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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: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:18PM (2 children)
Yes, this is generally popular. But it doesn't necessarily solve gerrymandering -- it merely changes the form. Witness what happened in Indiana [wikipedia.org] after the 2010 census. If you view the historical progression of district maps there since the 1970s, it appears that Indiana mostly has moved toward more "square"(-ish) districts over time. But Democrats argued after the 2013 redistricting that it would benefit Republicans (who have, by the way, gerrymandered the state legislative districts to a high degree) and mostly cement their seats by concentrating Democratic power in few regions that happen to contain the more urban (and more liberal) areas. So it looks more "fair," but is it?
The problem, to my mind, is that we have two incompatible metrics of "fairness."
(1) One metric says we need "compact" geographic districts, ones that perhaps line up with reasonable political and/or community boundaries, so that a representative is representing a coherent group of people geographically.
(2) Another metric says we need parity between the parties, so that each party has roughly a chance of winning a number of seats equal to its respective proportion of the population STATEWIDE (or nationwide).
These two goals are diametrically opposed. When you divide up data, you can create different outcomes for subsets compared to the overall data trend. This is well-known to anyone with basic familiarity with Simpson's paradox [wikipedia.org]. So, it's quite possible to produce a mathematically geographically "perfect" division by whatever metric that is supposedly politically neutral, and STILL have a situation where 60% of the nation votes for Democrats and Republicans win 55% of House seats (or vice versa, though the fact that Democrats tend to be concentrated in high-density population zones makes it somewhat more likely that they will suffer more under most "prefer squares" metrics).
If we really want to satisfy both conditions, we'd need to do something much more radical, like allocate Congressional seats to each party on the basis of the fraction of the popular vote that each party gets nationwide (or at least statewide), as is done in some parliamentary systems [wikipedia.org]. That would eliminate much of the redistricting issue, but it would also radically change the idea that a local geographic population gets to choose its own preferred representative (and perhaps run afoul of the Constitution).
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:25PM
Sorry -- should have caught this before submitting, but for my first "metric" I meant: "ones that perhaps line up with reasonable municipal and/or community boundaries." (I meant "political boundaries" in the sense of county or city lines, etc., not according to political party affiliation.)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday May 26 2017, @01:41PM
Allow me to reformulate those:
1. Geographical districts
2. Proportional representation statewide
If you require the voting system to deliver these, then yes, these are opposed.
#2 must be handled by the voting system to preserve some amount of fairness to the results.
#1 doesn't - every candidate is free to say "I'm running on behalf of geographical region (x1,y1)-(x2,y2)! Except the folks at (x3,y3)!"
So an easy solution to the issue you raised is to have elections with proportional representation: X seats in the house, the top X of the election get those seats.
If #1 is actually important to people, then the "free market" will solve it. Candidates will find the optimum size of an area to represent and just claim that themselves. Voters who care about geographical representation might vote for them, others likely won't.
If some of those candidates are elected, then apparently there is merit to #1. If not, then either no candidate found the right way to implement #1, or voters just care about other things more than about geographical representation.