Gerrymandering in the United States
This is the second part of a series on redistricting and gerrymandering in the United States, focusing on different ways of measuring and testing the severity of gerrymandering in states.
As defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica, gerrymandering is “the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups (racial gerrymandering).”
This effect is measurable through a number of different methods. One involves looking at a state’s efficiency gap. This test looks at each district to see how many votes are wasted. Wasted votes are votes that do not contribute to a candidate winning the election in that district. For example, let’s say there were 199,999 votes in a district. A candidate would need only 100,000 votes to win. If the Democratic candidate won 110,000 votes, 10,000 votes are wasted, because that candidate only needed 100,000. The 89,999 votes for the Republican candidate are also wasted, resulting in a net waste of 79,999 Republican votes. But that’s only one district, so we’d need to look at others. Let’s say that another district had the exact same number of votes, but the Republican candidate won 110,000. That would result in the same net 79,999 wasted votes for the Democrats this time. When you add the two districts together, the net wasted votes is zero, meaning a partisan gerrymander is unlikely. If, however, those net wasted votes were to add up to show one party’s votes were wasted far more than the others, that would be a sign of gerrymandering. Let’s look at an example of the efficiency gap in Maryland, a state accused of being gerrymandered in favor of Democrats.
Maryland had an efficiency gap of 10.7 points in favor of Democratic candidates, meaning that Republican voters are at a disadvantage in this state. While Democrats do tend to have a 2–1 voter margin in Maryland, they tend to have a 7–1 advantage in seats (2014 being the exception). The current standard I see is that a 7- or 8-point efficiency gap is considered problematic, meaning districts have likely been drawn to favor one party statewide. Thirteen states exceed this threshold, seen below. Notice anything?
Twelve states have maps that favor Republicans, and one favors Democrats. Maryland’s Democractic-leaning map was passed by a government with a Democratic trifecta (meaning Democrats controlled the governorship and both houses of the state legislature). Of the 12 Republican gerrymandered states, eight had Republican trifectas at the time of redistricting, two more had Republican-controlled legislatures, and two more were split. In all of these states, the legislatures are in charge of drawing district boundaries.
Another way to look at gerrymandering is through partisan bias. This measure adjusts the outcome similarly in individual races to simulate a 50–50 statewide election. For example, if statewide votes came out to 53–47 in favor of Republicans, this measure would adjust the Republican vote down, and the Democrat vote up, by roughly 3% in each district to achieve a 50–50 split. By this measure, how do congressional races look after the largely Republican-led redistricting in 2011? This analysis yielded the map below.
The U.S. House elections that took place after the 2011 redistricting have produced the largest partisan gaps measured, going back to 1992. In 2014, a partisan gap of 6.6 points against the Democrats may have resulted in them winning 29 fewer seats than would be expected if the race had been 50–50. Based on this measure, the Democrats would have needed to win over 56% of the nationwide vote just to get 50% of the seats. The argument has been made that some of this effect is natural: that Democrats win fewer seats because they tend to be concentrated in urban clusters (they “pack themselves”). However, computer analysis of district maps would seem to indicate that the Republican advantage is no mere “geographic accident.” Statistically, such a thing is highly unlikely.
North Carolina is widely seen as one of the worst examples of partisan gerrymandering in the nation, and Republicans have been pretty blatant about their intentions. It had its district maps thrown out not once, but twice, on the grounds that the first one illegally suppressed the influence Black people had in elections, and the second was a blatant attempt to suppress Democratic influence, “officially” not based on race. State Representative David Lewis, speaking when the legislature was redrawing the maps, stated: “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law…I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court also ruled against the Republican gerrymandering of the state, and ordered a newer, fairer map be drawn for the 2018 election. You can see the results of that below.
In 2019, the US Supreme Court ruled that, while it could intervene in matters of racial gerrymandering, it did not have the jurisdiction to interject itself in matters of state elections with regard to partisan gerrymandering (it may be worth noting that this was a decision agreed on by only the court’s Republican-nominated justices). However, the court did say that these issues could be resolved by states, either through state courts or citizens’ initiatives. Since the largely Republican redistricting of 2011, five states have decided to bypass their legislatures (four of which have been controlled by Republicans the entire decade) to create either independent commission, or new bipartisan rules for redistricting. Unfortunately, for the rest of the states, their legislatures in 2021 will decide the redistricting, and those legislatures will be chosen based on the maps drawn in 2011. And which political party got to draw those maps?
For more information on Republican gerrymandering, and the man largely credited with the maps that allowed it, this this seven-and-a-half minute video breaks it down pretty well.
