Gerrymandering Voters into Passivity

Fourth Quarter 2003

The drawing of new boundary lines for congressional districts in some states is now reaching the point of absurdity.

Typically, after each national census (every 10 years), states redraw their congressional districts to make them conform to federal election requirements. Among those requirements are that the number of US House seats each state is allocated depends on its share of the total US population, and that every electoral district must have approximately the same number of residents. Populations shift and some states grow while others shrink.

Now, Texas and Colorado, for starters, have decided not to wait until 2010 to go through the process again. You probably heard about the Texas Democrats who left their state by bus so that the Texas House of Representatives would not have a quorum and its Republican majority could not pass its second redistricting plan in two years. The Republican controlled legislatures in both Texas and Colorado have decided to redraw their congressional districts in less than two years in order to see if they can give Republican members of the House even more secure positions in their districts. If this movement continues and spreads to other states, Republicans and Democrats in states whose legislatures they control may try to redraw congressional boundaries as often as they want.

"Nonpartisanship is not an option," said Colorado Senate President John Andrews, according to The Washington Post (7/2/03). "There are only two kinds of Congress to choose from: one where... Republicans hold the majority, or one where... Democrats do." In other words, majority parties in state legislatures should no longer feel obligated to serve the public by drawing up electoral districts in which voters have a meaningful choice at election time. Instead, government should be used to gain further political advantage.

Steven Hill and Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy argue that this process is further corrupting the electoral system. Even before the Texas and Colorado efforts this year, legislative bodies in state after state in 2001 sought to protect incumbents of the party in control of the legislature by gerrymandering district boundaries toward that end. "The real losers," say Hill and Richie, "were voters, left with overwhelmingly choiceless elections" (The Washington Post, 7/1/03).

Think of it this way: in the 2002 congressional elections, with 435 Representatives up for election, "only four challengers defeated incumbents, the fewest in history, while fewer than one in 10 races: were won by competitive margins of less than 10 percent," say Hill and Richie. "For the rest of this decade, the only choice most voters will have in House races is to ratify the nominee—usually the incumbent—of the party that was handed their district."

The only "lasting solution" to this problem, say Hill and Richie, "is to replace winner-take-all elections with full-representation electoral systems in multi-seat districts, which makes voters rather than district lines the key to defining representation." What Hill and Richie mean is that there is a better way to organize elections. That way will not only give voters real choices but will also eliminate all the cost and time and political conflict that goes into gerrymandering congressional districts.

"Full-representation electoral systems," like those in almost every other democracy in the world, are those in which voters elect representatives in proportion to the percentage of votes that each party receives in genuinely competitive elections. Take Texas with its 32 House seats, for example. If the entire state of Texas were changed to a single, multi-seat district from which 32 members of Congress would be elected, then any number of parties could put forward 32 candidates and voters could vote for the candidates they want. If Republicans earned 47 percent of the statewide vote, they would get 15 seats, not more and not less. If Democrats won 41 percent of the vote, they would get 13 seats, not more and not less. And what about the other four seats? They might be won by Libertarians, and/or Greens, and/or some other minor party, depending on how the remaining 12 percent of the votes were cast. Winning six or seven percent of the votes would be sufficient to elect a representative.

Moreover, if two or four years later, the smaller parties gained strength on the merit of their ideas and service, they would likely gain more seats at the expense of other parties. The point is that no party could gain more seats than its percentage of the votes earns it. Even if a party won 65 or 75 percent of the votes, it could not win all the seats. Other parties, having won the remaining 25 or 35 percent of votes, would win that proportion of seats in Congress. Winners could no longer take all, but only what they earn. And minority voices would have real voice and not be shut out altogether.

What would happen to the periodic redistricting and gerrymandering circus? It would be disposed of entirely, once and for all. The census each decade would tell the state the number of House seats it may fill. But the lines of its one and only multi-seat district--the lines of the state's boundaries--would never change. Parties and politicians would then have to focus on meaningful appeals to real voters whose choices would always make the difference. The time has come to do justice to voters

—The Editor