9 Comments: Redistricting

by: elwood

Fri Jan 28, 2011 at 08:25:00 AM EST

This happens once every ten years, unless Tom Delay tries to get cute - and he is currently out of circulation.

Some thoughts on the process below the fold.  

1. Redistricting is a relatively tiny deal in New Hampshire.  It's a much bigger deal in Massachusetts, which will lose one Congressional seat. Our neighbors to the South will have a game of high-stakes musical chairs as they create new district lines with nine seats for ten incumbents.
2. The idea of a gerrymander is: take four districts that are split 50-50 between the two parties, and arrange their boundaries so that one district gets most of Party A's support (we'll write that seat off) while the other three have a majority for Party B. That changes the likely electoral outcome from 2-2 to 3-1.
3. But the same approach is often cheered when the numbers are different. If a particular demographic has 40% of the vote averaged across four districts, they may never elect a representative. Align the district boundaries so that one district has a big chunk of the group, and they may get one of four seats: 25% strength, less than 40% but better than 0%.
   
4. I have a hard time constructing a metric that convinces me: This districting plan using demographic knowledge is Bad, but this one is Good.  I think there probably are some mathematical models that could make a reasonable claim of that, but they will be sufficiently academic that they will not create consensus.
5. In 1962 the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in Baker v. Carr, that Congressional districts had to be reasonably balanced in population. (I believe the big deal was not that proposition, which had always received lip service: the big deal was, the Court decided it could act to enforce redistricting).  That limits the leeway legislatures have in redistricting - and it often results in awkward district boundaries.
6. In addition to keeping district sizes equal, and perhaps giving different demographic groups a fair shot at representation, district boundaries should really be drawn with some awareness of community institutions and social patterns. If folks in Grover's Corners read the Patriot, don't put them in a district that the Patriot will never cover. If three towns send their kids to the same high school, maybe they should share representatives.
   
7. New Hampshire has two Congressional districts and any clever redistricting is a zero sum game for either Party. Move a 10,000 vote chunk with a 65-35 party split to make the Second more conservative, and you make the First less so. That makes internecine fights over redistricting likely.
8. There is a greater potential for "gaming" the redistricting process in the case of state Senate seats. There are 24 of them, and some of the victory margins are fairly small. Moving a town or ward from one Senate district to another can perhaps tip things conclusively.
9. Proposals to have re-districting performed by some special commission may have merit - but that seems a little premature. First we have to build a consensus on just what the goals are: are at-large state House seats (to the extent we can still use them) good or bad? Do we see value in demographic awareness - perhaps ensuring that two lower-middle-class neighborhoods are placed together rather than separately overwhelmed?