Congress and the people 393minority voters (called majority-minority districts). Figure 11.4 shows the plan the
legislature enacted, in which the district boundaries look like a pattern of spiderwebs
and ink blots. Moreover, one of the districts had parts that ended up being only as wide
as I-85, following the highway off an exit ramp, over a bridge, and down the entrance
ramp on the other side. This move prevented the I-85 district from bisecting the district
it was traveling through, which would have violated the state law requiring contiguous
districts.
The North Carolina example shows how convoluted redistricting plans can
become. Part of the complexity is due to the availability of census databases that
allow line drawers to divide voters as closely as they want, moving neighborhood
by neighborhood, even house by house. Why bother with this level of detail?
Because redistricting influences who gets elected; it is active politicking in its
most fundamental form. The North Carolina plan was ultimately declared
unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court—a ruling that opened the door for
dozens of lawsuits about racial redistricting. (See the discussion in Chapter 5 of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and more recent Supreme Court rulings on racial
redistricting, especially the 2013 case in which the Court struck down the part of the
law that identified states that needed to have their redistricting plans preapproved
by the Justice Department.^23 ) The current legal standard is that race cannot be
the predominant factor in drawing congressional district lines, but it can be one
of the factors. Nonetheless, there is still plenty of room to create districts that
will be composed of voters who will vote in ways that will have profound political
consequences. The obvious political implications of redistricting often lead to
demands that district plans be prepared or approved by nonpartisan committees
or by panels of judges who are theoretically immune from political pressure. Such a
process, as in Iowa, often produces more competitive districts.FIGURE
11.4North Carolina Redistricting, 1992
This set of House districts was the subject of the landmark Supreme Court ruling Shaw v. Reno (1993),
in which the Court said that “appearances matter” when drawing district lines. Do you agree? Should
other factors such as race, party, and competitiveness play a greater role than district shape?Source: North Carolina General Assembly, 1992 Congressional Base Plan No. 10, http://ncga.state.nc.us (accessed
10/26/12).11 10
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