The Lowdown » redistricting

Interactive Map: U.S. Congressional Representation by State

Matthew Green — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:22:58 +0000

Click on any state to see the number of current seats it’s represented by in Congress (based on the 2010 Census population figures) and the change – if any – since 2000. The darker the shade of green, the greater the number of seats.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The Strange Geometry of Gerrymandering (redistricting’s dark side)

Matthew Green — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:07:56 +0000

A political cartoon from 1812 criticizing Massachusetts state senate electoral districts drawn by the legislature to favor candidates in Governor Elbridge Gerry's party. (Wikimedia Commons)

When lawmakers control the redistricting process – as they do in most states - self-interest inevitably plays a big role in how electoral maps are redrawn. It puts the power in the hands of incumbent legislators eager to squash political competition. A Republican lawmaker would likely want to redraw his own district to include as many Republican voters as possible; and vice-verse for a Dem.

This is called gerrymandering – the process of redrawing electoral maps (usually into pretty odd shapes) for some political advantage. It’s a practice that’s been in play pretty much since our democracy began (named after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812, influenced how his state’s electoral districts were drawn so as to to directly benefit members of his own party. It was said that the strange shapes of the new district maps resembled a salamander.

Hence … gerrymandering!

The big list of redistricting no-no’s

Despite ongoing attempts to reform the process, redistricting in many states has long been fraught with corruption and racial discrimination. And it often at the expense of disenfranchised communities. Here’s a list of some of the most notorious tactics:

Cracking: Splitting a community into multiple districts in order to reduce its political influence. Prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, African-Americans throughout the South were frequently split apart by district lines in order to prevent them from electing their own candidates.

Packing: Isolating “unfriendly” voters into one political district to minimize their influence in neighboring district races. When racially motivated, this process is called “bleaching.”

Hijacking: Intentionally drawing lines that put two unfavorable incumbents into the same district to compete against each other.

Kidnapping: Intentionally drawing new district lines that place an unwanted incumbent in a district where he/she doesn’t live.

ProPublica’s musical animation: The Shenanigans of Redistricting

Additional Resources

ProPublica’s investigative series on redistricting abuses

Redraw California

The Brennan Center For Justice

Gerrymandering: The Movie

Redistricting: Who Draws the Lines?

Matthew Green — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 20:25:19 +0000

U.S. Census Bureau

It seems relatively straightforward, right? Every 10 years the population changes and state government officials redraw district lines to make sure populations are equal.

No biggie.

But who draws the lines (and where)?

Remember that each state gets to decide. And that’s when thing can get complicated.

Because if you think about it, there are an infinite number of ways a state can redraw its electoral lines, yielding a lot of potentially controversial outcomes.

For instance, what if, all of a sudden, an incumbent democratic congressman finds himself running in a newly redrawn district that now includes lots of Republican voters? Or, what if the lines of a district with a large minority community are redrawn in a way that splits that community in half so they lose their influence to elect their own representative?

A political chess match

In 34 states throughout the country, the legislature has the power to draw new electoral maps every 10 years. That means, if a state’s legislature is heavily controlled by one party – let’s say the Democrats - than there’s a pretty good chance that those Dems will act in their own self-interest and try to redraw districts so as to create Democratic strongholds (strong concentrations of Dem voters) to protect the incumbent candidates in their own party.

The investigative news service ProPublica recently produced a series exposing some of the questionable redistricting methods that a number of state legislatures use to consolidate power for the dominant political party. Reporter Lois Beckett describes it this way:

“Redistricting is pretty complicated and politicians like to take advantage of
that. They think it’s too complicated for voters to understand so they can sometimes do it in the back rooms to manipulate things so they can win seats without our really knowing that they’re gonna do it.”

(Until now, this is how California rolled. But things have changed – more on that here.)

The United States is actually one of the very few democracies in the world that allows members of the legislative branch to directly control the redistricting process. Most industrialized nations with representative democracies – including Canada, England, Germany and Australia – assign the task of redrawing district lines to independent commissions who remain outside the direct influence of the legislative branch.

The stakes are high!

Because the redistricting process only happens once every 10 years, any changes made last for the rest of the decade. So there’s a whole lot at stake. The process can pretty dramatically affect the balance of political power in both national, state and local politics. The stakes are particularly high for lawmakers, whose political careers can be made or broken, depending on how their districts are redrawn. And because of this, political parties often spend millions on research and lawyers to help steer the process to their advantage. It also explains why there have been so many court cases in various states challenging new maps.

The Texas example: maps are always drawn in the eye of the beholder

Source: NY Times

The 2010 Census reported that Texas’ population over the last decade had grown by more than four million people, with three-quarters of that growth in the Hispanic and African-American populations. That increase entitled the state legislature to create four new congressional districts and, therefore, obtain four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The big question was how to draw those four new districts. Because – remember - the new districts could be carved out in any number of ways. And how different communities were grouped together could determine whether a district had a heavier concentration of Republican or Democratic voters.

Most of the new minority voters that accounted for the brunt of Texas’ population increase were Democrats. Yet. when the Republican-controlled state legislature redrew the maps … well, you can probably guess what happened: they created districts that intentionally split up urban regions that had heavy concentrations of new minority voters (who would likely vote Democratic). Instead, the minority, left-leaning communities were mixed into more traditionally right-leaning districts. So in the end, three out of the four newly created districts were Republican, and only one of them contained a majority of minority voters (even though minorities made up most of the state’s population increase). In all, the maps increased the number of safe Republican seats from 21 to 26.

Pretty tricky, right?

Not surprisingly, state Democrats and minority-rights groups cried foul, arguing that the new maps violated the federal Voting Rights Act by splitting apart communities of interest and disenfranchising minority voters. They sued, and new versions of the maps were drawn by a federal district court in San Antonio. The image above shows the two very different interpretations of how one of the districts was drawn.

In the end, the controversy caused multiple delays in the state’s presidential primary, and the issue eventually went before the U.S. Supreme Court, who ordered the lower court to redraw the maps more in line with the legislature’s original version. And Republicans walked away happy.

More Resources

ProPublica’s investigative series on redistricting abuses

Redistricting: Drawing the Lines (from PBS NewsHour)

Brennan Center for Justice

Redistricting Revealed: The Basics

Matthew Green — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 21:43:15 +0000

Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the wild world of redistricting.

We’re in the heat of election season, so you’ve likely heard it mentioned a bunch recently. But how exactly does redistricting work? And, more importantly, why should you care?

Redistricting can be a pretty confusing process, and because it’s so complicated, a lot of voters don’t know much about it, or how it applies to them. But it has a pretty major impact on the power balance of our political system, and on how much your vote ends up counting on election day.

Redistricting has a pretty major impact on how much your vote ends up counting on election day.

Keesha Gaskins from the Brennan Center for Justice puts it this way:
“How we elect our representatives is how we run our government. America is a representative democracy, which means how we put those representatives in office is absolutely essential to how our democracy works.”

The basic gist

The basics of redistricting are actually fairly straightforward. At its root:

Redistricting is the process of drawing new electoral district boundaries – throughout the United States – so that each voting district has roughly the same size population.

The U.S. Census Bureau counts the nation’s population at the start of every decade.
Shortly thereafter, each state is required to go through the process of redrawing its electoral maps based on the new population data. Because the population of any given area can change significantly over the course of a decade, states have to redraw district lines to make sure they have roughly the same number of people.
After census data is released, some states end up gaining or losing congressional seats based on changing population size. It’s a process is called reapportionment. The Census Bureau has a good explanatory animation of reapportionment works.
The twist though, is that while there are certain federal redistricting requirements that have to be followed " />#8211; including those specified in the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act – each state chooses its own method for how to redraw the lines of its districts and, more importantly, decides who gets the authority to control that process. California’s process, for instance, is completely different from, say, Texas or New York. And that’s where things can start to get really tricky.
Currently, 34 states allow the state legislature to redraw electoral district maps.

This is a good quick animation on how redistricting works (it’s from a documentary called “Gerrymandering”)

The congressional breakdown

The U.S. House of Representatives has a total of 435 seats (the result of a federal law from 1911).
Each seat represents one district throughout the U.S., and each district has to contain roughly the same number of people so that, in theory at least, everyone is equally represented.
Currently, the U.S. population is at a bit more than 311 million. So, divide that by 435, and it comes to roughly 715 thousand people in each district throughout the country.

California, with 53 U.S. congressional districts, is the most populous state in the nation and therefore has the most districts (and the most seats in Congress).
So if your district has increased in size over the last decade by, say, 100,000 people, then the geographic lines of that district need to be withdrawn to make sure it doesn’t have more people than any other district.

2011 State Congressional Districts_California Citizens Redistricting Commission

Is it just congressional lines that get redrawn?

Nope! There are a whole bunch of state and local government jurisdictions that need to be redrawn too. In California, this includes State Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization, all of which have their own separate districts.That means that every ten years, California has to come up with four completely redrawn district maps. You can see all the final versions here.

There are also the local districts – including county, city, school district, community college district or special districts – which also get redrawn, but that process is controlled locally.

Resources

U.S. Census Bureau interactive maps and data
The ReDistricting Game (that’s right – there’s actually a game!)
PBS NewsHour’s explanation
US. Department of Justice’s legal info on redistricting