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Tag: gerrymandering
Ohio's Supreme Court Blows Up GOP Gerrymandering Tricks

Ohio's Supreme Court Blows Up GOP Gerrymandering Tricks

Ohio's Supreme Court struck down the state's new congressional map as an illegal partisan gerrymander designed to excessively favor Republicans on Friday and ordered legislators to draw new districts in compliance with the state constitution. The decision came just two days after the court invalidated the GOP's new legislative maps on similar grounds.

The majority, which saw Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a moderate Republican, join the court's three Democrats, used harsh language to castigate Republicans in its ruling. The foursome concluded that the congressional map Republicans adopted in a pair of party-line votes in November featured "undue political bias" that made it even worse than the already gerrymandered map it was replacing, "whether viewed through the lens of expert statistical analysis or by application of simple common sense."

At issue was a 2018 amendment approved by voters requiring lawmakers to pass a new congressional map in a bipartisan fashion, or, failing that, forbidding them from enacting a map that "unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents." Because Democrats stuck together and voted uniformly against the GOP’s maps—a fact the court took note of—Republicans were obligated to adhere to the provision regarding partisan favoritism.

The court ruled that they had not, saying, "When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins." Citing a variety of statistical measures, the majority slammed the map on account of the fact that Republicans were poised to "reliably win" 75 to 80 percent of seats despite "generally muster[ing] no more than 55 percent of the statewide popular vote." Wrote Justice Michael Donnelly, "By any rational measure, that skewed result just does not add up."

As a consequence, the court determined the entire map was invalid. It also ruled that Republicans had violated another provision directing that lawmakers "not unduly split governmental units" by chopping up three of Ohio's four largest counties for no reason other than to gain partisan advantage.

One egregious example was in Hamilton County, a blue county in the state's southwestern corner that's home to Cincinnati and voted for Joe Biden by a 57-41 margin in 2020. Hamilton on its own is close in population to the ideal district size, but instead of keeping it as close to whole as possible, Republicans divided it three ways, dumping the Cincinnati suburbs into two adjacent, safely red districts. The city itself, meanwhile, was linked to deeply rural Warren County via an isthmus just one mile wide—a detail the court highlighted with a map.

Lawmakers now have 30 days in which to pass a new map that, as the court stressed, "comports with the directives of this opinion"—with emphasis in the original. If they fail to do so, then the state's redistricting commission, on which Republicans have a 5-2 majority, would have another 30 days to complete the task. While the court did not explicitly say it would review any plans to ensure they're compliant (as it did in its ruling on the legislative maps), there's little doubt the majority will carefully scrutinize the final product—and potentially produce their own, should they find it lacking.

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Republican gerrymandering

Trial Reveals GOP 'Lies' And 'Secret Maps' In North Carolina Redistricting Process

In North Carolina, a civil trial has found Republicans and Democrats at odds over 2021’s redistricting process for congressional districts in the state. Democrats, in a lawsuit, have accused North Carolina Republicans of partisan gerrymandering, while Republicans are insisting that their new congressional maps are quite fair. And this week, the Raleigh News & Observer’s Will Doran reported that State Rep. Destin C. Hall — a Republican who oversaw GOP redistricting in North Carolina in 2021— testified that he had used secret maps in the process.

Doran reports, “A political trial that has mostly been dominated by math and academic research erupted in drama late Wednesday, when a top Republican redistricting leader said on the witness stand that he had used secret maps, drawn by someone else, to guide his work. That statement, made under oath, appears to directly contradict what he told Democratic lawmakers at the legislature in November, shortly before the Republican-led legislature passed those maps into law over Democrats’ objections.”

The 34-year-old Hall, who was first elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives in 2016 and is now serving his third term, described the maps as “non-consequential.”

“In the 2021 redistricting process,” Doran reports, “GOP lawmakers drew new maps of the political districts for North Carolina’s state legislature and U.S. House of Representatives seats, which will be used in every election from 2022 through 2030 — unless they are overturned in court, which is what this week’s trial has been about.”

Doran adds, “Republicans have defended their work as the most transparent redistricting process in history, and devoid of any political data that could have helped them tweak the maps to make them as favorable as possible to GOP candidates in the future. But on Wednesday, Hall — a Lenoir Republican who leads the House redistricting committee — said that he would sometimes refer to ‘concept maps’ that his top aide, Dylan Reel, had brought to him…. The liberal challengers in the lawsuit asked if they could see those concept maps — to analyze them, potentially for signs that they used a process that violated the rules the legislature was supposed to be following. But the legislature says those maps no longer exist.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, according to Doran, “accused North Carolina Republicans” of “withholding evidence,” implying that they knew the “concept maps” would be destroyed and should have saved them.

According to Doran, “Democratic Rep. Zack Hawkins, a member of the House redistricting committee, testified after Hall did on Wednesday and said he feels lied to. Hawkins also said he thought Hall, as the leader of the committee, could and should have done more at the time to ensure that outside materials with political data didn’t make their way into the process.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Capitol building

Once Again, Gerrymandering Threatens To Throttle Democracy

It's a redistricting year in the blue state of Illinois, which means that Republicans are getting less consideration than a missionary on the Las Vegas Strip. Democrats have been winning in the Land of Lincoln for a long while, controlling the state House for all but two of the past 38 years. But they see no harm in running up the score.

Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker campaigned on a vow to take reapportionment away from politicians and turn it over to an independent commission. But that didn't happen, and when the General Assembly sent him district maps that exemplified partisan gerrymandering, he signed them into law.

"Make no mistake, these maps were drawn solely for the Democrats to maintain their political power in the state of Illinois," House Minority Leader Jim Durkin said. Democrats outnumber Republicans 73-45 in the state House, and those numbers are likely to grow more lopsided.

Similar things are going on in New York, where Democrats have plotted new district lines with the goal of cutting the GOP's eight members of Congress to four or even three of the 26 seats the state will have. That's less than 16 percent of the seats in a state where 38 percent of voters went for Donald Trump. New York's Republican Party chair Nick Langworthy said the redistricting "is a political sham built on a foundation of lies and hypocrisy."

Shams are the norm in this process, where lawmakers celebrate the glories of democracy while scheming to make elections an empty formality. Democrats in blue states are more than willing to ignore their good-government allies to cement their control in state legislatures — and to keep Nancy Pelosi in the speaker's chair.

After losing out on Maryland's last congressional map, Republicans took the fight to the Supreme Court, arguing that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. (The court disagreed.) So you might think that Republicans would be determined to put an end to partisan reapportionment. But hypocrisy is a two-way street.

Today, the GOP has control of the governor's office and the legislature in 23 states, compared to 15 such "trifectas" for Democrats. Such dominance is never more valuable than in a redistricting year, giving those in power the chance to supersize their advantage for a full decade.

Political scientists Alex Keena, Michael Latner, Anthony McGann and Charles Anthony Smith wrote in The Washington Post, "We found that, after 2011, 45 state legislative maps had been drawn with extreme partisan gerrymandering. Of these, 43 favor Republicans, while only two help Democrats. Because of these gerrymandered maps, Republicans held onto power after losing the statewide popular vote in Virginia in 2017, and in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2018."

That explains why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has no interest in a Democratic bill that would make it impossible to tilt the playing field. The For the People Act would require states to hand over redistricting to independent commissions. With that reform, incumbents would no longer get to tailor their constituencies to achieve permanent tenure.

It would not prevent either party from winning most legislative or congressional seats in a particular state. Such bodies already draw maps in several states, including Arizona, where the GOP has held a majority in both houses of the legislature since 2003, and California, where Democrats have done the same since 1997.

In most places, the issue is not which party will dominate. It's just by how much.

Besides, no one objects when a party getting a majority of the votes wins a majority of seats. Objections are in order, though, when the party getting a minority of the votes wins a majority of seats. Last year, Democratic candidates for Congress got 43 percent of the votes cast in South Carolina — but only one of the seven House seats, or 14 percent.

A federal solution is needed because at the state level, no party in power wants to cede control of redistricting. Democrats say they can't afford to unilaterally disarm in the battle for power, and Republicans show no interest in mutual renunciation of gerrymandering.

But in the long run, a fairer system would be a good thing for both parties. It would give each more opportunities to compete and more incentive to stay in tune with the preferences of those they represent.

It would be best of all for the voters, many of whom have been effectively rendered powerless. Democracy is supposed to rest on the consent of the governed, not the governors.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com

Ed Markey

Attacked By Texas Republican, Sen. Markey Silently Drops Crushing Tweet On Him

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

Sen. Ed Markey is the Massachusetts Democrat who has continued to move towards the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and the voters have rewarded him, first by defeating the strange Pelosi-supported primary bid by Rep. Joe Kennedy III and then by winning reelection to his Senate seat with a commanding 66.5 percent of the vote.

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