D4D Gerrymandering Project — Update
Earlier this month we got an update from Julius Simonelli, a project lead on this ongoing gerrymandering project. Over the summer, a team from Data for Democracy working with Professor Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium at Princeton University, prepared an amicus brief for the gerrymandering case that was recently before the Supreme Court, Gill v. Whitford.
“Professor Wang wrote three statistical tests to measure partisan gerrymandering that he wanted to implement in Python. He also wanted to make his gerrymandering website more user-friendly. D4D had teams working on both of these aspects.”
A Little Background
Gerrymandering is a big political word that most often gets tossed about during an election year. For those that aren’t aware, gerrymandering refers to the process of diving and redrawing up congressional districts to give your political party an advantage.
Many people are not fully aware that US congressional districts, which are the districts that elect your representative in the house, are not divided up in any regular fashion. You can see for yourself, and find your own district, on this congressional map.
They can be redrawn by packing or cracking, which is political speak for stuffing a group of voters all into one district, or breaking up a group of voters by splitting them arbitrarily into several districts. Either way, it presents and opportunity to skew who gets elected to represent you in congress.The only exception is for states that have only 1 representative in the house, in which case all the voters in the state are effectively in one district.
So, gerrymandering can be bring about big problems, like is this really constitutional?
Project Update by Julius Simonelli:
“For some background, an amicus brief is a submission to a court by someone who isn’t a litigant to the case but still wants to provide an argument to the courts. The Gill v. Whitford case was brought in response to the Wisconsin State Assembly district plan that was drawn up after the 2010 census. The Republican party was in control of the state government after the 2010 election and therefore drew up the district maps (in some states a nonpartisan commission draws the maps, in others, it’s the party in power). The first election after the maps were drawn was in 2012. While the Democrats won the majority of the votes, the Republicans won 60 out of 99 seats in the Assembly. The results for 2014 and 2016 were similarly disproportionate. In 2015, the 2010 Wisconsin redistricting plan was challenged as unconstitutional.
What does the amicus brief focus on?
The amicus brief was submitted on 30 August 2017. It attempts to convince the judges (read: Justice Kennedy) of two points:
1. The issue of political gerrymandering is judiciable, i.e. partisan gerrymandering is a violation of the Constitution and the courts have the right and responsibility to intervene.
2. A judicially manageable standard for determining gerrymandering does existMost of the brief concerns the first issue, arguing that it would be appropriate for SCOTUS to make a ruling in the case of partisan gerrymandering (i.e., that it is judiciable). There is a fair amount of precedence for courts deciding that congressional districts are unconstitutional.
Racial gerrymandering is illegal under the Voting Rights Act, but partisan gerrymandering is currently not. It is illegal to pack all minorities into a single district (Covington v. North Carolina, 2017), but you can with a political party. The brief argues that creating a system to intentionally disenfranchise a group of people based on their political affiliation violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment as well as the 1st Amendment’s prohibition on discriminating based on viewpoint.
The second point the paper tries to make is that there is a judicially manageable standard with a concept known as “partisan symmetry”. Partisan symmetry means that if one party wins, say, 55% of the vote and wins 60% of the seats, that if the other party won 55% of the vote under a likely voting scenario, they would also win, approximately, 60% of the seats.
Note that this is different than proportional representation where a party that wins say, 40% of the votes is guaranteed 40% of the seats. Proportional representation is not guaranteed by the Constitution and is not what was being proposed (even though Chief Justice Roberts called it that and the attorney for the plaintiff had to correct him).
The point of the briefing isn’t to say that we found THE statistical test to determine excessive partisan gerrymandering, but to say that there are many tests that would work and here are a few examples. In many cases, the Supreme Court provides the guiding principles and the lower courts determine for themselves what metrics are best.”
What Happens Next?
The oral argument was held on October 3, 2017. There is likely to be a 5–4 decision, and most expect that Justice Kennedy will determine the outcome. The decision is expected around June of 2018.
Join us on the Data for Democracy slack to participate in this project!
References:
Full text of the amicus brief
Professor Wang’s article on the three techniques
Professor Wang’s website on gerrymandering
