TIME October 9, 2017
The Brief
a gerrymandered map, it’s harder than
ever for the opposing party to regain
control and flip the map in their favor.
Gerrymandered maps have been
challenged in court in the past. The
maps are usually overturned when
the court finds evidence of racial bias.
(The 1965 Voting Rights Act protects
minority representation.) Evidence of
partisan bias is another story. Courts
have generally given a pass to this kind
of gerrymandering, in part because
there has never been a concrete metric
to prove that a party went too far in
gaining an advantage.HERE’S HOW DEMOCRACY IS SUPPOSED TO WORK:
Citizens go to the polls to choose who will represent
them, and when all the seats are filled, the legislative
body looks roughly proportional to the makeup of
voters. But that’s not what happened in Wisconsin’s
2012 election, when Republicans took more than 60%
of the seats in the state assembly despite getting less
than half the votes. That outcome—and similar results
in five other states that year—occurred largely thanks to
computer-driven partisan gerrymandering.
On Oct. 3, the Supreme Court will hear the case
ofGill v. Whitford, which could decide whether that
redistricting plan was constitutional and by extension
whether the practice of
partisan gerrymandering
should be reined in.
As a political strategy,
gerrymandering is hardly
new; the term dates back
to the 1800s. But critics say
increasing polarization of
Democrats and Republicans
and sophisticated software
have made it much worse in
recent years.
“It is questionable
how much of a democracy
we really are if we have
manipulated the lines so
that people can change their
votes but they can’t change
who gets elected,” says Ruth
Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal
Center, which is representing the people fighting the
Wisconsin map. The state argues that the map sticks to
traditional districting principles and reflects the natural
tendency of political groups to cluster together.
Some states have tried to address partisan gerry-
mandering by assigning the redrawing process to
nonpartisan commissions. More typically, though,
in states like Wisconsin, the task falls to the sitting
politicians. And that means the majority party controls
the process that will be used to fill its own seats.
Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of using
partisan gerrymandering to their advantage. But about 20
years ago, the GOP gained a national edge, and Democrats
have struggled to redraw the lines in their favor ever since.
The digital age is partly to blame; district lines are drawn
with the use of increasingly sophisticated data-analysis
and mapping technologies. These days, once a party makes
North
Carolina’s 12th
Congressional
District was
drawn in 2011
but ruled
unconstitutional
in 2016 on the
basis of racial
gerrymanderingComputers made
gerrymandering
worse. Can they fix it?
By Emily Barone
How to
manipulate
votes
There are many
ways to slice up
a state, although
some are more
fair than others.
In gerrymandering,
one party takes
a share of seats
significantly greater
than its share of
votes. Here’s how
one group of voters
can be divided three
ways to get three
different results.The case in
Wisconsin
Republicans redrew
districts with the
intent to land
future victories.
Take, for example,
the eight districts
in the Milwaukee
region. Democrats
would have likely
won four of those
districts in 2012
but instead took
just two.MOST-FAIR DISTRICT BOUNDARIES
Red (majority) voters and blue (minority)
voters are proportionally represented.OLD BOUNDARIES
Had the map not been redrawn, this is
how the 2012 election would have likely
played out in the Milwaukee area.12345