Today the editors of the Washington Post have given us the benefit 0f their opinion on gerrymandering:
Partisan gerrymandering in states such as North Carolina and Illinois enables one party to take more seats than its underlying support warrants. North Carolina’s median congressional district — under the new maps — favored President Donald Trump by 14 percentage points in 2020, so only an astonishingly large anti-GOP wave would win Democrats the number of seats the state’s overall voting patterns would suggest they should hold.
Gerrymandering can also be used to kill competitive districts. In Texas, for example, mapmakers drew deeply red and blue districts — and few that lie in the middle.
Their solution to the problem?
States that use some kind of independent process to draw maps tend to end up with more competitive districts.
No map is perfect, because even commissions acting in good faith must balance competing interests. Drawing maps that reflect the preferences of a state’s overall electorate can conflict with ensuring that communities of interest remain in the same district. For example, Virginia’s map may overrepresent White voters because it packs many Black voters into two districts to ensure minority communities can elect representatives of their choice. Even so, maps drawn by independent commissions, who lack the glaring conflict of interest state legislators bring to the table, have over and over again proved fairer.
Ideally, every state would embrace a strong redistricting commission process, in which the line-drawers are nonpartisan, balanced between the parties or some mix that produces maps on a binding, not an advisory, basis. But only 10 states have fully independent commissions. Most state legislators have proved unwilling to surrender the power to choose their own voters.
To some extent that’s circular, “begging the question”. How are the commissions constituted? Fourteen states use redistricting commissions. Of those five are political commissions which is to say no fairer than the state legislature. How California’s redistricting committee is constituted is described here. My cursory reading suggests that although it is notionally non-partisan it is pragmatically just as partisan as the state legislature is.
I have a modest proposal: why not draw districts algorithmically? The criteria would be contiguity, compactness, uniformity in size (plus or minus 10%), and political boundaries (political entities should not be split other than to satisfy the size requirements). Such a method would be faster, fairer, and more transparent than any state legislature or commission.
I will continue to point out, with single member plurality voting elections results are weakly correlated with voting shares. Using that as the basis to say a map is gerrymandered shows a poor understanding of how single member plurality systems work.
If the goal is results that are proportional to votes; proportional voting is the only way. A big plus is states could avoid line drawing with such a system.
Each state would hold a statewide election for all its house seats; where residents vote for list tickets. The seats are proportionally awarded to lists by their share of votes.
I would add that voting for Biden is an extremely weak proxy measure of “is a Democrat”.
One further comment.
There is one assumption that underlines single member plurality voting, and how Congress is supposed to work.
That a winner’s first duty as representative in Congress is to advocate for their whole community; not advocate their personal preferences, or only the voters that voted for he or she.
But currently it seems politicians would rather select the community they represent then represent the community that selected them.
In that case, the assumption underlying single member plurality voting is broken and even “fair” maps won’t give voters who voted for the losing candidate the representation they have a right to.
Algorithms can be gamed.
Here in Colorado, we have a good commission that is composed of equal numbers of Republicans, Democrats and Independents. We really only have 1, maybe two competitive districts with the new maps.
The difficulty is political sorting. The commission is supposed to draw maps prioritizing natural boundaries and try not to split communities or regions. But that usually results in uncompetitive districts. To make them all competitive, you’d have to carve out bits of Denver and add them to more rural parts of the state.
I continue to think that increasing the size of the House would help a lot.