While the Supreme Court has clearly shown to be both
justiciable and illegal, the same is not true of an equally pernicious
redistricting tactic: partisan gerrymandering. Although it is not perfectly
defined, partisan gerrymandering tends to be the redrawing of district lines in
such a way that one party may maximize the number of seats that it can take in
election. This party will usually pack most of the opposing party’s voters in to
just a few districts. The remaining districts often have similar numbers of
voters from each party, carefully allocated so that the gerrymandering party
secures narrow victories consistently.
Much like racial gerrymandering, partisan
gerrymandering discriminates against certain voters and makes voting less
democratic. The court (and therefore the law), however, views the two very
differently.
In the last week, I read the Supreme Court opinions of
four pivotal partisan gerrymandering cases. From all of these cases, it became
clear that the court still has no metric to rule on partisan gerrymandering
claims. Majority opinions have argued that certain metrics for evaluating these
claims will not work, but no ruling has ever decided on a metric that does
work. Such a metric will have to come from a future case.
Hey Giacomo, you may want to look into a case from last week, where federal judges ruled that Texas' Republican-led legislature gerrymandered congressional districts to limit the influence of minority voters. An interesting note is that Texas, along with 8 other states with a history of racial discrimination, was under federal oversight of elections until 2013. What are your thoughts?
ReplyDeleteAlek, you are absolutely right. The court has made several rulings about racial gerrymandering within the past few weeks. The federal oversight you mentioned is a topic I have discussed a little bit already in this blog. It is called preclearance. That practice stemmed from section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. As you alluded to, this section was deemed unconstitutional in 2013. I will be discussing all of these current cases, as well as other ongoing movements for redistricting reform, in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
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