From "Virginia’s new redistricting panel was supposed to make democracy work better — but partisanship stands in the way" by the editors of The Washington Post.
So the people voted in a referendum for reform to solve a problem that has reemerged in the reform. They voted against partisanship for something that also manifested partisanship. The editorial ends by saying that because the people voted to "improve democracy," the commissioners ought to take improving democracy "more seriously." Yet it looks like what's really going on is that the Democrats on the commission just have to figure out if they are worse off making concessions to the Republicans or letting the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court pick the "experts" and let them draw the lines. It's a grisly business.
ADDED: I don't like my own phrase "They voted against partisanship." Who knows exactly why people vote for what they vote for? It's at least as likely that they voted with hope that the new method of redistricting would benefit their party more than the method it replaced. In that case, the WaPo's editors threat to the commissioners is silly: The people believed they were voting for democracy, so you'd better not give them partisanship.
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AI can dispassionately create maps. But that does not allow for gaming the system. It’s so weird I’ve heard of gerrymandering my whole life. Always in the context of the the speaker decrying the process and blaming others. Yet somehow this relic of Congress’s history, it’s original dysfunctionality is still with us, causing consternation and frustration because politicians are incapable of removing politics from any endeavor. They just can’t.
What are you saying -- that the Wapo's editorial board expressed an illogical thought?
Unbelievable. Why not hand it over to the first grade of the nearest school and tell them no recess until it's solved.
Gerrymandering has been going on forever in our country, as all of your readers know. It has actually gone on in other countries as well for as long as anyone can recall. Giving it a name (thank you Elbridge Gerry) secured it's place as a known process.
There are two definitions of gerrymandering.
1) If it favors Democrats, then it's considered rearranging districts properly for the good of Democracy.
2) If it favors Republicans, then it's manipulating the districts unfavorably, distorting the vote, and disenfranchising voters.
As long as we keep that in mind, we'll understand it when our 'Journalists' talk about it.
Virginia is a textbook example of a sharply divided region. There are many old-school, rural, and fiercely independent people, but also a large influx of urban and federal government people near DC and Richmond. When the Democratic party recently came to power they passed urban-focused laws (e.g., gun control), which were then instantly resisted by non-urban areas with many gun rights or constitutional "sanctuaries." This either mocked or hoisted the left's immigration sanctuaries on their own petard.
There's a tense standoff, and this may lead to a breakthrough...or not...
It is funny how Democrats eschew democracy at the state level, where they have a harder time competing with rural voters who tend to vote against them. I'm not sure I can think of a fairer or more democratic method of redistricting than letting the party that wins the most seats control the process. It isn't perfect, but as recent events have shown, you can't rely on any supposed neutral party to actually behave neutrally. Journalists aren't neutral. Judges aren't neutral. Doesn't it make more sense to have representatives do that work, than a "neutral" party who may actually be beholden to one side or the other, or some special interest?
I think it a mistake to include Legislators in a bi-partisan redistricting commission. Choose citizens at random from the phone book, pay them a hefty stipend, give them a week (and tell them a finished product is needed by the end of the week or they lose the stipend), and put them up in a nice hotel.
Given them a direct line to the Minority and Majority Leaders' phones -- both at once, conference calls -- for any questions they might have, and start the whole thing with detailed population maps and good software.
As a Republican in Michigan, I loathed the US Supreme Court's decision in Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Redistricting Commission. That case is required reading for anyone wishing to understand this issue.
And I voted against our statewide referendum in 2018 to establish a redistricting commission. I lost. The referendum passed with a large majority. (It's not relevant to Althouse's post, but Michigan's redistricting commission avoids some of the worst problems of the Virginia plan, but has some of its own problems that are still being worked out.)
But this is how much things have changed for me in just the last three years. I no longer trust many of my fellow(?!) Republicans in the state legislature to engage competently in the process. It's not that I can't stand any Republicans; it's just that the Republicans who now seem to be populating county committees and state party committees, and the backbench Republicans who respond to extremist base voters above all, are off the rails. I do think that there are plenty of good Republicans; many mainstream Republican voters; many Republican lawyers; Republican judges. Christopher Krebs. Brad Raffensperger. Michigan state senator Ed McBroom. Dozens and dozens of Republican affiliated/nominated state and federal judges. Many, many others.
Dave Ball, a county Republican official in Pennsylvania, rebuked [Senator Pat] Toomey for his vote [to convict in the second Trump impeachment], saying, “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.”
https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-politics/republican-groups-censure-party-lawmakers-who-voted-impeach-convict-trump
Isn't partisanship integral to democracy?
i'm assuming that when the WaPo says "making democracy work better"
they meant 'work better for the democrats'
IF the Virginia supreme court was dominated by democrats... Would the WaPo be concerned?
For some reason there's a crack in the WaPo paywall between the blocked pop-up ad and the subscribe banner, so I can read this article. From my peeking partisan eye it's the same story of the partisan WaPo doing it's best at claiming the 'fairness' moral high ground for the left's preferred positions. Quelle suprise!
The left has a big gerrymandering problem since their voters are concentrated in urban areas. Excepting maybe Vermont, there are no blue states- only blue cities. Districts divided by area concentrates the D vote too much while splitting cities up dilutes the D vote too much. So naturally WaPo invents the notion the only 'fair' division is not by area or population, but by 'clout'. 'Clout'? For WaPo it seems to mean insuring D votes carry more weight than others...
Next they'll start demanding something like Risk rules, where the only 'fair' division is where Ds get to apply their votes where they need them once all the opposition votes are counted. Yes, they may have already implemented this strategy (if we had only checked!) but so far they aren't out and proud about it...
Colorado is now in the fifth redistricting where district lines are created by a commission instead of the legislator and governor.
All 5 of these redistricting panels have been heavily BIASED in favor of one party or the other … since supposed “neutral” members are named by somebody in the judicial branch of state government. In EVERY CASE, the judge who picked the “swing” members picked shills for the party of the governor who had appointed the judge.
A house of ill repute doesn’t become reputable merely by singing a hymn on Sunday morning after a busy Saturday night.
Colorado Dude
Sounds like folks are discovering the democratic self-rule is messy. Apparently they received a poor education in the principles underpinning the system our genius Founding Fathers created. So-called elites never fail to impress with their ignorance.
The Supreme Court has ruled that "partisan advantage" is neither an unconstitutional, nor an objectionable, result in design of political districts, and is in fact one of the main reasons that districts are redrawn by legislatures.
The only way to stop partisan redistricting is to eliminate all information from the data used for redistricting other than population count (no info on voting history, party, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sex, etc., in any redistricting work). And that ain't happening.
It is valid redistricting when we do it; it is vile gerrymandering only when they do it.
Another story in a disturbing trend the past 3-4 decades of where the courts wind up doing the legislature's work. I'd love to see someday a court proclaim, "not our job."
WHen do the Democrats EVER reach accross the aisle and be "Bi-partisan". EVERYTHING with them is based on "Win by any means neccessary". They NEVER give an inch to the other side. So, we are where we are.
And part of the problem is the sainted moderates who NEVER will hold the D's accountable. They will however scold the R's for not giving in, or fighting back. That's what drove them crazy about Trump. The D's could call the R's Nazi and it doesn't bother the "moderates". But when Trump slung some back it was "Stop all this fighting!".
Another story in a disturbing trend the past 3-4 decades of where the courts wind up doing the legislature's work. I'd love to see someday a court proclaim, "not our job."
Its a very positive development that in many states, those corrupted Zuckerburg-financed morons like Brad Raffensberger in Georgia, will very soon be out of a job where they spend all of their time figuring out ways to ensure democraticals can steal elections.
The greatest gift of the Trump Presidency was how it exposed the entire legion of fake conservative/fake republicans for what they really are: democrats.
Democracy Dies in Darkness, or so I've been told.
As an example, you have Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes working overtime to attack Catholic high schoolers and helping Facebook (a "generous" funder of The Dispatch) to deplatform established pro-life groups...after spending years lying about being "conservative".
In Georgia, as in other states, Raffensberger and Kemp have likewise been completely exposed and will never win another republican primary again...which is bad news for the democraticals because it will mean just what it meant on the presidential level in 2012: there won't be a democratical "A" Team (obama/Biden) and a democratical-controlled opposition ticket (romney/ryan) on the other ticket.
That's bad news for democraticals and fakecon LLR's everywhere.
Which is a good thing for everyone else.
As a Virginia Democrat I voted for the constitutional amendment creating the commission, against the recommendations of my party. IIRC the amendment started its life when the Reps still controlled the legislature, but lost gerrymandering suits in the courts. It was drafted as a compromise between the two parties. By the time it was passed the second time and put on the ballot, Democrats had majorities in both houses, and became much more aware of the possibility of stalemates in the commission and the fact the Republican nominees control the court. So the party bigshots thought it would be best to reject the amendment, and start over, because it's possible Democrats will continue to control the legislature in the future.
I, and a majority of voters, thought accepting the compromise we had agreed to originally was the best and surest way of working against future gerrymandering by either party. I'm not confident our bet will pay off, either in the commission, or if it goes to the court, but I still hope.
Yet it looks like what's really going on is that the Democrats on the commission just have to figure out if they are worse off making concessions to the Republicans or letting the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court pick the "experts" and let them draw the lines.
I disagree. I think that what's going on is that the Democrats are demonstrating their complete inability to compromise. Whether that's because they're just power hungry thugs, or it's because any reasonable map favors the Republicans, is left as a question to be answered by a reader who has more time than I do to look in to this.
AI can dispassionately create maps. But that does not allow for gaming the system
Wrong, and wrong.
The Democrats are a geographically confined Party whose voters tend to be highly intolerant people only willing to live with others like themselves.
So, we can make an AI that follows the "proper districting rules":
1: Compact districts
2: That follow existing natural (rivers, highways, anything else that provides clear physical breaks) and political boundaries (city limits, county limits, we'll defined "neighborhoods", etc)
3: And combine communities of interest (city with city, suburban with suburban, and so on)
In that priority order
You will get reasonable looking districts where the vast majority of people are actually being represented by their representatives. (For example: City voters care more about mass transit. Suburban voters care more about easy access with their personally owned car. If the district is split across both, one of those groups is not going to be well represented by their "representative")
But if you do that, you will get maps that favor Republicans. Because the cities vote 60% - 70%+ for Democrats, and everything else doesn't. So if you make "city districts", "suburban district", etc, you will get Democrats winning by ~70% on average and republicans winning by 55% on average, and you'll get legislatures where Republicans are "over-represented" by vote %.
So they Democrats are going to want that AI to have a different set of rules. One that focuses on "no Party 'over-represented'" rather than "don't make salamanders".
So they system is still "gamed" by determining which set of rules is followed.
My guess is that a compact, boundary honoring, community of interest honoring redistricting strongly favors the GOP in VA, and the Dems are going to fight and scream and trust that the MSM will push the Democrat's line, rather than the truth.
Which is the way to bet.
Here's hoping it does them no good
Redistricting was always meant to be done by the legislatures- there is a reason for this- they are the ones most repsonsive to the citizenry. No matter what method you choose to redistrict, it will favor one party or the other. If you simply took slices of a state, cutting east to west ending at the borders that contained equal numbers of residents, it would still end up favoring one party or the other. Trying to find nonpartisan ways to do this is just fucking ridiculous as the zero-Covid policies the governments are implementing.
Here is what is fucking hilarious- WaPo was surely in favor of Virginia's new commission when the Republicans controlled the legislature, but seems now opposed after the Democrats took over. That should tell you all you need to know about WaPo's opinion here.
So, having now read the entirely content free editorial (no links to the maps the two sides are generating, no comparison of the maps), I feel confident that my prediction was correct.
By any reasonable standard, the Democrats will get hurt in the redistricting, so they're relying on their allies in the MSM to push for an unreasonable redistricting. Which is why they're not willing to say anything about the districts they actually want:
It's because they're objectively indefensible
The point of periodic redistricting in the constitution was to avoid the rotten borough problem in Britain's Parliament where de-populated areas retained their political power under the control of wealth landowners. It's meant to be a partisan process so that representation changes when the population changes and new consensus needs to be reached every 10 years.
I say let them fight.
mikee said...
The only way to stop partisan redistricting is to eliminate all information from the data used for redistricting other than population count (no info on voting history, party, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sex, etc., in any redistricting work). And that ain't happening.
If the GOP was controlling the redistricting, that wouldn't really make much of a difference. Because simply going with "city voters in their districts, suburban voters in theirs, etc" would get you a solidly pro-GOP "gerrymander." You can play games at the margins to make it better for the GOP (and I'm sure they will), but so long as Democrats are significantly over-represented in the cities, any reasonable redistricting is not going to be in their favor
Greg The Class Traitor @11:43: Exactamundo. The root cause of every redistricting "crisis" in this country is that Democrats are far more likely to live in overwhelmingly Democratic cities, while Republicans are far more likely to live in modestly (but still significantly) Republican suburbs and exurbs. If you divide the state up in the manner you describe (compact and contiguous, &c.), you will overrepresent Republicans, b/c the Democrats are simply crammed too tightly into a few plausible districts, while the Republicans are spread much more widely across everywhere else. And the "majority-minority" district requirement only makes the problem worse.
The only fix I can think of is to drop physical districting altogether. I don't mean districting by the alphabet, say -- that would be identical to making every district at-large -- but by communities of interest. It would involve a detailed survey of every person's political opinions, which of course means it's also certainly doomed, but it would at least connect a segment of the population with a representative who is allied with that segment's own interests.
Here in Washington State, we have had a redistricting commission for several decades - in fact, since the 1990 Census. It has 4 members - one each selected by the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. Those 4, in turn, elect a non-partisan, non-voting Chairperson (usually a well-respected mediation-type attorney with no political affiliation, including political contributions).
Over the years, several of my GOP friends have served on the Commission. The small number of participants makes it easier to compromise.
Naturally, the liberals in our state are unhappy about it because the electorate is solid Blue and they don't like the fact that the GOP gets 1/2 the votes. Libs have been urging the legislature to "add" participants from "communities".
The only problem they have? The Commission was created via an amendment to the State Constitution and the legislature can't simply "add" members.
If the government didn't have the power to micromanage every little thing in people's lives and the ability to confiscate as much of the wealth people create as they do, redistricting wouldn't be such a big deal.
Michelle Dulak Thomson, I'm just going to say I don't want it "fixed", any more than I want a "National Popular Vote".
Having discreet areas with discreet votes is one of the ways to make vote fraud less powerful. it doesn't matter how many votes they manufacture in Philly, they can't steal the House seat in Scranton (or Ann Arbor vs the Michigan UP).
Establish a system where you have to personally go in and register to vote, that when you do so you have to at that time show a valid US government issued ID that proves you're a US Citizen.
Where absent good cause you can only vote on Election Day, and you have to present a valid photo ID provided by the government of the State you're voting in, with poll watchers there to make sure that your id is checked, and that it is valid
Where poll workers are never allowed to touch ballots, or be in the presence of ballots, except where there are poll watchers there, and you can't stop counting on election night until every vote that's in is counted, and you have to report within 10 minutes after the polls closed exactly how many ballots were collected at each site.
IOW, once we have a setup where we actually have honest elections, then we can talk about "communities of interest".
Until then? Districts are awesome
"and you have to report within 10 minutes after the polls closed exactly how many ballots were collected at each site."
And those counts aren't added up (or even looked at) until every precinct has reported their totals.
Like California's this commission is not only inherently partisan but inflexibly so, a massive incumbent protection for the two entrenched parties, above all else. Another layer of inefficient bureaucracy that will only ever be removed if it is catastrophic, not if it is merely another barnacle adding cost but no value.
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