Majority-Minority Districts

Shaw v. Reno, another racial gerrymandering case I read this week, concerns majority-minority districts. These are districts in which most of the population is non-white. In this case, the court was ruling on North Carolina’s 1^st and 12^th Congressional Districts. To understand the creation of these districts, one must first understand section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

This section requires “preclearance” for certain states and localities. Essentially, certain North Carolina counties had to get approval from the U.S. Attorney General before changing any of their voting procedures. This includes redistricting maps.

After the 1990 census, North Carolina gained a seat in the U.S. House, because the state’s population had increased. When the North Carolina General Assembly reapportioned the congressional districts in 1991, they created one majority-African-American district (District 1). This map was thrown away, however, because the Assembly had failed to get preclearance for it from the Attorney General. This meant they had to draw a new map, which now included an oddly shaped second majority-African-American district, the 12^th.

Five white North Carolinians sued the Attorney General, saying that these two majority-minority districts unconstitutionally discriminated against them. The court ruled in their favor, finding that District 12 was drawn with race as the primary concern.

This did not, however, mean that majority-minority districts were inherently unconstitutional. The court just stated that race could not be the only consideration in creating districts. Compactness, contiguity, and political subdivisions (for example census units) are not constitutionally-required considerations, but they are legitimate and traditional goals in redistricting. Race is not, though it can be a factor as long as other considerations (like those listed above) are the main ones. That is the most important part of the Shaw v. Reno decision: that race cannot be the main criterion in redistricting.

The Background of Racial Gerrymandering

After Baker v. Carr and Renyolds v. Sims outlawed population-based gerrymandering (where districts were apportioned to have vastly different populations, over-representing some constituents while under-representing others), state legislators found two new ways to gerrymander effectively. One of these was racial gerrymandering. This week, I read the supreme court case White v. Regester, which was the first instance of the court finding racial gerrymandering to be unconstitutional.

The 1973 case was based upon the 1971 reapportionment of Texas’s House of Representatives. The court ruled on two aspects of this reapportionment: population variance between districts, and racial discrimination.

One of the metrics used to evaluate population-based gerrymandering claims is variance between the populations of a state’s most and least populous districts. In Texas, this variance was 9.9%. The court ruled that this was an acceptable variance, even without justification for why such variance was in the state’s best interest.

The more important part of this case, however, was the assessment of racial discrimination in the 1971 reapportionment. The court found that in Dallas County and Bexar County, racial minorities had undergone significant disenfranchisement in their multi-member districts.

The 1971 reapportionment plan had divided the state into 79 single-member districts (where the district elects one representative) and 11 multi-member districts (where some specified number of representatives are all elected to represent the same constituents. The court found that the way in which these single-member or multi-member districts were distributed was irrational and unjustified.

In Dallas County, the multi-member districts discriminated against African Americans, because of a white-dominated Democratic Party primary (in which candidates could win without the support of any African American voters) and the so-called “place rule”. The place rule forced candidates to run on a specific place on the ballot, making each seat a two-candidate head-to-head race. While the court did not see such rules as inherently unconstitutional, it found that this one in particular served to discriminate, and was therefore illegal.

Bexar County had a slightly different discrimination issue. Mexican Americans in this county made up only 29% of the population, despite having huge majorities in neighborhoods like Barrio. This, along with a poll tax, language barriers, and the nation’s strictest voter registration system, effectively eliminated the political voice of Mexican Americans in Bexar County.

The court ruled that this discrimination was unconstitutional. The ruling became the foundation for claims of racial gerrymandering.

Mills' Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill was the other utilitarian philosopher whose work I have read these past two weeks. He wrote On Liberty in 1859, long after Bentham’s 1780 publication of Principles of Morals and Legislation. The time period, as well as significant differences in thought, are evident in a comparison of the two works.

As I have previously written, Bentham established utilitarian principles from the ground up, focusing on the careful calculus of comparing individuals’ pleasures and pains. Mill, on the other hand, focuses primarily on rights, implying the existence of some of the principles Bentham established.

Mill’s version of utilitarianism requires that individuals have the rights of free speech, free thought, and, for the most part, free action. Unless such acts might harm someone else, Mill contends a person should be as free in action as they are in opinion.

So what do these ideas have to do with redistricting? Mill’s version of utilitarianism lends yet another lens through which to analyze redistricting systems. A system that fails to give citizens equality in the strength of their votes would restrict their voices, and therefore would be deemed unacceptable under this philosophical framework. This disallows any gerrymandering, which inherently would reduce the strength of some citizens’ votes.

Bentham's Utilitarianism

One of the books I read this week was Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation. In it, Bentham describes the principle of Utilitarianism. To him, this principle is all about the balance of pleasures and pains.

The idea is that an action should be measured by both the intentions and consequences of it. A good action is one that attempts to increase the pleasures or decrease the pains of a person it affects. The overall value of that action, then, can be measured by summing the outcomes it has for every affected person.

So how does this apply to redistricting? Adhering to Bentham's principles of utility necessitates majority-favoring districts. These districts would have to be drawn with maximum compactness, and with no regard for communities of interest. Bentham's ideas would strongly oppose both racial, and partisan gerrymandering, because both types work to strengthen the political power of certain groups beyond what their population figures would prescribe.