254 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 protected the
African American right to vote after a century of
disfranchisement through poll taxes, literacy clauses,
and intimidation. In response, many Southern states
redrew political districts in order to limit the power
of black voters, updating the longstanding practice
of gerrymandering. In 1973, for example, the Hind
County Board of Supervisors in Mississippi “cracked”
the black population of Jackson into five separate
districts to dilute the power of that constituency.
When the VRA came up for renewal in 1982, Congress
responded by reaffirming the right of minorities
“to elect the representatives of their choice.” These
words profoundly—if unintentionally—altered
American electoral politics.
To fulfill the mandate of the VRA, Democrats
began to craft districts where minorities constituted
a majority. Yet these “majority-minority” districts also
required gerrymandering. In 1992 the North Carolina
state legislature created a new district shown at
right from Charlotte through Winston-Salem and
Greensboro to Durham. The geography of district
12 was connected in some places by little beyond
Interstate 85, yet it worked: for the first time in the
twentieth century, North Carolina elected an African
American to the House of Representatives.
Even though this new district elected a Democrat,
fellow Democrats argued that by forcing the state
legislature to draw boundaries based upon race, the
federal government had violated the Equal Protection
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme
Court tentatively agreed, finding that majority-
minority districts may violate the Constitution.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote
that the bizarrely shaped district 12 echoed the ugly
racial gerrymanders of the Jim Crow era, and came
close to political apartheid by segregating African
Americans. But the court also acknowledged that
race must necessarily be taken into consideration
to advance minority representation.
This dilemma is striking. “Concentrating”
racial minorities advanced their representation,
but also weakened their party elsewhere. Because
African Americans tended to vote Democrat, the
effort to create secure majority-minority districts
unintentionally made the surrounding districts
more Republican. In part the problem lies with
representative democracy, which hinges on
geography: what constitutes a coherent constituency,
and how are lines to be fairly drawn?
GERRYMANDERING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Maps of North Carolina’s 12th
congressional district, 1992–2016
As the map on page 116 shows, gerrymandering
is endemic to American politics. But technology—
coupled with an increasingly partisan culture—has
sent it into overdrive. Census returns provide
demographic information, while redistricting
software adds highly refined political data. Expert
mapmakers integrate all of these variables, then
test the likely outcomes of various redistricting
scenarios. As the maps here show, small
geographical changes produce important results.
In 2010 Republicans won both houses of the
North Carolina legislature, which gave them
exclusive control over redistricting based on the
new census returns. They redrew boundaries to
“pack” Democratic votes into no more than three
districts, one of which was district 12. In doing
this, the party claimed to be fulfilling the spirit
of the VRA by moving African Americans into
the district. But they also diluted the strength of
blacks, who mostly vote Democrat, in neighboring
districts. With sophisticated precinct data, they
also shaved off Republican voters, strengthening
that party elsewhere. The map designed for the
113th Congress at lower left may not appear
much different from its predecessor, but small
tweaks had enormous consequences: Republicans
received less than 49 percent of the statewide vote
in 2012, yet won nine of the thirteen seats in the
House of Representatives. This trend extended
across the South: in 1991 Democrats held 81 out of
133 Southern seats in the House, but by 2013 that
number had fallen to 18 out of 145.
Gerrymandering makes all races less
competitive. Candidates facing homogeneous
constituencies have little incentive to moderate
their positions, which exacerbates polarization.
Extreme gerrymandering has also created a
situation where politicians increasingly choose their
voters rather than the reverse. Recently, however,
the courts have begun to use the same digital tools
and maps that facilitate gerrymandering to assess
its constitutionality. In 2017 the Supreme Court
struck down North Carolina’s map at lower right for
excessively packing African Americans into district- Then in 2018 a panel of federal judges ruled
that “partisan advantage” had improperly been
used as the primary criterion in modifying that
same district.
Incumbents also use gerrymandering to protect
the “safety” of their seats. The advent of ever more
precise marketing and online data promises to
complicate gerrymandering even further. And, at
the center of the problem—but perhaps also its
solution—is the map.