether either party enjoyed a
systematic advantage in turning votes into seats.2 Any vote cast for a losing candidate is considered
wasted, as are all the votes cast for a winning candidate in excess of the number needed to win.

Here is another explanation of this concept https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/03/upshot/how-the-new-math-of-gerrymandering-works-supreme-court.html

The Supreme Court is considering a gerrymandering case in Wisconsin. At the core of the debate is a new way to measure gerrymandering. Here’s the simple math behind it. RELATED ARTICLE

Ever since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy left the door open to a “workable standard” to limit partisan gerrymandering, political scientists have sought to construct a measure to satisfy him. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will test whether they’ve pulled it off.

At the center of the case is the “efficiency gap,” a relatively new measure of partisan gerrymandering. A federal court in Wisconsin ruled in November that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature had discriminated against Democratic voters, and it partly relied on the efficiency gap to find that the Wisconsin State Assembly map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Whether it’s persuasive to Justice Kennedy — expected to be the key swing vote in the case — is another matter. The efficiency gap is not a perfect measure. But it would probably address many of gerrymandering’s problems, with few downsides.

The Manchin proposal on getting rid of partisan gerrymanding is a major deal. This one proposal would make a major difference in the real world

[Emile]

5. Republicans have gerrymandered Indiana so bad they

are guaranteed to win for the next ten years. The sad part was they were on local TV bragging about it.