The Redistricting Morass

The Redistricting Morass

Description

In a democratic society, the purpose of voting is to allow the electors to select their governors. Once a decade, however, that process is inverted and the governors and their political agents are permitted to select their electors. Through the process of redistricting, incumbent political actors choose what configuration of voters is most suitable to their political agenda. The decennial redistricting battles reveal the bloodsport of politics, shorn of the claims of ideology, social purpose, or broad policy goals. Redistricting is politics pure, fraught with the capacity for self-dealing and cynical manipulation. That different configurations of electors will yield different electoral results is hardly new or noteworthy; the pejorative term “gerrymander” stems from the creative linedrawing of Massachusetts Governor Gerry and the founding strokes of the American republic. What is still relatively new is the attempt to constrain, under the aegis of the federal Constitution, the most wanton excesses of the process. It was only thirty years ago that the Supreme Court required rural legislators in Tennessee and Alabama to redistrict their states to reflect the growing urban population centers and thereby undermine their stranglehold on state political power. The commands of the one-person, one-vote rule of redistricting are by now so ingrained as to obscure what else is new in the 1990s round of redistricting. For the first time since the great Supreme Court reapportionment decisions of the 1960s, redistricting authorities had to contend not only with equipopulational districting, but with vigilant protections of minority representation as well. Only after the passage of the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court's expansive endorsement of the amended Act in the 1986 North Carolina redistricting case, Thornburg v. Gingles, did the issue of minority-controlled districts emerge front and center in the decennial battles over representation. In state after state, the question of minority districts became the most visible and debated issue after the 1990 Census, oftentimes joining an uncomfortable alliance of minority incumbents, aspirants for political office, and the Republican Party, the latter armed with the oversight powers of the federal Justice Department. Particularly for moderate Republicans without ideological opposition to race-conscious politics, the prospect of concentrating (or “packing,” as the practice is known in the redistricting trade) the traditional Democratic votes of racial and ethnic minorities into minority-dominated districts offered the possibility of eviscerating the biracial power bases of many liberal Democrats—thereby realizing the long-term strategy of the late Lee Atwater, who early on saw in the ·redistricting battles of the 1990s the chance to weaken, if not destroy, Democratic control of state legislators and the House of Representatives. Despite the centrality of minority representation to post-1990 redistricting, the process took place in the absence of any well-defined standards of law, particularly with regard to the application of the Voting rights Act. The leading cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the section that prohibits diminishing of minority voting influence—were forged in the battles against at-large or multimember electoral districts. These electoral systems allow all members of a given jurisdiction to vote separately on each candidate for office, and thereby allow a voting majority to control every seat in an election. For example, if a community were 60 percent white and 40 percent black, and if the races had consistently different voting preferences, the result of an at-large election for a city council in which black and white candidates vied head-to-head for each of five council positions would likely be that the white candidate would prevail in each contest with about 60 percent of the vote. In such cases, the perceived harm was the capacity of majority communities to capture a disproportionate share of representation by the ability to vote serially for each candidate for local office. The principal remedy has been the creation of electoral subdistricts in which minority voters, acting in concert, are able to select a representative of their choice. Unfortunately, the post-1982 vote dilution case law gave little guidance to measuring alternative electoral arrangements following a decennial reapportionment. In the context of such decennial redrawing of district lines, the stakes are far more complicated than in the binary decision of should there be single-member districts or at-large elections. Rather, redistricting poses the question of choosing among competing plans in which all jurisdictional lines are up for grabs. Nor did the prior cases articulate the conditions under which state redistricting entities are either permitted or required to resort to race-conscious practices. These were the issues presented to the Supreme Court initially in cases arising from the redistricting battles in Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, and most notably, North Carolina, the setting for Shaw v. Reno. Whereas the prior cases had addressed the remedial use of race-conscious districting to alleviate proven exclusion, the 1990s redistricting cases concerned the affirmative use of race in the quintessentially political process of dividing electoral spoils.

Source Publication

Affirmative Action and Representation: Shaw v. Reno and the Future of Voting Rights

Source Editors/Authors

Anthony A. Peacock

Publication Date

1997

The Redistricting Morass

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