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North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally Gerrymandered (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina's congressional map on Tuesday, condemning it as unconstitutional because Republicans had drawn the map seeking a political advantage (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander, and it instantly endangered Republican seats in the coming elections. Judge James A. Wynn Jr., in a biting 191-page opinion, said that Republicans in North Carolina's Legislature had been "motivated by invidious partisan intent" as they carried out their obligation in 2016 to divide the state into 13 congressional districts, 10 of which are held by Republicans. The result, Judge Wynn wrote, violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. The ruling and its chief demand -- that the Republican-dominated Legislature create a new landscape of congressional districts by Jan. 24 -- infused new turmoil into the political chaos that has in recent years enveloped North Carolina. President Trump carried North Carolina in 2016, but the state elected a Democrat as its governor on the same day and in 2008 supported President Barack Obama.
How is this not automated? Should just be a computer program that does "find the N points such that each point is the closest point to exactly P/N people."
That is, make a Voronoi diagram on population, not geometric distance.
No politics involved at all, but probably people wouldn't like it...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Sure. But this stuff has been going on so long that it's part of history class. Even the term gerrymander goes back to the earliest days of our republic.
That said, the fact that a state (or a voter) went for Obama and then Trump is no proof of nefarious meddling.
This idea that the system is broken because it produced a result you don't agree with is even MORE dangerous to democracy than gerrymandering.
Short of a simple geometric algorithm, any attempt to redraw districts will generate objections. Both parties will seek to alter the result to benefit them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
they went along with the Gerrymandering because the R's carved out some safe districts for them. If this keeps up (and if we don't let voter suppression happen) it'll change the political landscape drastically. The part that worries me is the Rs just got out from under that court order that lets them send poll watchers. I some how doubt the reason for that order (voter intimidation) really went away. I know in the last two presidential elections there were armed police stationed outside predominately black precincts... OTOH there's been motions to force paper trails nationwide.
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Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably.
That's how gerrymandering works. You don't create districts for your own party to win, you create single safe districts for the other party to win to "contain" the opposition votes in one district so they don't affect the others.
For example, the most common type of gerrymandering in North Carolina is to put all the black voters into one district. By sacrificing that one district, you improve your chances in the five surrounding districts. This is from the article you cited:
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, I happen to hate when both Republicans and Democrats gerrymander. Thus I support this particular suit. When the Republicans find themselves regularly winning the popular vote, yet consistently losing big by seat count, I will listen to them, too.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
That's because of a tactic called "packing" whereby you try to concentrate the opposition into the fewest districts possible. The other major tactic is "cracking" which dilutes the voting power of the opposition across multiple districts. So it wouldn't be shocking at all to find a highly gerrymandered district drawn by the losing party. They do that so that they can win more seats elsewhere.
Gerrymandering is, by definition, the manipulation of the Congressional districts in a way to assure an outcome beneficial to one party of another.
What makes it "insidious" or not is beyond speculation. That is is just a stupid, inflammatory adjective on the Judge's part.
BTW, Gerrymandering has been happening since the beginning of the Republic.
Well at some point it does become obscene in the extreme. Looking at these maps and reading a bit at how they are formed... ie throw as many Democrats as possible into a few districts and then spread the remaining Democrats out in all the other districts. I don't really see how this is any different than the prohibition on using race as part of drawing new districts.
The courts should make this simple and delegitimize partisan affiliation and voting history as a valid consideration. The only legitimate data that are used to draw the maps should be where people live and then the districts should be draw to closely match the existing underlying political boundaries (ie cities, towns and counties) in a geographically compact area.
The original term, which you yourself quoted, was "effectively disenfranchise", not just disenfranchise. That lines up very well with the term "effectively meaningless" which you are objecting to. The adjective can't be ignored when you're quoting the definition if Disenfranchisement.
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It's not going to be exactly equal but you'd expect a State with 70% of the population as registered Democrats compared to 30% Republicans to roughly have a 7:3 (or 6:4, even 5:5) mix of elected Congress-people.
No, I would not expect that at all. If political affiliation was equally distributed across the state, then with 70% democrats, you would expect every district to go democrat every time. But because we know that democrats tend to clump in cities and districts are divided by population not area, I would expect democrats to win most of the small area districts and republicans to win most of the large area districts. In some ways slight gerrymandering can actually give better representation for everyone so that the 30% minority actually gets a representative. Another way to accomplish this would be to have all representatives elected at large and the top N candidates with the most votes get a seat. Ideally this would probably work best with some form of ranked voting system so that if the top person gets more votes than they need, those extra votes trickle down to the next candidate.
The individual right to equal representation is the primary concern. If a state attempts to suppress the political will of its people, its justification for state powers vanishes.
It's sad that the federal government needs to address this at all. There are both red and blue gerrymanders out there, and they are both morally wrong.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Gerrymandering is bad no matter who does it.
But let's also not use false equivalents. The GOP once again is clearly the more immoral of the two.
https://www.apnews.com/fa6478e10cda4e9cbd75380e705bd380
TLDR statistical analysis shows that Rs abuse the system 4 time as often.
Currently If you put an R next to your next to your name you are an immoral sack of shit who is willing to corrupt the most basic principles of our electoral system.
*Note "R" not conservative.
Expect... Like expecting Hillary to carry states Obama won?
Expectations have the problem of being wrong.
That is extremely poor understanding of how courts and constitutions works.
The constitution is a framework for the courts to use to keep the executive and legislative branches in order. The executive branches and legislative branches can kind of do what they want, but the courts can then review it and throw it out if it violates the constitions.
To put it more bluntly, without courts, theres no constitutions, thus the court is *always* a party to questions of constitutionality, as no other body really has the power to enforce it (Even the DOJ etc, they can only refer stuff to the courts)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
No one has ever been denied the ability to associate with members of their own party.
Not sure what point you are trying to make but you certainly missed the one in the discussion. Gerrymandering utilizes the association with a political party to remove the power of their vote by rigging the system. So if Party A draws the districts to favor Party A then members of Party B are being disenfranchised as a result. Members of Party B are effectively being deprived of their vote because their vote will not matter in the outcome of the election. The fact that they actually cast a ballot does not change the fact that their vote won't have any chance to affect the outcome because the electorate has been rigged.
Funny how people always resort to "Change the Constitution if you don't like it" whenever two conflicting Constitutional principles have to be weighed by the courts - and the court doesn't pick their choice.
The Supreme Court has jumped through hoops to pretend that, for example, "money is speech" is a more important American value than "government by the people" or "equal protection". And as regards gerrymandering, it has in the past come down on the side of "we can't police partisanship" over "everyone's vote should count". They've yet to rule on the issue since it became possible to mathematically show how gerrymandering causes votes to be effectively rendered useless - and there's still every possibility that the Kennedy will join with the rest of the conservatives and choose the convenient answer that happens to favor their side..
But to say the court shouldn't have a voice when there's such a conflict is to say "I like things the way they are, so fuck you - change the Constitution if you don't like it".
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Remember back when Democrats were happily using racist assumptions that blacks could only get elected from majority-black districts, which they were all too happy to gerrymander into existence?
The current Republican antics are a direct result of those racist efforts...and redrawing the districts will almost certainly dilute those majority-minority districts (again, which are racist constructs in the first place). And lots of folks will not be happy at all about districts drawn by "colorblind" algorithms that are simply trying to map equal numbers of people into right-sized districts, so the algorithms will have to be made "fair". Good luck with that.
The Atlantic (2013)
Acting under the legal strength and moral authority of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats led the charge to draw so-called "majority-minority districts" -- ones packed so full of minority voters that they usually resulted in electing a minority representative, as intended. The number of minority representatives jumped exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s, with the number of black House members increasing from five to 24 by 1989.
But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. The Democrats had been tripped up by a classic Catch-22, as had minority voters: Even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.
Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts for GOP advantage, as did the Bush Administration Justice Department prior to the 1991 redistricting, even as GOP activists like now-Chief Justice John Roberts campaigned against the VRA because they opposed any race-based remedies. The tipping point was the 1994 midterm elections, when the GOP captured the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 35 years and Gingrich because speaker. Many experts on both the left and the right, from The Nation's Ari Berman and prominent GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who spearheaded the 1991 effort to maximize the number of majority-minority districts), attribute the Republican success that year to the drawing of majority-minority districts; indeed, African-American membership in the House reached its highest level ever, at 40.
VRA districts undoubtedly played a role in the GOP takeover, but they were not the only factor, since Republicans made big gains that year in lots of places outside the South. But in the hardscrabble battles of the 50-50 nation, any advantage at all was embraced, and prominent Republicans like Ginsberg and Gingrich became the loudest proponents of drawing majority-minority districts.
Never mind that the third judge was a Bush appointee and concurred on two of the three bases for the decision.