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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 NotSanguine on Friday May 26 2017, @05:30PM (2 children)
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you just don't realize how redistricting/gerrymandering has worked in the U.S. [govtrack.us]
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're ignorant. In the U.S. congressional districts are divided *by population* and not by geography. The issues I mentioned WRT regular polygons wasn't a suggestion that such polygons be of equal area, but rather that they are of created in as compact and normalized a fashion as possible, without any consideration of *who* lives in those areas.
In too many places, congressional districts have been drawn to divide members of the party(ies) not favored by the state legislatures in order to create districts where, regardless of how they vote, they are always a minority in that district.
As such, when drawing district boundaries, intentionally splitting areas which would seem to create the most compact and normalized districts, in order to limit the voting blocs for specific parties, is malicious.
I've often thought that proportional representation in our legislative bodies was a good idea. Not because I necessarily think a parliamentary system would be superior (I think that the separation of the legislative and executive branches is an excellent idea, which is lacking in parliamentary systems), but because it would allow more diverse voices into our legislative processes and the national debate.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday May 26 2017, @06:16PM (1 child)
Neither, actually - I was talking about the implications of districting. These hold for the USA and for any other country that uses districting.
Thanks! Unfortunately, I'm not ignorant, so sorry about that.
I was talking about theory, you're talking about practice.
In a nutshell, when districting anywhere (including in the USA):
1. population size per district does not mandate a certain structure. Districts may be rotated, moved, or squished in one direction and elongated in another.
2. Since voters are not uniformly distributed and since the borders are not nice straight lines, any zoning algorithm will make some arbitrary choices.
For an example, see this image [wp.com]. Uniform density of voters, 4 districts, every voter voting purple or green. The most obvious point of this picture is to illustrate how choosing districts carefully can determine the result. But: the key thing for this discussion is this: it is impossible to say any of these divisions is intrinsically wrong. Sure, the bottom right looks fishy - but that doesn't mean that this must never be allowed to happen anywhere. In fact, I'm sure it's possible to come up with example settings that embed this division of voters where each of the districting options depicted leads to the most fair districts in the rest of the setting.
For example, say this image depicts the city centre, and outside the city centre voter density varies. Now if you start creating your districts from the city centre, you might get districts like shown in the top row of the picture. However, in case this is the last part of the state to be districted, you could conceivably end up with the lower right division.
The UK (to name but one) must be doing it wrong then [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday May 26 2017, @07:16PM
I suspect that we may be in violent agreement here.
My concern WRT redistricting is one of the deliberate, active weakening of one voting bloc to benefit another.
There are many ways to look at that issue. My primary point is that *preferring* regular shapes (or reasonable combinations thereof) for districts can limit (but certainly not eliminate) attempts to create district boundaries that favor one group over another.
My (albeit limited) understanding is that in most parliamentary systems (and I thought this of the UK as well, but I could be wrong), was that the majority party (or coalition) in the legislature populated the executive roles from within its own ranks and those folks retained their seats in the legislative branch (i.e., the current Prime Minister [wikipedia.org] remains the MP for Maidenhead [wikipedia.org]).
In the U.S, by contrast, Jeff Sessions [wikipedia.org] was required to resign his legislative post as a Senator from Alabama, before he could take on his role as the U.S. Attorney General.
As such, Theresa May (the head of the U.K.'s executive) will cast votes on legislation in parliament as the MP for Maidenhead. In the U.S., with the (extremely rare) exception of the Vice President casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate, no executive branch member *ever* votes on legislation.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr