January 8, 2004
Poliblog (via Brett Marston) has an analysis of the Texas redistricting (he thinks it's legal) and comes to this conclusion:
I am increasingly of the opinion that an entirely different system of districting needs to be developed that would do away with conscious partisan districtcraft, and would lead to more competitive elections.The problem is, there's no way to do this without restricting people's freedom to move and reproduce - at least, not if you want each rep to represent roughly the same number of people. As long as a person is making the decision, there's going to be a political element to the decision - and our system now leaves that process in the open. The framers knew this would be a political process, which is why they created specific rules to govern the process - state legislatures are responsible, it only takes place every 10 years (after the constitutionally mandated census), etc.
The specific problem in Texas seems to have resulted from a situation that arguably isn't governed by those rules - which is precisely why it's turned into such a partisan mess. I'm not sure how to deal with that problem - for more specific guidelines to have weight, would they have to be written into the Consistution?
Here are the oral arguments (a PDF, via DJWInfo) from a US Supreme Court case last month, well worth a quick look. The jurists ask fascinating questions about the nature of voting institutions, etc.
All I know is that payback's a bitch. And when the Dems do retaliate in the future they'll be loudly denounced as partisan hacks by the same peopel supporting this redistricting.
The fundamental problem is that we're using single-member districts to elect Members of Congress. (That's due to a 1967 federal statute, not the Constitution). When only one person gets elected from a district of 650,000 people, hundreds of thousands of people in each district are going to be stuck with a Member of Congress they voted against. That's why gerrymandering is so powerful, because the political minority is left with no representation. The ultimate solution is to use multi-member districts and a proportional voting method (like the Irish use), to minimize the influence of the map on the results of the election. www.fairvote.org has more on this.
Interesting, Dan. What do you think about the fact that congress has capped its own size - that even though populations are rising, no new reps are being added in the house? Smaller districts would still have single member representation, but individuals could still have more sway with their rep.
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