Elisabeth Vallet’s Time.news: the impact of “gerrymandering” on the American electoral process

by time news

The face of the United States has changed rapidly, as the last census shows. In ten years, the population has grown by 10.1% and has become more urban: growing particularly in the South and West, 86% of the American population now lives in large cities. Although it represents 204.3 million individuals (out of 258.3 million), the white population is in decline (-8.3% over 10 years) and American society sees itself as more diverse – the census is based on the self-identification, and people who identify as having multiple origins are more numerous (+ 276%). Finally, the population is also a little less young – we can observe a decline of the under-18s of 1.4% in ten years.

While the census is instrumental in the distribution of a number of federal programs (such as Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, housing, school equalization, children’s health insurance), it is electoral crucial: not only will there be more people per electoral district (711,000 people per district before the census, about 761,000 after), but their geographic distribution is also changing.

This will affect the next presidential election as the grand voters are distributed by state demographics: in 2024, Texas will gain two major voters, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and Oregon one, while the California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia will lose one. If Democrats leave with an advantage for the popular vote nationwide, it is indeed the electoral college that keeps the GOP (Grand Old Party) in the competition (for the past three decades, the Republican candidate , three times victorious, won the popular vote only once).

Looking ahead to the upcoming House of Representatives elections in 2022, the impact is even more palpable. Each state is responsible for composing its electoral map and the contours of the 435 districts to reflect demographic changes, while respecting the law. However, the manipulation of electoral geography is inherent in the history of the country. Moreover, in 1812, the designer Elkana Tisdale published in the Boston Gazette a caricature of a convoluted (salamander-shaped) constituency designed by Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts, to favor his party. From this practice was born the term ” gerrymandering », Describing this partisan electoral redistribution that has become commonplace …

However, it was to limit its impact, in particular on minority voting, that the Voting Rights Act was adopted, which serves as a basis for judicial control of elections. In recent times, however, the Supreme Court has sent the opposite signal. In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, it rules that even if the practice of gerrymandering alters the democratic foundations, it constitutes a political question beyond its competence. Rebelote in July 2021, when she invalidates in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee the judgment of the Court of 9e circuit sanctioning violation of the Voting Rights Act by the State of Arizona. In her dissenting opinion, Judge Elena Kagan protested: by knowingly gutting the Voting Rights Act in defiance of the intention of Congress which had presided over its adoption, the court went too far, she explains. And she is not wrong.

In 20 states, the majority Republican legislatures will be able to redraw the electoral geography of 187 seats (the Democrats too, but in 8 states and for 75 seats). However, explain the authors of Gerrymandering the States : Partisanship, Race, and the Transformation of American Federalism, published in July by Cambridge University Press, if the process is common, the gerrymandering is “further where the Republican Party controls the process.” As in Texas, where the draft map of Districts 3, 4 and 6, for example, seems to be the work of a lacemaker, knowingly diluting the votes of Hispanic or Asian minorities.

To the point where the “Plan Score” project is set up by the Campaign Legal Center to measure the bias of electoral geography. Professors Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee have defined an indicator (efficiency gap) to measure this electoral hoax which aims to “waste” the votes for the opposing party, either by packing constituencies with unnecessary votes because the election is acquired, or by diluting votes which could have been useful elsewhere. In 2002, in the review Election Law, professors Scot Schraufnagel, Michael J. Pomante II and Quan Li establish an index which allows to evaluate the voting burden (cost of voting) and confirm that more than half of American states have made it difficult to access the vote between 2020 and 2022, with supporting measures.

Behind this hardening, there is, again and again, this presumption that electoral fraud is endemic. However, all serious investigations, all official commissions, all scientific reports abound in the same direction: there can be errors, a bad apple, but no massive electoral fraud. In a context where the former president announces the launch of his own social media (Vérité – TRUTH Social), where the polarization leads a considerable fringe of the population to doubt the probity of the voting system, the electoral redistribution could constitute a key of the next election.

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