The Law and Philosophy Behind Redistricting

As you may have already seen, this project’s title mentions “fair” redistricting, but I have thus far always put the word “fair” in quotation marks. This is because there is no easy way to determine what type of system is “fair”. In fact, Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in the supreme court case Vieth v. Jubelirer states that: “no judicially discernible and manageable standards for adjudicating political gerrymandering claims have emerged” in the 18 years since a previous case assumed that some standards must exist. In essence, Scalia is saying that there is no legitimate metric to decide what constitutes “fair” redistricting.

Because of this conundrum, the first few weeks of my project will be devoted to studying the background of modern redistricting. I am starting with the Supreme Court’s interpretations of redistricting law, deciding what is legal and what constitutes an illegal gerrymander. I will then delve into philosophy, to decide what political theories can be applied to the concept of redistricting.

What Redistricting Is

The U.S. House of Representatives and all State Legislatures are composed of regionally-elected members. They are elected by voters in specific districts, defined on the basis of population. In this project, I will be investigating the ways in which the redrawing of those districts (redistricting) affects political representation for American voters. The current system is flawed, and there is a need for new redistricting laws to make the system “fair”.

Politicians and political parties take advantage of redistricting through a process commonly known as gerrymandering. The idea behind gerrymandering is pretty simple: Article 1 section 2 of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that U.S. Representatives must be elected from districts with relatively uniform populations, and that each state must have at least one U.S. House Rep. Population figures are determined every ten years when the census takes place, and after each new census, districts are redrawn to account for changes in population between states. The way politicians abuse this is by drawing the districts to contain voters likely to elect certain politicians, or members of a specific political party. These districts allow politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around.

The word “gerrymander” dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry was credited with creating a politically-biased district in a shape resembling a salamander. Amalgamating the name of the Governor, and that of the slimy amphibian, led to the term “gerrymander”. 
 

Clearly, the idea of gerrymandering is not new, but it has evolved. New technology has made it far easier to predict how individuals will vote, and to draw districts based on this information. Over the course of this project, I will investigate several aspects of modern gerrymandering, as well as the changes necessary to make a “fair” system.