Political Gerrymandering: (Part 1) How It's Done

     One of the most contentious and least developed areas of constitutional law involves the problem of "political gerrymandering."

     I was motivated to write on this subject because of an article by Kenneth P. Vogel in Politico entitled ""GOP Lags In Early Redistricting Race."  Vogel states:

Outmaneuvered by the GOP during the last round of redistricting a decade ago, Democrats appear to have an early advantage as the two parties gear up again for the expensive and high-stakes battle over redrawing state legislative and congressional districts.

�I do believe that the Democrats are much better organized at this stage,� said Ben Ginsberg, a top Republican election lawyer.

     Political gerrymandering is the drawing of legislative districts to enhance the political power of a political party or other political faction.  Through clever drawing of legislative boundaries, it is possible for a group to double its power in a legislative body.  Here is how that can be done.

     Assume that a state has a population of ten million people.  Assume further that the state has 20 members of Congress, 50 state senators, and 100 state representatives in the state legislature.  Under Reynolds v. Sims and the principle of "one person, one vote" there will be 500,000 persons in each congressional district, 200,000 persons in each state senatorial district, and 100,000 persons in each state house legislative district.  Assume further that half of the people in the state are registered voters, and that this is uniformly true throughout the state.  Accordingly, each congressional district will comprise 250,000 voters, each state senatorial district will have 100,000 voters, and each house legislative district will have 50,000 voters.

     Assume further that the number of democrats and republicans in the state is evenly divided; of the five million voters, 2,500,000 are Democrats and 2,500,000 are Republicans.  In such a state, if political party affiliation is not taken into account when we draw district lines, we should expect that some districts will be Republican, some will be Democratic, and some will be competitive; and it is possible that in most, if not all, of the districts, either Democrat or a Republican could stand a good chance of winning the election, depending upon which way the political winds are blowing.

     Now let us assume that one party or the other can control the drawing of district boundaries.  For the sake of argument, assume that the Democrats obtain the power to draw district boundaries any way they choose.  Under Reynolds they must still keep the overall population of each district equal; but unless there is some rule against political gerrymandering, they will be able to put as many or as few members of each political party in any particular legislative district.

     To maximize their political power, all the Democrats have to do is to pack Republican voters into a small number of legislative districts, and spread Democratic voters evenly over the remainder of the districts.  In other words, the Democrats would create a few districts that would be practically unanimously Republican (and thus very save seats for Republican officeholders), but in the remaining districts Democrats would outnumber Republicans.  In our example the Democrats might create two congressional districts that are all Republican; each of these districts would have 250,000 Republican voters and no Democrats.  It would then be theoretically possible to draw district lines so that Democratic voters would outnumber Republican voters by a margin of 139,000 to 111,000 in every single one of the eighteen remaining districts; they would outnumber Republicans 55% to 45% in each of those districts.  It a normal election year Democrats would win 18 of the 20 congressional seats. 

     This sneakiness works even for groups that comprise of a minority of the electorate.  It is possible for a group with 26% of the vote to secure a majority in more than 50% of the legislative districts by packing the opposing party into a few legislative districts.  And once an incumbent is elected, he or she is very difficult to unseat.

     If one racial group were to do this – if one race were to pack voters of a different race into a small number of legislative districts in order to obtain a political majority in the rest of the districts – this would be considered to be a violation of the Constitution.  However, while the Supreme Court has held that gerrymandering on the basis of political affiliation may be unconstitutional in some circumstances, it has yet to declare any existing plan to be unconstitutional, and it has not even agreed upon a standard for measuring its constitutionality.  That is the subject of the next post on this subject.

Tagged as: political gerrymandering, redistricting