Dear Editor,

April 1st is traditionally when the US Census Bureau sends redistricting counts to the States. The data is then used by each state to redraw the legislative districts they will use for the next 10 years. It also determines the number of votes each state is allocated within the Electoral College. As a result, migration in Colorado, for example, is expected to pick up one new House district, and thus one more vote in the Electoral College. For this reason, no government process is more fraught with corruption, hypocrisy and Machiavellian intrigue. Why do these details matter? Short of abolishing social media, structural reform of the redistricting process would be the most powerful way to reduce the extremism and polarization that infect our political culture today.

The most blatant forms of redistricting manipulation are known by the colloquial term ‘gerrymandering’. Gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating the boundaries of legislative districts to establish an unfair advantage for a particular party. Two tactics are most common: “cracking” (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts) and “packing” (concentrating the opposing party’s voting power into one district to reduce their voting power in others). Less common are “hijacking” (combining districts to force two incumbents to run against one another - ensuring that one will be eliminated) and “kidnapping” (moving an incumbent’s home address into a newly created district). All these practices disenfranchise voters by replacing the natural geographic and community affiliations that exist in our society with maps tortured to produce specific imbalances.

The term gerrymandering is a portmanteau of the name “Gerry” and “salamander”. Urban myths have suggested the etymology was meant to evoke an amphibian with slippery and sometimes poisonous qualities. However, the Boston Gazette first coined the term in 1812 after politician Elbridge Gerry, then Governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a partisan district that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. Cynical party operatives ever since have expressed admiration for gerrymandering because it ‘allows politicians to pick their voters, instead of the voters choosing politicians.’ 

Sometimes the gamesmanship starts even before the data is published. Like everything in that baleful year, the 2020 Census was notable for how politicized the counting process became. Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, the famously narcoleptic Wilbur Ross, proposed that the Census questionnaire should include a question requiring respondents to declare their citizenship status. This was seen as a thinly veiled attempt to discourage non-citizens from responding, presumably leading to significant undercounts of Hispanics and other immigrants and thus tilting the redistricting data to favor the GOP. Challenged in court by the ACLU and several states, the proposal was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision. 

In this polarized era, partisans on both the right and left have advocated for such structural changes seeking a durable electoral advantage. With the White House and both houses of Congress in hand, for example, Democratic pundits have been pushing proposals to grant statehood to the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, divide California into two separate states, or to simply eliminate the Electoral College. Like Wilbur Ross’ citizens-only Census these ideas are crass attempts to permanently eliminate electoral competition and are just as thinly veiled.

Why are such extreme ‘final solutions’ in vogue today? One reason is that decades of increasingly blatant gerrymandering have disadvantaged and disenfranchised the centrist voters in both parties. Consider the side effects of widespread ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’ tactics when applied across dozens of states over a period of decades. The most profound result is a dramatic increase in the number of legislative districts that are ‘safe’ for one party or the other. In such districts, the primary election effectively becomes the only choice voters get to express - the general election is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, this fuels extremism, as incumbents can only be unseated by more radical primary challenges from the right or left. Multiply this effect by hundreds of races over time, amplify it with the radicalism algorithms unleashed by social media, and you have the ingredients for unrelenting polarization. 

As a result of this toxic formulation, policy issues today are increasingly only national in nature; geography, so core in the Founders’ conception of a bicameral Congress, has been all but eliminated from the equation. Neither party is immune to the gerrymandering disease. New York state passed a law in 2014 supported by 57% of voters. It placed a bipartisan commission at the heart of the redistricting process (like 14 other states). New boundaries were required to be informed by legacy jurisdictions, and to recognize local communities of interest, including those representing ethnic and racial groups. Now that the process is beginning in earnest, the legislature in Albany passed a new law that proposes to eliminate all input from the opposition party. Governor Andrew Cuomo has also done an end-run on the 2014 law by refusing to allocate any funding for the bipartisan districting commission. 

All those who favor two-party democracy over ‘final solutions’ aimed at creating a de facto one-party system need to take heed. The redistricting war is fast upon us, and those who believe compromise is critical to a healthy political culture need to unite in opposition to cynical gerrymandering. There are rational ways to create balanced legislative districts that properly reflect the full diversity of political views among the electorate. We won’t get them unless we demand them.

Derek Ridgley
Nederland