Every ten years a census is taken. To take into account population changes, new political districts must be drawn. Presently, state legislatures draw and approve district lines. By and large, the results have been disastrous. Politicians have drawn districts in ways that emphasize marginalizing their opponents over keeping communities together.
It is time for a fundamental change in the way districts are redrawn.
Each state should create an impartial redistricting commission. The commission’s main goal will be to be geographically concise. It will redistrict based on natural community distinctions like towns, villages and boroughs. The Government Accountability Office will oversee the commissions.
If state legislatures have a problem with the way the district map is drawn, they may bring their dispute to a federal district court. The state must demonstrate clear bias and unfairness in the map. If there is egregious bias, the court will order the commission to redraw the districts. This appeal process would require US Congress to extend jurisdiction of federal courts to redistricting arbitration.
Politicians pervert districts in two ways: cracking and packing.
Cracking occurs when voters of a particular ideology are split up among many districts to deny those voters from making up a sufficiently large voting block in any particular district. Politicians can split up voters whose ideologies are inconsistent with their own.
Packing is a strategy wherein politicians concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. As a result, an ideological majority can be packed into one district and split among other districts, substantially weakening a majority of the population.
In either case, the democratic will of the people is manipulated by self-interested politicians. Both minorities and majorities are at risk of having their democratic will manipulated by strategically drawn districts. Elections are won by the person drawing the districts and not by the democratic preferences of the voters. Collectively, this type of redistricting is known as gerrymandering.
In the status quo, gerrymandering is endemic. As described earlier, through packing and cracking, politicians insulate themselves and their party from difficult elections. Since a census is taken every ten years, legislators can affect the trajectory of politics for a full decade before districts are redrawn.
The hold of a political party is deeply entrenched within a state by the next census. This cycle repeats itself. Politicians can postpone a truly democratic allocation of representatives for long periods of time.
Unfairly drawn districts are less competitive because opposing parties cannot muster enough political support to challenge the incumbent. Thus, the incumbent is less accountable to the electorate because there is no viable opposition.
When a district is dominated by people in support of a particular party, the party primary is more important than the general election. To try to appeal to the party base, politicians tend to espouse the most partisan positions. They have no reason to moderate to appeal to voters of different persuasions.
People become political minorities when they are strategically split up into districts. These people feel alienated because they are in an unwinnable district. They tend not to be politically active.
Gerrymandering causes districts to take weird shapes. Many districts cover hundreds of miles and divide natural communities. Communities are split up such that many representatives cannot cover a concise geographic area.
Politicians cover many split up communities rather than a few whole communities. As a result, a specific community’s geographic interests like subsidy requests or zoning concerns are ignored because the politician sees no utility in addressing community specific benefits when not all of the people he is benefitting live in his district.
Leaving redistricting to the politicians is a mistake. They are biased and they corrode the democratic and regional will of the people.
In contrast, the redistricting commission is comprised of people who are hired to be unbiased. They have a directive to draw districts in geographically sensitive ways. If a member of the commission errs or injects bias into the way he is drawing districts, he will be checked by the other members of the commission. If the problem is perpetual, he will be fired.
Since the commission will be overseen by the Government Accountability Office, it will be under heavy scrutiny. Moreover, if the districts are drawn unfairly, the commission will be brought to court and ordered to redraw the districts.
The commission has every incentive to be fair. If they are not, they will get caught; they risk their jobs and the districts will have to be redrawn anyways. Politicians, on the other hand, have every incentive to draw districts unfairly. If they do, they can all but ensure their own reelection.
Moreover, judges are fairer than legislators are. Federal judges are selected to be impartial and they are not up for re-election so they gain nothing from biased districts. Moreover, the judiciary is the single most objective branch of the government. The likelihood of a fair decision from the judiciary is thus far higher than from the legislative.
Great Britain and France redistrict by commission without the safeguards proposed here. Yet they still have more fairly drawn and geographically sensible districts than the US.
Objectively drawn districts will improve the overall state of American politics and policy.
