Drawing districts the nonpartisan way
By: Rob
Published On: 11/16/2006 6:15:46 PM
The last time congressional districts were drawn in Virginia, partisans were in charge.
The legislature in Virginia, as in most states, draws congressional and state legislative district lines. In final form, a redistricting plan is a bill: introduced by a member; considered in committee; passed by both houses; and signed, returned for amendment, or vetoed by the Governor.
So, when redistricting comes up again, partisan Democrats or Republicans will control the process every step of the way.
A different way is the Iowa model, which uses a non-partisan entity to draw up the congressional boundaries.
[U]nlike many other states, in 2001 the Iowa Legislature was able to re-draw its congressional and state legislative districts with little controversy. Since 1980, Iowa has used a non-partisan redistricting service, called the Legislative Service Bureau. Even though the state legislature twice rejected the Bureau's maps in 1981 and ultimately drew up its own, Iowa lawmakers have generally accepted the Bureau's proposals. Most importantly, no district voting lines have been drawn by the courts since the 1980 legislation was passed.
And look at that map of Iowa! No counties are split in two, no arms reaching out to grab urban areas, no strange-looking boundaries (e.g., VA-03).
Rather than the politically motivated way that inevitably leads to high-profile (and often circus-like) partisan disputes, Iowa's method focuses on non-partisan factors - population equality, contiguity, unity of counties, and cities and compactness. Should Virginia adopt this model? Should the nation?
(H/T Sullivan)
Comments
There are ways to do this (Rebecca - 11/16/2006 6:24:07 PM)
Some towns in New England have a mathematical formula they use to create lots for houses. The formula helps prevent odd shaped lots. Why can't states create a formula for creating districts which will prevent the creation of odd shaped distracts which were created for partisan reasons?
Sounds good to me. (thegools - 11/16/2006 7:17:08 PM)
Gasp... (Silver Fox - 11/16/2006 7:34:05 PM)
What a concept. Draw voting districts in a non-partisan manner that uses logical criteria to set the boundaries? It must make the Republicans' (and some old time Dems too) blood run cold to even consider such a possibility. For candidates to have to actually compete on the issues and what they hope to accomplish if elected because they can not depend on knee-jerk party directed voting in a "safe" district. Why, it might even (whisper it softly) increase the participation of voters because they would actually be participating in a real election, not just a gerrymandered farce. What a dream. Don't wake me up yet.
Too bad we'll never have a pretty square map. (Kenton - 11/16/2006 7:37:38 PM)
We'd have to break Fairfax into pieces (there's no way around it--Iowa doesn't have an equivalent 8,000 pound population gorilla), and boundaries here follow pesky little rivers and mountain ranges.
Iowa also has the benefit of being lily-white compared to Virginia, and doesn't have to get itself tangled in majority-minority districts. 95% of Iowa is white, while only 74% of Virginia is.
How is the 3rd district even legal? (uva08 - 11/16/2006 8:25:24 PM)
Looking at the congressional lines its quite clear that the driving force behind drawing the lines was race. I thought the Supreme Court outlawed districts like this. See Miller v. Johnson and there was another one out of North Carolina where the width of one district at one point was an interstate highway.
Shaw v. Reno is the second case (uva08 - 11/16/2006 8:30:46 PM)
The 3rd was redrawn (Jerry Saleeby - 11/16/2006 9:17:05 PM)
The original 3rd district was even worse and failed the court's muster and was redrawn.
Straight lines, (libra - 11/16/2006 9:51:34 PM)
as equal number of people (irrespective of race) as possible... Large cities could be divided pie-like (from centre out)-- isn't Paris laid out like that and maybe even DC? What's so difficult about that? And yes, I'd go for an independent, non-partisan organisation to supply the draft, provided they didn't charge a river and a mountin for it and provided that, like in IOWA, the legislature has a say over whether or not to accept the plan.
Just Such a Bill (Waldo Jaquith - 11/16/2006 10:16:24 PM)
Well, then you'd be interested in Del. Jim Shuler's
HB1629, which does just that.
Thanks Waldo, I hadn't known about it. (thegools - 11/17/2006 9:40:11 AM)
I think that will be tacked on as one of my letters to my delegate/senator causes along with Verified Voting in virginia VaVV.org.
They should let software make the decision. (relawson - 11/16/2006 10:21:01 PM)
I'm a software engineer. If I were going to design a fair application to do this, the one thing I would ignore is political lines. I would do something similar to Iowa, and make sure the counties are contiguous - and never split. Sure, some districts would be slightly high and others slightly low in population but I am reasonably sure you could get close enough. There would be some randomness to it so the outcome couldn't be predicted. You'd probably be better off trusting my application than your politicians. I'd even open the source so everyone knew how it worked - no secret formulas.
I live in a split county. My representative never shows up around here because it is in the far end of her district - which is strangely drawn. They didn't even campaign here and I am in the largest city in my county. Just not enough of us in my sliver of the district.
That sounds like Virginia's 1st (thegools - 11/17/2006 9:45:16 AM)
or perhaps Warrenton in the 10th. I have never seen Congressman Wolf make his way this margin of his district.
Other States have other plans (Teddy - 11/16/2006 11:16:07 PM)
Some give the drawing of lines to retired judges (not too good an idea, but it still gets the process out of the hands of current politicos); others have discussed giving the job to demographers who, of all professions, would have the best handle on population. The legislature then votes the resulting plan up or down, no tricky little messing with the non-partisan plan. The fact is, gerrymandering, thanks to the use of computers, has made elections a farce--- remember how DeLay forced Texas to re-district between censuses in a largely successful effort to give Republicans more seats from Texas in Congress.
We must tackle and abolish gerrymandering as presently practiced, and do it immediately if democracy is to be saved. I know this sounds dramatic, but it is true.
Don't blame the computers!!! (relawson - 11/16/2006 11:47:41 PM)
Blame the operators of the computers and the designers of the logic that went into them. Obviously politicians meddled with the process.
You can make a computer do stupid things just as easily as you can make it do smart things. Politicians created an unfair formula, and there is a saying in programming: garbage in = garbage out.
A computer doesn't belong to any political party. It is the humans telling the computer what to do that you should worry about.
Trickier than you think (KCinDC - 11/17/2006 11:33:56 AM)
I agree that we need a nonpartisan redistricting process (though we need to institute it nationwide rather than have Democrats unilaterally disarm while Republicans gerrymander the states they control). However, the rules that should be used for drawing district lines are less obvious than some might think.
If lines are drawn considering only population and compactness of districts, it will hurt Democrats a lot, because Democrats are more concentrated in cities while Republicans are more spread out. Drawing the "obvious" lines will give you a bunch of districts with perhaps 55% Republicans and a few districts with perhaps 75% Democrats, so you'll end up with overrepresentation of Republicans, even in a state that's 50-50 by population.