Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Boba bam here. A representative democracy can
Speaker 1: be a beautiful thing, but the process of drawing the
Speaker 1: lines for congressional and state legislative districts can get ugly.
Speaker 1: The Constitution is vague on how voting districts should be drawn,
Speaker 1: saying only that they should be updated every ten years
Speaker 1: and be roughly equal in population. Over the centuries. Since
Speaker 1: the constitution's writing, American politicians have seized on the once
Speaker 1: a decade redistricting process to redraw voting maps to their advantage.
Speaker 1: While partisan redistricting is an accepted, if bemoaned practice, the
Speaker 1: courts have found it unacceptable to redraw voting districts for
Speaker 1: the express purpose of suppressing the voting power of black
Speaker 1: voters and other minority groups. Gerrymandering is defined as the
Speaker 1: manipulation of voting districts for hyperpartist in or racist reasons,
Speaker 1: but the line between legit redistricting and unethical jerrymandering is
Speaker 1: blurry at best. It's ultimately up to judges to decide
Speaker 1: whether a redistricting plan is kosher or not. Every ten years,
Speaker 1: the United States conducts a census. The constitutional purpose of
Speaker 1: the census is apportionment, that is, the process of determining
Speaker 1: how many seats each state should have in the House
Speaker 1: of Representatives. While the Constitution automatically a lots to senators
Speaker 1: for every state, the apportionment of representatives in the four
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty five seat House is based on population,
Speaker 1: with populous states like California getting fifty two representatives as
Speaker 1: of the census and sparsely populated states like Wyoming and
Speaker 1: South Dakota only getting one seat. Each. Members of the
Speaker 1: House are voted into office by the voters in their
Speaker 1: congressional district back home, and according to the Constitution, those
Speaker 1: districts should be approximately the same size, meaning that each
Speaker 1: of the four thirty five House members represent roughly the
Speaker 1: same number of people. The average congressional district now holds
Speaker 1: a little over seven d s people. But who draws
Speaker 1: the district maps. A handful of states appoint independent commissions
Speaker 1: who draw their district lines, but those are the outliers
Speaker 1: right now. State legislatures in thirty nine states draw their
Speaker 1: own congressional districts, though that includes the six states that
Speaker 1: only have one congressional district. If the state legislature is
Speaker 1: firmly in the hands of one political party or the other,
Speaker 1: as it is in more than half of all states,
Speaker 1: then that party exercises a lot of control over the
Speaker 1: redistricting process. By tweaking the size and shape of voting districts,
Speaker 1: they can boost the voting power of their party and
Speaker 1: increase the odds of winning congressional seats. The district drawings
Speaker 1: and power struggles in each individual states legislature works similarly,
Speaker 1: but we're concentrating on the national government today. Okay, So
Speaker 1: when does partisan redistricting cross the line and become illegal gerrymandering.
Speaker 1: When state legislators sit down to redraw their voting district maps,
Speaker 1: even in solidly Republican or democratic states, they're expected to
Speaker 1: play by some basic rules. Districts have to be of
Speaker 1: roughly equal population, though a deviation of a few percentage
Speaker 1: points is okay. Districts have to be contiguous, meaning they
Speaker 1: have to be contained by one boundary. And districts should
Speaker 1: be compact, not long and snakelike. Of those three characteristics,
Speaker 1: the compactness or non compactness of a district is usually
Speaker 1: the one that triggers accusations of gerrymandering. For the article
Speaker 1: this episode is based on, Has to Work, spoke with
Speaker 1: Doug Spencer, a law professor and election law scholar at
Speaker 1: the University of Colorado, Boulder. He explained, if you see
Speaker 1: a bizarrely shaped district that raises your intent a that
Speaker 1: it may not have been drawn neutral ly, but in
Speaker 1: a way that favors some group, political group, a racial group,
Speaker 1: or something else. After all, it was the freakest shape
Speaker 1: of a Massachusetts congressional district that helped coin the term
Speaker 1: Jerrymander in eighteen twelve. The long and snaking district was
Speaker 1: approved by Governor Elbridge Jerry and delivered a powerful electoral
Speaker 1: advantage to his party, the Democratic Republicans. A newspaper cartoonist
Speaker 1: noted the alamander like shape of the district and labeled
Speaker 1: it the Jerrymander after its partisan creator. According to Spencer,
Speaker 1: the courts have recognized that partisanship and the redistricting process
Speaker 1: is an accepted outcome of state elections. If voters put
Speaker 1: control of the state legislature in the hands of one party,
Speaker 1: then there's an expectation that party officials will make redistricting
Speaker 1: decisions that benefit their party. Spencer said, the question becomes
Speaker 1: how much partisanship is too much. That's the line that's
Speaker 1: hard to distinguish. Some state legislatures are blatantly honest, but
Speaker 1: what they're trying to accomplish. In North Carolina, for example,
Speaker 1: the Republican chair of the state's redistricting committee said in sixteen,
Speaker 1: I propose we draw the maps to give an advantage
Speaker 1: to ten Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not
Speaker 1: believe it's possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans
Speaker 1: and two Democrats. And in Maryland, the Democratic governor testified
Speaker 1: that a new district was drawn to quote create a
Speaker 1: district where the people would be more likely to elect
Speaker 1: a Democrat than Republican. Yes, this was clearly my intent.
Speaker 1: But do such statements go too far? For its part,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court is keeping out of the controversy. In
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, the justices ruled five to four that the
Speaker 1: nation's highest court would not get involved in challenges to
Speaker 1: state plans on strictly political grounds. They left those challenges
Speaker 1: to state lawmakers and state courts. Racially motivated jerrymandering is
Speaker 1: unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under
Speaker 1: the law. But before the nineteen sixty four Voting Rights
Speaker 1: Act was passed, state legislatures a special in the Jim
Speaker 1: Crow era South used a pair of gerrymandering tactics to
Speaker 1: strip black voters of equal electoral power. They're called packing
Speaker 1: and cracking. If black voters were concentrated in a certain
Speaker 1: geographic area of a state, then the legislators would pack
Speaker 1: them into one or two districts. Even if that created
Speaker 1: strong black voting blocks in those districts, their vote would
Speaker 1: be outweighed by all of the majority white districts. If
Speaker 1: black voters were more geographically dispersed, then the districts were
Speaker 1: drawn in order to crack or dilute the black vote
Speaker 1: by assigning small numbers of black voters to several different districts,
Speaker 1: and that way their voices were still guaranteed to be
Speaker 1: drowned out by the white majority. This was supposed to
Speaker 1: change with the Voting Rights Act, which included a provision
Speaker 1: that six Southern states had to receive federal approval for
Speaker 1: their districting plans. Those six states, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, and Virginia were flagged for this extra scrutiny
Speaker 1: because of a story of race based jerrymandering. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, three more states were added, Alaska, Arizona, and Texas,
Speaker 1: but in a landmark case, the Supreme Court bailed out
Speaker 1: those nine states from having to seek congressional pre approval
Speaker 1: for their plans, and stoking fears of a new wave
Speaker 1: of racially motivated jerrymandering, mainly in Republican controlled Southern legislatures.
Speaker 1: The reality is that racial jerrymandering is still unlawful and
Speaker 1: can be challenged in both state and federal courts. A
Speaker 1: lawsuit intended to block a state's redistricting plan on racial
Speaker 1: grounds must be filed by a voter living in the district,
Speaker 1: says Spencer, not an outside political organization. It's then up
Speaker 1: to a judge or judges to determine if there's enough evidence,
Speaker 1: like testimony or emails or texts between lawmakers to conclude
Speaker 1: that the district lines were in fact drawn to disenfranchise
Speaker 1: minority voters. And these challenges do happen. Two high profile
Speaker 1: Supreme Court cases within the past gade effectively blocked districting
Speaker 1: plans in North Carolina and Virginia on grounds of racial jerrymandering.
Speaker 1: A part of what makes the line between redistricting and
Speaker 1: jerrymandering so blurry is that the electorate has become increasingly
Speaker 1: polarized along racial lines. In presidential election, for example, of
Speaker 1: black voters shows the Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Meanwhile, white
Speaker 1: voters continued to skew Republican particularly non college educated white
Speaker 1: voters of whom voted for Donald Trump. What that means
Speaker 1: for Republican held legislatures, especially in the South, is that
Speaker 1: any attempt to crack or pack districts to prevent the
Speaker 1: election of Democrats risks targeting black voters and running a
Speaker 1: foul of the law. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article what's the difference between redistricting and jerrymandering? On House
Speaker 1: to works dot com, written by Dave Rouse. Brain Stuff
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Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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