Tag Archives: gerrymandering

The Battle For Redistricting In Texas

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On Monday, MSN reported that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the Texas redistricting maps.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) sided with Texas, upholding its redistricting Monday.

The five-to-three decision ruled in favor of reversing the District Court’s judgment, according to the orders of the court issued through its controversial shadow docket.

The now-reversed District Court’s judgment sided with the plaintiff, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), that Texas’ 2025 congressional map, enacted mid-decade in August 2025, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The case was appealed to SCOTUS, which made its decision “for the reasons” described in SCOTUS’ response to a December application for a stay.

The court’s preliminary evaluation then determined that Texas satisfied the traditional criteria for interim relief, citing two serious errors of the District Court, and because the “trial court base[d] its findings upon a mistaken impression of applicable legal principles.”

On Monday, Fox News reported:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, had asked the Supreme Court last year to pause a three-judge panel’s ruling in the Western District of Texas that found 2-1 that race was too much of a factor in its redraw.

The Department of Justice also chimed in, telling the high court to intervene and reverse the decision, saying Texas’ choice to change its map was driven by purely “partisan objectives,” not racial objectives, which could violate the Voting Rights Act.

The voting rights groups who challenged Texas and Abbott claimed that the map was an illegal racial gerrymander, but the high court found in December 6-3 that the groups could not offer an alternative map that served Texas’ political needs.

I would like to mention that the New England states–Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine have Congressional Districts set up so that there are no Republican Representatives from those states. The Republicans in those states have no representation in Congress. The Democrats have no room to talk about gerrymandering (a tactic that began in Massachusetts).

It’s Hard To Find Honest Reporting On This

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North Carolina will now have new U.S. House of Representative districts. Most of the news articles I found about the changes made to the map focus on the idea that the Republicans redid the map to add a Republican seat. That may or may not be true, but let’s look at the before and after maps and see how they add up.

This is the new map:

This is the old map:

Which map looks gerrymandered?

District 1 is currently represented by a Democrat. The change in the map will make District 1 a more competitive district. However, there are no guarantees.

What’s In A Name?

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The word of the day is “gerrymandering.” It is a technique long used by the Democrat party to ensure that Republicans don’t get elected to Congress. Lately, the Republicans have figured out that they can play that game too.

On Thursday, the Tilting At Windmills website on Substack reported:

The term “gerrymandering” has become a big part of the recent news cycle. Mostly, it’s been a yawn for me. Both sides do some degree of gerrymandering, but it’s only a problem when the other side does it.

Texas, however, was engaging in a little bit of it that would oust Rep. Jasmine Crockett and help Republicans snag a few more seats in the midterms, where the president’s party typically loses a bit of ground.

And people lost their minds over it, acting like this has never happened anywhere else, and that it’s somehow the most horrible thing in the world despite the pile of examples of Democrats doing it.

Politico, however, went a slightly different direction in their headline for a story about the situation that reads, “Democrats try to separate their tactical use of redistricting from that of Republicans.”

That’s right, it’s not gerrymandering that Democrats do. It’s “tactical use of redistricting.”

And understand, the word “tactical” isn’t anywhere else in the piece, so that’s Politico’s choice of words there, not a quote from someone like JB Pritzker or some other Democrat trying to deflect.

No, that’s their covering fire.

On August 6th, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted a chart showing the impact of gerrymandering:

The chart shows why gerrymandering is important and how it impacts Congress. Let’s end tactical use of redistricting!

Stacking The Deck Through Redistricting

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On Wednesday, American Greatness posted an article about the gerrymandering of Congressional districts. Redistricting has been used by both parties for a very long time. At one point our Massachusetts congressional district was in the shape of a sea horse in order to dilute one Republican area.

The article reports:

Few events in politics are more consequential while being less understood than redistricting. The consequences are obvious. If your party controls a state legislature, then once every ten years, when it comes time to redraw district boundaries for state legislative seats and seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, you can redraw them to your advantage.

The methods are less obvious, but intuitive enough. Create geographical boundaries that concentrate registered members of the opposition party into a single district, thereby shifting the majority in your favor in surrounding districts. Or, equally effective, disburse registered members of the opposition party into carefully apportioned districts where they will not have a majority anywhere, completely nullifying their voting power.

The intelligibility of the process ends there. How redistricting commissions parse voter geolocations—deemed favorable or unfavorable based on precinct-level registration—is a complex science. And since the people drawing these new boundaries are almost invariably partisan hardliners, a lot of time and money is invested in calculating maps that precisely optimize the ruling party’s prospects of preserving and enhancing their advantages in the next election.

The article includes a map of the Congressional Districts of Los Angeles, California:

The logic in drawing the above districts is less than obvious.

The article notes:

In reviewing this map, it doesn’t take a cartographer to quickly recognize how the boundaries are twisted in ways that bear no resemblance to city limits or natural geographic features. These boundaries are contorted to the point of absurdity for one reason: to ensure California Democrats control 83 percent of the state’s congressional delegation, to ensure that California’s Republicans are denied 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that they might otherwise have earned based on voter behavior in California’s statewide elections.

The article suggests a solution:

There are solutions to the practice of partisan redistricting that plagues every state, California most of all. It is to rely on algorithms that can assign district boundaries without taking into account voter demographics or party affiliation. It would automatically generate district borders, sorting at the precinct level, according to the following conditions:

(1) Maintain equal populations;

(2) select for district centers based on areas with the highest population density;

(3) solve for convex edges; and

(4) minimize the cumulative length of the polygons formed by the districts.

It would be naive to believe that this would totally solve the problem, but it might make Congress more representative of the people they are supposed to serve.

When The Courts Play Politics

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We need to remember that the U.S. Constitution gives the responsibility of setting the manner of holding congressional elections to the state legislators. That responsibility includes redistricting based on the census. In North Carolina the courts decided that the map of the districts provided by the Republican-led legislature were not acceptable. Then the court appointed three “special masters” to inspect the map and make corrections. That in itself is questionable, but they did it. The redrawn maps do not reflect the political demographic of the state–they represent a serious effort to gerrymander the districts in favor of the Democrats.

The Carolina Journal reported the following on Friday:

Gerrymanders are not always apparent when looking at a map, but the special masters’ gerrymander is clearest when looking at two parts of the state. The first and most obvious is that they cleaved Charlotte in half, grafting one-half of the city to suburbs in Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties and the other half to Gaston County. That move violated two basic redistricting principles by not creating a congressional district that is wholly contained in Mecklenburg County and by dividing clear communities of interest.

The special masters could have easily preserved communities of interest by drawing central Charlotte in one districting and linking suburban communities of Cabarrus, Mecklenburg, and Gaston Counties. In doing so, they would have created one safe Democratic district and one relatively competitive Democratic-leaning district. Instead, they made two safe Democratic districts by unnecessarily grafting urban and suburban areas in both districts.

State Senator Jeff Jackson (D-Mecklenburg) has already expressed interest in running in the new safely Democratic 14th District. Bob Orr, the so-called “unaffiliated” special master appointed by the trial court in the redistricting case, is a fan of Jackson’s. According to Federal Election Commission records, he donated to Jackson’s campaign committee in 2021. In recent years, the “unaffiliated” special master has also donated to other Democratic candidates such as Joe Biden and Dan McCready.

The special masters also gerrymandered the Wake County districts. They split southeastern Raleigh from the rest of the city to put it in the 13th District. Splitting was unnecessary; the special masters could have easily kept Raleigh whole by adding rural and suburban eastern Wake County to the 13th.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. Unfortunately, this is what happens when a partisan court oversteps its bounds. When we lived in Massachusetts, our voting district was shaped like a sea horse in order to dilute the Republican votes of a conservative area. Gerrymandering, unfortunately, is a way of life in America. However, it should not be done by supposedly neutral courts.

Gerrymandering In America

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Gerrymandering is an American tradition (I didn’t say it was a good tradition–I just said it was a tradition).

According to Wikipedia (which I don’t generally recommend as a source):

The term gerrymandering is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry,[a][6] Vice President of the United States at the time of his death, who, as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander (/ˈdʒɛriˌmændər, ˈɡɛri-/). The word is also a verb for the process.

Our voting district in Massachusetts looked like a shadow drawing of a sea horse. It was drawn like that to minimize the Republican votes in the area of Massachusetts that bordered northeast Rhode Island. Districts are drawn by state legislators and are usually drawn to give the advantage to whichever party is in power. There are less noble reasons for drawing districts, but the fact remains that the state legislators have the responsibility to draw those districts. Recently a case involving districts drawn by the Alabama legislature was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Monday, The Epoch Times reported:

The Supreme Court on Monday halted an order requiring Alabama to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2022 elections.

A lower court had determined in late January that the new Alabama congressional electoral map disadvantages black voters and likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The lower court’s three-judge panel said the state should have two majority-black districts, instead of one. The congressional map, approved by Alabama’s Legislature last year, has one majority-black district.

Alabama’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives consists of six Republicans and one Democrat.

Alabama was given until Feb. 11 to create a new map, but it appealed the district court’s decision instead.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling (pdf) grants a stay of the lower court’s order to have the districts redrawn.

“The stay order is not a ruling on the merits, but instead simply stays the District Court’s injunction pending a ruling on the merits,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, wrote.

The legislature has the right to draw voting districts. The courts do not have the right to undo those districts and require new maps. The districts may not be drawn fairly in Alabama, but it is up to the voters in Alabama to vote for people in the legislature that will create districts that better reflect the population. There are other states where the courts are trying to control the redistricting process. This is an example of the courts attempting to usurp the job of the legislature. The courts do not have that right.