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Gerrymandering by Computer
jefu writes "In the latest New Yorker there is an excellent article on redistricting and gerrymandering (more permanent URL). It discusses how recent gerrymandering is being done with the aid of computers. It also discusses how redistricting is polarizing voters and is making many seats in the House of Representatives 'safe seats' which effectively gives incumbents a permanent seat. It is not hard to see how this also tends to leave our 'elected' representatives in a position where voter input is less important to them than things like lobbying." Few articles about gerrymandering really get into how ugly and blatant it is.
Would have been nice to define a not-often-used word in the article so we all don't have to dig...
To divide (a geographic area) into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections. (Link.)
Give me my karma, baby.
evil adrian
...including nice charts and graphs can be found here on FraudFactor.
From the examples given in the FraudFactor article, both sides seem guilty of gerrymandering whenever possible.
The Army reading list
It's crazy that in the US politicians are involved in drawing district boundaries at all. In the UK, we have an independent electoral commission who are in charge of this.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Here we have seen another step towards the death of democracy. Where those incumbents, who got elected by the people, no longer need to respond to people. Where the big money businesses can pay their way to get laws favorable to them pass. It will be the society of the rich people, for the rich people, by the rich people.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
To me, the first problem with our government is that it's too large. The second, which is directly related to the first, is that it's filled with too many politicians. Our government tries to do too much, most of which it sucks at. These thoughts are the main reason I call myself a libertarian.
... just replace our representative democracy with a true democracy.
As King Longshanks once said (in Braveheart at least), "The problem with Scotland... is that it's full of Scots!" The problem with U.S. politics is that it's filled with politicians.
In the simplest way, how do we solve this problem (and thus issues with gerrymandering, lobbyists, the inability to elect anyone outside the two party system, etc.)? "Easy"
But wait, I hear you say, that would be rule by "tyranny of the majority."
Here is where my libertarian ideals come in to play. Of course this is all hypothetical, idealistic, unrealistic, and some might say, Unpossible... ahem.
But what if we eliminated this looming threat of tyranny under this truly democratic system? How could this be done? Well think about where tyranny of the majority comes from primarily -- issues related to control of private citizens lives.
Are you allowed to drink alcohol and smoke drugs? Look at porn? Own a weapon to protect your life and property? Practice atheism or a minority religion?
These are examples of issues where the tyranny of the majority could have a negative effect. I think the central thing to all these issues is that they should not be controlled by the government in the first place. If we had an ammendment in the constitution that clarified the constitution, that the federal government shall not make laws that seek to control the behavior of a person not explicitly harming another person, then what is left for the tyranny of the majority to affect?
Then when an issue comes up in front of our tiny, truly democratic government of the citizens of the United States, it's a referendum that we all vote equally on. If there are multiple choices, we use a smart voting style (approval, counting, etc), and not the insane methods used now to pick such unimportant things as our next President.
This is just an idea that has been brewing in my head, can anyone see holes in it and offer constructive criticism?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I know I posted on something similar maybe a week ago. What's ugly is that it was already seeming like our representatives (in general) cared very little for our wishes (consider the recent secret spending bill) and more for their pocketbooks. Obviously we can't expect everyone to be a martyr, but this is getting rediculous. We're a democracy in name only. We vote for appearances. Less and less of what we say we want is really heard.
Who, then, is really running the country? And how did they really get in office?
No, serious, I want to know. Because I'm starting to think that my voice really DOESN'T matter.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
there was a case a few years ago where Dame Shirley Porter was convicted of ~40 million pounds worth of gerrymandering in a votes for homes scandal. Of course she's actually paid very very little of it back (less than a few hundred thousand pounds, if I remember the Private Eye story correctly)...
What goes around, comes around, unless you can pay enough money to the right people....
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
A buddy of mine came up with an initiative in CA to eliminate the bias in redistricting by using a set of easily-understood rules that could be set into law and would ensure a balanced outcome based on geography and population levels, not political benefits.
You can find the details at Fair Vote 2k2.
He's still working on getting it passed into law by the voters in CA. It's tough when it doesn't really benefit the party in power to change the system to make it fair.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
In Iowa, for example, voter party registrations are not allowed to be used in the redistricting, so it is non-partisian. Several states have initiatives to switch over to non-partisan redistricting.
Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts from 1810-12, signed a law that blatantly redrew districts to give his party an advantage (think 90% in one district of the opposition, 55% of your own party in the other x districts -- if you work the math out, it's a safe way for the ruling party to increase its representation.) Here's the link and a picture of the "Gerry Mander" editorial cartoon which we still remember: http://www2.uiuc.edu/ro/observer/archive/vol11/iss ue5/gerry.html
Doing this stuff by computer is -scary-. It means that it's no more than an afterthought for a lawmaker to manipulate the rules of the electoral system.
At the same time, even "safe" incumbents have to do case work and at least occasionally vote the way their constituency wants; otherwise, the media will notice, the citizens will notice, and they'll get kicked out of office. We often underestimate the intelligence of the average voter.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Save for the fact that software is being used to help the process along. I find this less worrying than it appears -- ultimately the advantage gained by gerrymandering is slim and short term, since demographic change is inevitable, especially in a society as mobile as the US.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
How much longer until our vote is purely symbolic and has nothing left to do with reality?
Although in the article, they mainly focus on Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.
How's the job market in Europe these days, I wonder...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I believe this is one of many, why political positions shouldn't be a career. One of the founding fathers felt that one should get elected, do what's needed during the term, then go back to what one was doing before. No making a career out of it.
From the article: "He opposes abortion, fights for balanced budgets, and voted for the impeachment of President Clinton. His Web site features photographs of him carrying or firing guns. Through it all, though, Stenholm has remained a member of the Democratic Party"
I wonder what you have to do to be conservative down there.
Also this makes me think that gerrymandering isn't the only threat to democracy in the states. It seems Michael Moore's claim that the Democrats and the Republicans are the same isn't so far off.
Check out the book "How to Lie with Maps", by Mark Monmonier.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/022
Why yes, I am a geographer...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The logical opposite of gerrymandering is automating the process to provide politically balanced districts, 50% left, 50% right. Leaving aside how "left" and "right" ought to be defined (and how "center" is accomodated), balanced districts would tend for shorttermism and inaction at the political level higher. If you don't expect to keep your job, you don't plan what you'll be doing after the next election.
Solution? An independent commission. The nearer their decisions create equal political fury from both (all) sides, the higher the pay.
...and get our licks in in the primary. Really, to me, what this article says is that political parties really have become obsolete bodies whose only purpose is to disenfranchise the voters, and that we voters should simply ignore parties and vote pragmatically.
I don't register with a party affiliation because I find both parties so distasteful. I think it would be very wise for us independents to figure out for what party our district has been gerrymandered and register in that party, and if we run, run in that party.
It would be cool if the supremes solved this by ruling that all voters have to be able to vote in all primaries.
Not quite "whenever possible". At very least, redistricting has been historically confined to census cycles, by a sort of gentleman's agreement between the parties. The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently.
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
Ugly and blatant, perhaps. But many minority representatives (both State and Federal) would not have been / would not be elected without redistricting.
All sorts of interesting articles and view points available via Google.
Here is an interesting page with a lot of resources on the subject.
We have all known this for some time. Look at some of the people up there. The Senate represents party intrest only and the House is purely special interest.
If it wasn't for the need of Republicans to get seats in the House and Senate minorities would have been totally marginalized by Democrats. The Democrats speak a very good game of inclusion but they are in effect the party of exclusion. Gingrich and his cronies understood that and used it to their advantage.
The best solution to this would be to give each state X number of seats and then award those to the top X number of vote getters statewide. This would still protect the original intent of the framers of our Consititution and allow for more diverse people in office. It might finally allow a green or gasp, a libertarian, into the so called hallowed grounds.
People bitch and moan all the time about Presidential abuses but convienently ignore what goes on in the Senate (requirement of super majorities to vote is not in the Constitution - it is the exact fear the framers had - a government trapped by a militant minorty). Neither side will give up that power and hence they sell us out when making deals.
Whine about Electronic voting, Bush, and Diebold all you want. You really don't have a choice in who is elected to the House of Representatives... and apparently don't care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter. :-)
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
If you want to see ugly, take a look at the North Carolina 12th district. It's been re-drawn more times than I can remember, and been ruled illegal almost as many.
The NC Libertarian Party offered to redraw the districts as a disinterested 3rd party to the process (theirs would have mostly followed county lines), but the Democrats & Republicans would have none of that, and so we have our snake-like boundaries. A better view is available in this pdf (area in gray).
Chip H.
In Iowa, the State Constitution says that congressional districts can't cross county lines (unless more than one district can be formed from that county, although not an issue in Iowa)
I believe something like this was discussed due to the controversy in Georgia. When the Democrats who controlled the legislature redrew the House districts, they drew them to give Democrats a blatantly unfair advantage. New districts were created that had a slight Democratic majority, while Republican incumbents ran against each other in extremely Republican districts. (Note: Georgia, like much of the South, tends to vote Democrat at a State level, Republican at a National level).
50 State Constitutional amendments like this wouldn't prevent gerrymandering, but it would make it a lot more difficult.
The reason gerrymandering exists is simple: you need to split people up into relatively equal-numbered-sized chunks, so each representative represents a mostly equivalent number of people.
Where those lines are drawn can be key to who gets elected.
Let's use a simple example. If each representative represents 100 voters and you have 100 relatives that live in a 2-block square, the best district for you would be a shape specifying the exact size of that 2-block square where your relatives are. You can pretty much guarantee that all your relatives will vote for you, or at least most of your relatives won't vote for someone else. Thus you're a guaranteed winner.
What's wrong with that? Are you not going to represent the will and desires of those 100 people?
Any whining about gerrymandering is done by the people that lose out. In this case, it's the Democrats (usually) that are whining about gerrymandering, because they're starting to get voted out of office at the local level. In the past, the Republicans were whining about it because they were "drawn out" of the election process by the Dems.
Really, it's just a game of tactical advantage played by people on all sides. Advantage today turns into disadvantages tomorrow. Whiners today turn into brutal gerrymanderers of tomorrow.
That's how it is.
And "independent" councils are nothing of the kind. Anyone involved in the political process is a political actor, and are by definition not independent. They live, work, and eat with everyone else...it's just that everyone agrees not to complain too loudly when the "independents" favor one part or another.
It seems to me like gerrymandering could be cut to manageable proportions by mandating a few simple rules, enforced in order of priority:
1) Districts must be contiguous.
2) No party registration data may be used while assigning districts.
3) Districts must encompass areas equivalent in population within 0.X%.
4) Districts must have a ratio of perimeter to area of no more than Y.
5) Redistricting may not move the geographical center of any district by more than Z miles per census cycle.
We'd need to do a little study to find apprpriate values for X, Y, and Z, of course. But does it really need to be any harder than this? It is about fairness of representation... right?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Instead of letting the legislators have the power to district, which by some strange coincidence affects their (re-)electability, it would be nice to have districting done by a mathemetical grid of sufficiently small size laid over the state in question, and let a publicly-known algorithm functioning like a state (ha haa) machine and work its way across the grid map, apportioning areas. With sufficient trials, the program can run until it gets cohesive districts of roughly equal population. It's just computer time, so who cares about that?
At least this forces the gerrymanderers to be smart enough to figure out how to exploit loopholes in the algorithm.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Well, if you were using a *real* text editor, you could just create a macro.
From the article:
>While Texas was shifting its districts, the governing Republicans in Colorado did their own mid-cycle reapportionment, to solidify their hold
>on the one House seat in the state that produced a close election in 2002. (Legal challenges to the new Texas and Colorado districts are
>now pending.)
Background for this: In 2002, there were 4 republican seats, 2 democratic seats, and 1 intensely competetive seat (the republican won by 121 votes) In 2003, in the last 3 days of the session, republicans pushed through a redistricting which would essentially have guaranteed that 5 seats will remain republican until the next redistricting. Challenges were immediately filed on both legal and constitutional grounds; the legal case (in federal court) has been on hold pending the outcome of the constitutional case.
Before the Colorado Supreme Court, the democrats argued that the redistricting was unconstitutional; the republicans argued that not only did they have the right to redistrict, but AG Ken Salazar (the plantiff) didn't have the right to sue the state he works for. The court found 5-2 that the redistricting was unconstitutional and 7-0 that the AG has the duty to challenge laws he feels violate the Constitution.
Because the ruling was based in the Colorado constitution, it may or may not affect rulings in other redistrictings.
Twenties Retirement
I remember watching the 2000 presidential debacle with some amusement, and most interesting of all was the partisan nature of EVERY aspect. It seemed that representatives from both parties were needed not only for political comments, but for everything from counting votes to doing statistical analysis. In the end, even the supreme court decide along party lines.
I mentioned how absurd this is to my father, who is a civil servant here (Sweden) and a historian. His answer was that the concept of a politically indepedent civil servant in Europe is actually a remnant of the monarchic roots: civil servants in European monarchies were traditionally loyal to the king, not to the houses of parlament. Even though the monarchy is reduced to a symbolic role (more so here than in the UK), the tradition of indepedence from the political process lives on.
America simply does not have this background: everything in American government is fundamentally political, so the concept of an _independent_ electoral commission is impossible.
This is another great reason we need term limits for Congress. Those people are supposed to be running the country-not rearranging voting districts to ensure that they'll get relected so they can be there to waste more time redistricting the next time around.
Think about it-how many problems could be solved if elected officials were more concerned with getting work done instead of getting re-elected! Do you really think that Fritz Hollings would have spent so much time passing bills for Disney if he hadn't needed their bribes, er, campaign donations, to get re-elected? Would we actually have a budget that could be passed if politicians worried about re-election weren't stuffing it with more pork than the country can afford?
Let's all stop wasting time fighting all of the problems caused by these corrupt scum, and just get laws passed to keep them from coming back!
First, the commissions are made up of three people:
A judge, chosen by the Chief Justice of each Province or Territory, who acts as chairperson and two civil servants chosen by the Speaker of the House. In practice, many commission members, aside from the chairpersons, have been university professors or non-elected officials of legislative assemblies. N.B. Sitting members of Parliament, the Provincial Legislatures or the Senate are not permitted by law to be members.
Second, the commissions hold hearings that the public is entitled and encouraged to attend. There is a specific Parliamentary committee that forwards complaints and suggestions to the commissions, but the commission is under no obligation to consider them. The commssions are required to draw boundaries based upon population density, mainly, but other factors are considered.
After forty years of an independent commission, a certain amount of trial and error and fine tuning has resulted in a process that is indeed independent and effective. I cannot recall a single instance where boundary disputes were referred to a court for resolution.
An aspect that I haven't seen commented on here is Racial Gerrymandering. Even if you disallow using partisan information, you can achieve the same results if your state has a large percentage of African-American (AA) voters. And in the Southern states where the Voting Rights Act is in effect, there is somewhat of a loose requirement of not diluting AA vote strength. This will, in all instances, cause the creation of a number of majority AA districts, which always will elect a Democrat. And it makes the surrounding districts "bleached" or overwhelmingly white, which tend to elect GOP candidates. Assume that AA voters vote Democrat 90% of the time. And note that isn't a racial stereotype. Any political scientist or political professional will tell you that it's an historical fact for at least 20 years. Knowing that a census block is 90% AA, you can safely assume that the voters will go overwhelmingly Democratic. It is also notable that voters' tend to cluster by partisanship. In the city I live in, GOP voters live overwhelmingly in the suburbs and a few intown neighborhoods with high average home value and average income. White Dems cluster in certain other intown neighborhoods and near the large University in town. AA voters live predominantly on the southside. Without knowing partisan voting behavior, I can still draw GOP and DEM districts in my sleep. FWIW, I work in politics professionally and have been using computers for redistricting for 12 years.
The sad thing is, it would really easy to get census data into a format where a couple easy rules would create good geographical regions. For instance:
1) all districts must have X (X is state population/#districts) voters, +-5% (or some number, this rule actually already is used).
2) Divide the state into 1 mile by 1 mile squares, each district consists of neighboring squares, and the total boundary between all the districts must be as short as possible while fulfilling 1.
You'd probably end up with a bunch of basically square or circular districts.
Communication is only possible between equals
Of course, that's now backwards and the Senate represents the country better thanks to these stupid redistricting plans. In the last general election, less than 30 of the 530 seats changed (IIRC), but no matter what the number was it was pathetic compared to the way it used to be. Many seats were unopposed. Districts since the last census have been drawn largly like this: the Democrats negotiated so that their candidates got strong "safe" districts with little to no opposition. In exchange, the Republicans got everything else, so congress won't change much untill after the 2010 census.
OK, so how do we fix this? The answer is to take the political parties out of it. Somewhere (Iowa?) a amendment or some such was passed so that when redistricting, the commite can only look at city boundries, population, voter turn out, and other such things to try to make the districts fair, they were NOT allowed to take political party registration and such into account. The result? In the last election almost every seat in that state was well contested and so the citizens there had a good democratic election working for them, while those of us in most of the country basically get force fed some candidate (who may be great, but may be terrible). What we need is to pass laws like this all over the country, so that none of these shenanigans go on.
As we all know the current process works REALLY well. Let's take Texas for example. In Texas, the Democrats didn't like the Republican redistricting (which from what I've heard was unfair, and I'm a Republican, FYI) so they FLED THE STATE just to keep it from getting passed. TWICE. If we fix this process, there would be nothing for them to complain about, because things would be fair (or at least many MANY times closer to fair than they are now).
Please, let's pass some reform!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Single Transferable Voting, aka Proportional Representation.
This simulataneously removes the problem of voters voting against their consciences for fear of wasting their vote. In the PR system, no votes are wasted. It has been used in Ireland and other European countries for quite some time now, and the constitution is designed to allow for coalition governments. Just about all of the smaller parties have been players in coalition governments at one time or another.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I was a supporter of term limits, in theory, until I moved to wonderfully wacky California. Here there are term limits for the State Legislature and guess what gets done. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.
It seems that terms limits had the unintended consequence that instead of "getting work done" the pols simply became gridlocked. Now instead of compromise, we just get a big "Stuff it up your A**" by both sides.
The issue is best highlighted by a couple of recent examples. Dems voted overwhelmingly for Drivers' Licenses for undocumented workers and repubs against. Arnold says he doesn't like the law and the Dems fold like a card house and repeal the law that was signed into law weeks earlier. On the other side, the Repubs were hell bent on "cutting the waste" to balance the budget and were appalled at the idea of floating a 10 billion dollar bond that would balance the budget on paper, but would end up costing billions more in future debt payments. Arnie boy comes to town and proposes an even larger bond sale, 15 BiLLION, and the repubs can't sign on fast enough, while the Dems are now unsure about passing such a huge debt on to future generations.
Now the point of those two examples is that these term limited pols flip-flopped like fish outta water when it suited their interests. Someone worried about their reelection might have considered the ramifications of making their previous stance so blatantly transparent. With term limits, you just do or oppose whatever the hell you want because you know it's not your neck on the chopping block if you screw up.
As a toy to demonstrate how badly you can change the outcome of an election, I wrote a toy demo a few years ago which still seems to be up and running - you can try it out here It only implements simple population-based measures, but it does get the point over.
Spell checker (c) creative spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
In a system of proportional representation district size and shape does not affect the representation of the different parties. Each vote is mathematically worth exactly as much as any other.
So the problem is solved by just not existing...
Coming from such a country to the US, it's pretty bizarre how crappy and corrupt some of these things are done here.
In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils. There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination. Moreover, the new districts more accurately reflect the voting preferences of Texans as a whole.
Moreover, since when does a slanted piece by an unabashed liberal partisan complaining about the political opposition actually qualify as "stuff that matters"? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Oh, the idea isn't intentional sabotage. It is, "if the only person who can win in this district is a republican, then I want a chance to choose which republican runs."
The article in the New Yorker points out that in a district that's been gerrymandered, the party for whom that district has been gerrymandered always wins the election, so the real election is the primary, not the general election. So really only about 1/6 of the voters in the district actually choose, and they're the most polarized voters.
So the point is, if your district has been gerrymandered, you should register as a member of the party for which the district has been gerrymandered, so that you get to be one of the 1/6th that vote. If everybody did this, the primary would be the general election, and the candidate would be accountable to the voters despite the gerrymandering.
Term limits make politicians less responsive to people's needs, not more. They will make for more corruption and graft, not less. If a congressman is only going to be around for a couple of terms, whats going to stop him for selling you out for some corporation in exchange for kickbacks or the promise of a cushy job for a vote on key legislation? If a congressional politician can't make a career out of it, he'll constantly be looking for their next career. What's going to get him another career: pleasing voters or pleasing corporations who can actually give him a job after he's out of office?
And term limits wont do a damn thing to fix the problem of gerrymandering. The reason all these seats are unchallenged is because there is a concentration of voters of one party or another in those districts. All term limits will do is you'll have different people holding these seats, but they'll still be of the same party, the partisanship will be just as bad and congressional representation will be just as out of touch with the actual population as it is now.
Finally, term limits restrict your choice to vote for whomever you want to. Why would anyone want to limit their own right to vote, the bedrock of any democracy or republic?
I live in New Zealand, although I'm an American citizen. The country is currently run by a party called Labour. Their the equivalent of the Democratic Party. The electoral system is MMP (mixed member proportional), a supposedly more "democratic" and proportional system. In reality it just means more polticians, and small parties being able to hold disproportionate power. Arguments over electoral boundaries occur hear as well, and I doubt if there is any way to avoid them, or to avoid partisan gerrymandering. Democracy - a system of counting heads regardless of their content. www.libertarianz.org.nz
This is the same reason why support for the Florida recounts was almost precisely divided along party lines. It's hardly a coincidence that virtualy all Democrats believed that "hand recounts are the only way to be sure," while virtually all Republicans believed that "ballot tampering/theft and inconsistent counting of hanging/pregnant chads makes the hand recount actually less accurate, or at least more subjective, than the original machine tabulation." People believe what will get their canidates into power.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It has gone the other way in the past. In 1960, the Democratic margin of victory in Illinois was smaller than the amount of vote fraud that went on in Chicago. Nixon chose to concede the election rather than put the country through a constitutional crisis -- perhaps the only decent thing he ever did in his public career.
You're right, though. The New York Times sponsored a post-election recount of the paper ballots (yay paper ballots). Theie study came out with the result that the NY Times didn't want to see, so they barely mentioned that their study had finished, and that, according to their count, Bush got more votes.
A pox on both their houses.
I don't want to defend the practice of Gerrymandering, nor continuous redistricting BUT, this is definitely a case of "turnaround is fair play". The Republicans especcially in Texas have already had "the boot on the other foot" and this is payback time.
The current districts are a clear cut case of gerrymandering. In this last election 57% of Texas voters voted to send a Republican to the House of Representatives but the Democrats got the majority of Texas seats (17 out of 32) in the house. The current Democratic gerrymander gives the Democrats 3-4 seats beyond what would be "fair" by the popular vote. In the early '90's when the current districts were first put in place the Democrats managed to capture 70% of the house seats with only 1/2 of the vote. Micheal Barrone the author of the "American Political Almanac" called it ""The most partisan redistricting in the '90 cycle in the nation" in the Almanac he called it "the shrewdest gerrymander". To keep the post on-topic the Democratic gerrymander was implementied using a computer program, yet strangely the New Yorker didn't find that as newsworthy at the time. Here is a relevent quote from a journalism students story (apparently the Dems screwing the Reps doesn't attract as much interest in the media) on using computers to gerrymander Texas: A scrupulously fair redistricting would give the Republicans 3-4 additional seats. The Republicans to be fair are engaging in their own bit of gerrymandering to "unfairly" pick up an additional 2-3 extra seats to give them a total pick-up of 6-7.
It's worth noting that those 2-3 extra seats aren't quite as aggressive as what the Democrats achieved throughout the 90's. In the 90's however, there was no comparable outcry from outraged defenders of representative democracy. Republican complaints didn't get any traction in the media. Most likely this is a case of the Republicans not playing the game as well as the Democrats - they fought the gerrymander but didn't go the the extra-ordinary lengths that the Dems did in this round. Perhaps they didn't think that the press would be as kind to them.
You miss out one little detail, the judge had thrown out the map previously because it flunked the civil rights issue. So much for your 'less biased sources'.
No, where did you get that idea? The court created the current district map (essentially a continuation of the previous map) because the legislature was deadlocked and couldn't didn't come up with one. You really might consider finding less biased sources. I'd suggest looking at regional papers - they are occasionally biased but are less likely to get the story so wrong as partisan opinion journals or even national papers.
That is not the result of gerrymandering, it is the result of incumbency. Texas has been Democratic for decades.
Wrong again, In the 1990 redistricting the Democrats who still had the majority in the state house but were seeing the state as a whole trending Republican. So they gerrymandered the districts to give them 70% of the house seats with only 50% of the popular vote, and most recently The only incumbency that helped them was the imcumbent Democratic state legislators doing the redistricting (with the aid of a computer program, I might add). When the state was solidly (conservative) Democrat such aggressive gerrymandering wasn't necessary, they resorted to it as the populace became increasingly Republican.
DeLay and cronies are upset that voters do not want to trade their existing democrats in for republicans to do his bidding.
Actually the voters DID vote to trade democrats for republicans - as I said 57% of the vote went Republican. It's just that the majority sentiment was packed into a small number of overwhelmingly Republican districts while the minority sentiment was spread out the get relatively thin majorities among all the rest. The result, despite losing the congressional vote by a margin that would usually be considered a landslide (14% points down!) the Democrats got MORE of the seats (17 out of 32). That is a gerrymander no matter how you justify it.
Given the corrupt way the bill was forced through - changing the rules to fit the deed there is no moral reason the courts should defer to the legislature on this one.
Exactly what "rules" have been changed? The "rules" say that the STATE not the federal courts has the responsibility to draw electoral lines. If the courts invalidate such lines for some good cause (such as a deadlocked legislature that can't get it done on time) that does not change the RULE that it is the states responsibility. Lines drawn by courts have been redrawn by state legislatures on off years in the past (in California in 1984 for example). Court drawn lines have often changed *multiple* times over the course of a decade. It's hard to see how a body given only general oversight responsibilities (the federal courts) can have complete freedom to redraw districts as it will multiple times while the body EXPLICITY given that responsiblity has it completely taken out of their hands.
The courts should only step in when something goes very clearly wrong. Even when it does when the proper constitutionally mandated body comes back and does it's job right the court should defer to that proper body rather than usurp responsibilities given to others.
As far as I can see the only "rule" changed was the rule that Republican voters should be obligated to send Democratic politicians to Washington. I can understand why Democrats liked that "rule" but I don't think it should stand up in court.