SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Washington Post reports Supreme Court rules race improperly dominated N.C. redistricting efforts
The Supreme Court ruled [May 22] that North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature relied on racial gerrymandering when drawing the state's congressional districts, a decision that could make it easier to challenge other state redistricting plans.
The decision continued a trend at the court, where justices have found that racial considerations improperly tainted redistricting decisions by GOP-led legislatures in Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. Some cases involved congressional districts, others legislative districts.
[...] [The justices] were unanimous in rejecting one of the districts and split 5 to 3 on the other.
AlterNet reports
Republican legislators used surgical precision to pack black voters into just two districts, the tentacular 1st and the snake-like 12th. The lower court found that these districts targeted voters on the basis of race in violation of the constitution, a move that effectively prevented black voters from electing their preferred candidates in neighboring seats. map
[...] This now-invalidated congressional map was one of, if not the very most, aggressive partisan gerrymanders in modern history. North Carolina is a relatively evenly divided swing state--Donald Trump won it by just 3 points last year--yet these lines offered Republicans 10 safe districts while creating three lopsidedly Democratic seats. Amazingly, all 10 Republican districts hit a perfect sweet spot with GOP support between 55 and 60 percent, a level that is high enough to be secure yet spreads around Republican voters just carefully enough to ensure the maximum number of GOP seats possible.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SpockLogic on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:46PM (4 children)
If you want the voters to win then redistricting must be taken out of the hands of politicians. Politicians cannot be trusted not to look after their own sectarian interests above all else. An independent commission charged with creating compact, contiguous districts, that keep political units and communities within a single district would be the answer.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:25PM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:40PM (1 child)
The alternative is what the person at the top of this thread said: eliminate districts. The constitution does not require them to exist. Each state is free to decide how to elect their representatives, which could be a state-wide at-large election along the lines of proportional representation. Or, as a half-way, in large states, make mega-districts that combine ~5 house seats into one larger district and do PR within that mega-district.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:54PM
It's a nice idea, but the problem is that there's generally no political will to make it happen.
If either party has even a slight majority in a given state, that party, and thus the majority of people in the state, would much rather win all the seats in Congress (or as many as jerrymaniacally possible) than, say, 6 out 11 seats. So no matter which party is on top, the majority of people will probably support jerrymandering and jerrymander-prone districting procedures. (The exception, given a two-party system, might be a state so evenly divided that nobody knows who's on top, and both sides would rather split the seats than fight for all-or-nothing. But more likely, both parties will be sure that they have the edge, and both will favor all-or-nothing.)
if you try to appeal to fairness above party interest, those who don't laugh at you will point out that all these other states (and they'll obviously pick examples that go to the opposite party) do use rules that leverage a small majority of voters into a large majority of congressional seats, and ask how it's "fair" that they unilaterally diminish their own power, giving those other states an unfair advantage.
In a functioning representative democracy, there's more than two parties, and none of them usually has a majority of voters, so this sort of math doesn't apply -- any system that could be exploited to give any one party a disproportionate share of representatives, will be opposed by the majority of people.
It's ironically depressing, then, to note that our system of winner-take-all districts instead of proportional representation is one of the main factors (though IMO a lesser one than our use of the FPP voting system for single-candidate races) that perpetuates our two-party system, and prevents us from having the functional democracy needed to muster any will to change it...
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:34PM
What do you call someone wielding political power? The power to draw district lines is inherently political, the ones given the authority to do that will quickly become politicians even if you pick random names from a phone directory. Faster in fact if you do that since they will lack any hardening against the lobbyists who have an ax to grind in the decisions.