Q: So is this a Democratic gerrymander replacing the Republican gerrymander?
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One involved a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina, the other a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland.
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In the partisan gerrymander case, for example, he suggested discomfort with the lower court's standard meant to identify an extreme political gerrymander.
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In most states along the Eastern Seaboard, slaying the gerrymander requires you to beg the very lawmakers who created a gerrymander and benefit from it to mend their ways.
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Maryland Democrats have also conducted an extreme partisan gerrymander, and New Jersey Democrats proposed a plan that could produce a pretty severe gerrymander in their favor earlier this year.
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" Sotomayor asked how political gerrymander "helps our system of government.
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But there's a simpler, sounder path to slaying the gerrymander.
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"The Gerrymander Excuse Implodes," a Wall Street Journal editorial declared.
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Whitford), the other a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland (Benisek v. Lamone).
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Lamone, challenges the validity of a Democratic-led gerrymander in Maryland.
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But the "natural" gerrymander of the Senate was even more extreme.
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We first have to understand the strategies used to gerrymander districts.
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They realized they could use the gerrymander in a completely new way.
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Notwithstanding the partisan gerrymander, we will take back the House in 28503.
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Republicans will use sophisticated technology to draw a very effective partisan gerrymander.
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"This is about preserving the power to gerrymander legislative districts," Messenger wrote.
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But with a gerrymander, they argue, the people have almost no voice.
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Whitford, which challenged Wisconsin's 22019 redistricting plan as an extreme partisan gerrymander.
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The court rejected Texas's claim that its gerrymander was merely partisan, not racial.
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That data allows politicians to gerrymander or election commissioners to establish polling locations.
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Where it stands: The Supreme Court has never struck down a partisan gerrymander.
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Which Democrat-controlled gerrymander were they complaining of when calling for "fair districts"?
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Notably, Utah has a pernicious gerrymander, but it only costs Democrats one seat.
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But it has never ruled that a partisan gerrymander crossed a constitutional line.
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And a bipartisan gerrymander is a redistricting meant to protect incumbents of both parties.
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The court rejected the state's contention that its gerrymander was merely partisan, not racial.
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Common Cause, is about whether the state's congressional map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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The Supreme Court has never struck down an election map as a partisan gerrymander.
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The court has never struck down a voting district as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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That already has been done in the federal trial challenging the North Carolina gerrymander.
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But it has never struck down a voting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Michigan, Colorado and Missouri limited politicians' ability to directly draw — and gerrymander — district lines.
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Back in 813, the court rejected a challenge to a political gerrymander in Pennsylvania.
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The Supreme Court has never struck down a voting district as a partisan gerrymander.
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A North Carolina court threw out the state's legislative map as an illegal gerrymander.
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"In Pennsylvania, the Gerrymander of the Decade?" the Web site Real Clear Politics asked.
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Federal judges scrapped the initial map in 2016, deeming it an illegal racial gerrymander.
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By contrast, Benisek targets one egregious gerrymander in a single district on First Amendment grounds.
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Cox has defended congressional maps that a federal court has ruled as a racial gerrymander.
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A federal district court panel later ruled that the map was an unconstitutional political gerrymander.
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Democrats charged at the time that the map was both a partisan and racial gerrymander.
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A three-judge panel ruled in January that Mr. Hofeller's maps were an unconstitutional gerrymander.
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David Lewis, chair of the legislature's redistricting effort, once said in defense of his gerrymander.
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Adding more black voters to the district, she wrote, amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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Democrats flipped three seats in the House of Representatives despite a partisan gerrymander in 2018.
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" Democrats, he said, "have gerrymandered this new federal enclave, and I'm saying un-gerrymander it.
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Because of the GOP gerrymander, Republicans currently hold 10 of the state's 13 congressional districts.
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Just one district at issue in the case, they found, was an impermissible racial gerrymander.
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The Supreme Court has never struck down a voting district as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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"I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander", he said at a committee meeting.
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Evaluating which voters have an advantage in the Electoral College is similar to evaluating a gerrymander.
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If it does not, that's a sign the gerrymander unconstitutionally deprives voters of their representational rights.
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On January 22nd Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled that this gerrymander was unfair to voters (see article).
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Or as Sam Wang of Princeton University put it, welcome to the "great gerrymander" of 2012.
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Critics say real estate developers gerrymander luxury projects into TEAs, drawing money away from poor areas.
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Eventually, a majority of Supreme Court justices agreed, finding that this was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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This does not necessarily mean the map amounts to a "Democratic gerrymander," as some have suggested.
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Michigan, along with Colorado and Missouri, limited politicians' ability to directly draw, and gerrymander, district lines.
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Democrats gerrymander, too, but often the most they can achieve is to neutralize their underlying disadvantage.
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WASHINGTON — How egregiously can a majority party gerrymander a political map before it violates the Constitution?
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But using school zones, we can actually gerrymander these lines so we're not recreating the underlying segregation.
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First he drew a GOP-friendly gerrymander of Wisconsin, a state whose underlying partisanship is 22-257.
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However, there are plenty of D+21 precincts so you can draw the 6-2 GOP gerrymander.
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" Or, "I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law.
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In Maryland, for example, the Democratic government enacted a gerrymander that, in the words of then-Gov.
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Plaintiffs in the North Carolina gerrymander case made the same argument to the Supreme Court in March.
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It's illegal to racially gerrymander, or draw congressional districts based solely on the basis of voters' race.
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Below, I've drawn a GOP gerrymander where 22010/22002 districts have a score of R+7 or higher.
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Gerrymandering dates back to the 19th century, but the Supreme Court has never ruled a partisan gerrymander unconstitutional.
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Justices are also looking at another challenge to the North Carolina map that alleges an illegal partisan gerrymander.
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After that, he said, the justices have to look at whether the map constitutes an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Under the leadership of Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Republicans used computer technology to gerrymander state and congressional districts.
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And just last week, the High Court halted court-ordered remedies in the Ohio and Michigan gerrymander cases.
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I assume these thoughts were not far from his mind as he mused aloud during the gerrymander argument.
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While Republicans and Democrats both gerrymander, there is no doubt that Republicans do it more and more shamelessly.
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Whitford, the Wisconsin gerrymander case that is one of the most important election-law cases in a generation.
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In a case being argued this week that challenges the same Republican gerrymander at issue in Agre v.
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That led critics to sue again, charging this time that the entire House map was a partisan gerrymander.
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It's the first time a federal court has struck down a congressional map due to a partisan gerrymander.
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The original gerrymander—named for Massachusetts' ninth governor, Elbridge Gerry—was a sinuous blob that wound around Boston.
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In contrast, Republicans grasped the strategic importance of state legislatures, which in many places have the power to gerrymander.
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Politicians are likely to be careful and protect their own seats rather than gerrymander aggressively to help their parties.
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Of course Democratic politicians — all politicians — distort, gerrymander evidence, even lie and apply their greasy thumbs to the scales.
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Singapore's leaders vigorously defend their reputations with defamation suits, and gerrymander constituencies to help preserve the ruling party's majority.
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His aim was to gather citizenship data so that Republicans could more effectively gerrymander electoral maps in their favour.
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He said the federal courts will never draw a line to declare that any partisan gerrymander went too far.
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The justices have yet to resolve Gill v Whitford, a challenge to a Wisconsin gerrymander they heard in October.
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Last week, a federal court in North Carolina overturned that state's congressional district map as an extreme partisan gerrymander.
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For example, the original gerrymander of 1812 — which produced a vaguely salamander-shaped district in Massachusetts to favor Gov.
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Judges are also interested in durability: whether a gerrymander is likely to last under a variety of political conditions.
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Judges can look at the recent history of elections to get a sense of the durability of a gerrymander.
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"In essence, unions can now gerrymander the bargaining units they wish to organize," the Chamber writes in the report.
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But the court said the lower court was correct in ruling that one legislative district was a racial gerrymander.
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Two years later, they passed a new partisan gerrymander, entrenching the party's advantage in congressional and state legislative elections.
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Instead, they told the lower courts to reconsider whether the plaintiffs had each been harmed by the Wisconsin gerrymander.
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As the editorial says, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court replaced a congressional gerrymander with a more competitive and equitable map.
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Yet, out of this data set, some comedians and their fans seem determined to gerrymander an epidemic of bowdlerization.
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It was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander.
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In 2016, a court struck down a different version of the congressional map, saying it was a racial gerrymander.
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The decision was the first from a federal court to strike down a congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.
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In hearing gerrymander challenges during the last term, Justice Roberts worried aloud about enmeshing the court in political matters.
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Yes, both sides gerrymander, but even so, the march away from representative government is not an altogether bipartisan undertaking.
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The strong Democratic showing compared with Mr. Chen's simulations doesn't necessarily indicate that the map is a Democratic gerrymander.
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A truly efficient gerrymander spreads a winning party's votes so evenly over districts that very few votes are wasted.
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The opinion is the first federal court ruling to strike down a congressional map as representing a partisan gerrymander.
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Grassley and Leahy's side say the bill would still allow big city developers to gerrymander TEAs in wealthy areas.
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Republicans' landslide wins in the 2010 midterm cycle let the party gerrymander the congressional map, giving themselves an advantage.
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The "gerrymander" succeeded that year; though the Federalists won the governor's mansion, they could not retake the state Senate.
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That context is crucial as drama unfolds over perhaps the most lethally effective gerrymander that any state legislature has undertaken.
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Voting rights and gerrymandered districts The voting rights cases concern claims of racial gerrymander -- or how states draw district lines.
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One overturned the partisan gerrymander of the state legislature's districts; the other issued an injunction against the state's congressional districts.
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But naturally, the matter ended up back in court, with plaintiffs arguing the GOP carried out an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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He continued: We have never struck down a partisan gerrymander as unconstitutional — despite various requests over the past 45 years.
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Democrats and minority voting advocates will sue in federal court and claim that this is a racial gerrymander in disguise.
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It was still the case that the Supreme Court has never struck down a voting district as a partisan gerrymander.
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Unlike recent partisan gerrymander cases out of North Carolina and Wisconsin, the Pennsylvania case deals with state law, not federal.
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Legal controversy over gerrymandering The lower court panel that ruled Monday had previously declared the map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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The order comes as the Supreme Court is also considering two other partisan gerrymander cases out of Maryland and Wisconsin.
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Washington (CNN)The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has redrawn the state's congressional lines after declaring the current map an unconstitutional gerrymander.
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Politicians are delighted to gerrymander when it costs them nothing, but they aren't willing to put their own fortunes at risk.
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And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Gerry and salamander were mashed together in the public's mind, and just like that, the words "gerrymander" and "gerrymandering" were born.
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And the cases on which the court ruled on Thursday involved one Democratic gerrymander (Maryland) and one Republican one (North Carolina).
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Sure enough, the same Maryland map and an even more brazen gerrymander in North Carolina are right back in court's lap.
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But the conservative wing of the court was sceptical of the standard offered by those challenging a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin.
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The decision shows how courts can identify a gerrymander using methods that are much more precise than eyeballing funny-looking districts.
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In May, the court struck down two congressional district maps, holding that the state had engaged in an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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That's evident in Maryland, where Democratic legislators engineered such an egregious gerrymander that even a longtime Democratic voter couldn't stomach it.
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Here, Thomas was tweaking the Court for not finding the gerrymander unconstitutional in a 2001 case after a district court did.
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The Republicans' latest partisan gerrymander in North Carolina has been so effective, it has even held through the 2018 blue wave.
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Where Gill addressed Republican manipulation of state legislative maps, Benisek instead focused on a Democratic gerrymander of a federal congressional district.
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In North Carolina, it wiped away a lower court opinion that had invalidated congressional maps there as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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The trial court in that case had struck down a voting map for the State Assembly as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Last winter the Pennsylvania Supreme Court became the first court to invalidate a state's congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Jubelirer if a "limited and precise" standard could be found to determine whether an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander had occurred in redistricting.
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This means the majority was able to use the gerrymander to retain political power, contrary to the will of the voters.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that the state's maps were a Republican gerrymander and ordered new ones to be drawn.
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Generic balloting shows them 10 points down in the House popular vote, far too large a gap for Republicans to gerrymander away.
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The challengers say the move was a partisan gerrymander in violation of the U.S. Constitution because it intentionally diluted the Republican vote.
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Because the Supreme Court dismissed the challenge on standing grounds, justices did not rule if the maps constitute an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads A decision invalidating Wisconsin's gerrymander as unconstitutionally partisan would, of course, be a boon to democracy.
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Rucho litigators believe the Carolina gerrymander is so clearly partisan and so egregious that the high court will put its foot down.
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A lower court denied a partisan gerrymander claim, but left the door open to future claims if plaintiffs did propose a standard.
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The court has never struck down a partisan gerrymander, nor has it articulated the legal grounds on which it might do so.
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In a 2004 partisan gerrymander case, conservatives on the court said they thought the issue should be handled by the political branches.
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Those cases present an opportunity for the Supreme Court to establish a test that lays out what constitutes an unlawful partisan gerrymander.
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The latest lawsuit — filed by election advocacy groups and Democrats — said the replacement to the racial gerrymander also were unlawful partisan gerrymanders.
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North Carolina was forced to redistrict in 2016 because the Supreme Court found its earlier congressional map to be a racial gerrymander.
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So far, the Supreme Court has never struck down an election district or redistricting plan redistricting court as an unconstitutional political gerrymander.
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That was significant because it was the first federal court ruling to strike down a congressional map as representing a partisan gerrymander.
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The North Carolina decision follows a 2018 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that also struck down a partisan gerrymander under the state's constitution.
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This is what happened to Democrats in so many key states after the 22 midterms, letting Republicans gerrymander them to their hearts' content.
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These requirements can lead to strange-looking districts—and can give cartographers latitude to gerrymander under the cover of satisfying these other constraints.
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The Supreme Court cannot "approve a racial gerrymander whose necessity is supported by no evidence and whose raison d'être is a legal mistake".
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Arguably, that would be the gerrymander — stitching together unrelated communities and breaking apart urban representation for the sake of some other political goal.
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The 200-page document is, to a redistricting nerd, an enjoyable tour of some of the ways one might identify a partisan gerrymander.
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How it could work: Academics have proposed a couple of tests the courts could apply to decide when a partisan gerrymander becomes unconstitutional.
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That stretches from streets and sewer repairs to the makeup of the state's legislature, which Virginia Republicans have helped gerrymander for decades now.
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Those maps were based on an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, packing black voters into a handful of districts to protect Republican lawmakers from competition.
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Lowering the number of Latinx people counted by the census would aid Republican efforts to gerrymander away just representation for this growing population.
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The cases present a fresh opportunity for a state map to be struck down as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander for the first time.
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The state was ordered in 2016 to redraw its congressional map after some of the districts were found to constitute a racial gerrymander.
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The map was a partisan gerrymander that essentially took away meaningful representation and the right to vote for many of the state's citizens.
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If women swing towards Democrats, Republicans will have a difficult time finding a way to gerrymander women voters to maintain their House majority.
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The Supreme Court has struggled without success for decades to develop a legal standard for determining when a partisan gerrymander crosses constitutional lines.
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In Missouri, another nonpartisan group called Clean Missouri needed 180,000 signatures to get its anti-gerrymander initiative on the ballot; it collected 346,000.
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Tom Wolf has vetoed a proposed map of Republican-redrawn congressional districts, arguing the map is "a partisan gerrymander" ahead of Thursday's deadline.
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The Supreme Court just agreed to take a case on the subject of the partisan gerrymander, and let's hope they rule them unconstitutional.
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Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida, described the ruling as an "open invitation" to gerrymander again in the future.
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The new government edict gave labor unions the power to gerrymander workplaces and allow small groups of employees to form collective bargaining units.
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But the ultimate solution should be federal — to create a uniform set of rules and keep both parties from being tempted to gerrymander.
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Minnesota Democrats, who insist that they do not plan to gerrymander, control the governorship and House, and are optimistic about flipping the Senate.
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Minnesota Democrats, who insist that they do not plan to gerrymander, control the governorship and House, and are optimistic about flipping the Senate.
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That earlier decision, issued in January, was the first from a federal court to strike down a congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.
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Those lines, civil rights groups and Democratic attorneys contend, were improperly drawn using partisanship rather than race to gerrymander districts that favor Republicans.
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An explicitly partisan, but not racial, gerrymander that packed Democrats (but, ostensibly, not black North Carolinians) into as few House districts as possible.
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One strangely shaped district was said to look like a salamander, and was combined with the governor's name to create the term gerrymander.
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I will personally award $7,000 to the first follower who draws a Dem gerrymander where 6/8 districts are D+7 or higher. pic.twitter.
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Since the GOP-tilting precincts don't tilt as severely, the GOP vote sinks you'd craft to make a Democratic gerrymander aren't nearly as effective.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the old congressional district lines were a partisan gerrymander and ordered new lines redrawn for the fall election.
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So long as elected officials gerrymander their districts and otherwise make it nearly impossible for voters to oust them, direct lawmaking will be popular.
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This ruling represented the first time in over three decades that a federal court had declared a map to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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The Democratic Party doesn't need to gerrymander districts to control Congress; they just need a level playing field to compete, with fairly constructed districts.
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And earlier this year, the state Supreme Court ordered a redesign of Pennsylvania's congressional districts, which were deemed a partisan gerrymander that favored Republicans.
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A lower court panel found that this was indeed an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander — but this too was sent to the Supreme Court on appeal.
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"John Roberts ... gave the Republicans a green light to gerrymander to their hearts content," UC Irvine election law expert Rick Hasen writes at Slate.
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In places where Republicans can't gerrymander the lines — including the 12 largest cities — local Democrats have been pursuing bold, progressive policies that strengthen communities.
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Issues like these are also why the trial court treated the efficiency gap as "corroborative evidence of an aggressive partisan gerrymander" — not ironclad proof.
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Historically, those voters don't show up for off-year elections, and as a result the G.O.P. wins statehouses, which it then leverages to gerrymander.
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Other partisan gerrymander cases are waiting in the wings; one of those may look to the justices like a better vehicle for a ruling.
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The decision was the first from a federal court in more than 241 years to reject a voting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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One thing I always point out to people is that the first gerrymander -- we're talking about gerrymandering a lot these days -- (began in) 1810.
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In essence, the urge to gerrymander districts at the people's expense arises from the people's desire to have primary elections and lengthy electoral processes.
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"This map is likely unconstitutional, and it is clearly a corrupt political gerrymander undertaking by a partisan court," a Costello spokeswoman told The Hill.
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The issue took center stage when the state Supreme Court ruled the old map an unconstitutional gerrymander and ordered it redrawn earlier this year.
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The US Supreme Court recently ruled North Carolina's congressional maps unconstitutional and is currently considering maps in Wisconsin, Texas, and Maryland (a Democratic gerrymander).
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They had invested millions in state legislature races in 2010 to regain control and gerrymander voting districts to "crack and pack" our coalition of voters.
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To be clear, Democrats have also been known to gerrymander — although current reforms from the Democratic side are toward independently drawn maps, not Democratic ones.
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On May 22, the Supreme Court struck down two congressional district maps in North Carolina, holding the state had engaged in an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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Once in power, GOP officials in those states were able to gerrymander congressional districts to strengthen their electoral prospects for the rest of the decade.
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The high court has struggled in the past to determine exactly what constitutes a partisan gerrymander, noting that drawing districts is a highly political process.
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But if the gerrymander ravaged the party he works to support, then he indeed suffers harm, as do all other involved members of that party.
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The three-judge panel said the current maps represented an "extreme partisan gerrymander," one that handed Republicans 10 of North Carolina's 13 seats in Congress.
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And they could even add a third case to the mix — a challenge to a North Carolina gerrymander that is also teed up for review.
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Efforts by Republicans to permanently gerrymander an advantage in a state that went for Trump by less than one point were junked by the court.
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The high court has never struck down a voting map as a partisan gerrymander — and that question will still have to wait for another day.
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So Democrats were willing to overlook stuff like him agreeing to the Pennsylvania Republicans' gerrymander because it protected him at the expense of suburban Democrats.
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The election installed all those new Republicans in state legislatures and governors' mansions just in time for redistricting, giving them far greater opportunities to gerrymander.
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The court ruled in January that the state's existing congressional map was an illegal partisan gerrymander that "clearly, plainly and palpably" violated the State Constitution.
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"This attempt to gerrymander the corrective action without fixing all of the serious flaws pointed out in our complaint raises significant questions," the spokesperson added.
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They show how complex the seemingly simple definition of an unconstitutional gerrymander really is — and how the justices could define it should they choose to.
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The state Supreme Court ruled in January that Pennsylvania's congressional map was an illegal partisan gerrymander that "clearly, plainly and palpably" violated the State Constitution.
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It's the fad du jour to complain about partisan gerrymandering, but there's a more sinister power grab unfolding right under your nose: the judicial gerrymander.
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They say the map drawn by Republican legislators amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that intentionally diluted the electoral strength of individuals who oppose Republicans.
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Republican officials are now appealing a second decision from a three-judge district court panel to strike down the maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Michigan and Ohio now have laws that will make it much more difficult for either party to re-gerrymander those states after the 2020 census.
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The state's first map, which was approved by legislators in 2011, was struck down by courts as an improper racial gerrymander and redrawn in 2016.
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When, 33 years ago, the justices unanimously let a Republican gerrymander in Indiana slide, they said the impact on Democrats was discriminatory but not egregiously so.
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Justice Neil Gorsuch launched this line of questioning in Rucho v Common Cause, a challenge to an extreme Republican gerrymander of congressional districts in North Carolina.
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And moves are afoot in the Pennsylvania legislature to gerrymander judicial elections in response to the state Supreme Court's crackdown on a Republican-favouring congressional map.
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District 35, meanwhile—a skinny, long district resembling the nation of Chilé—showed signs of an "impermissible racial gerrymander", line-drawing based predominantly on racial considerations.
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With no one watching over them, and with increasingly sophisticated methods of identifying optimal maps to warp elections, legislators are now empowered to gerrymander at will.
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It's a major change from Republicans, who speak to their base voters and choose to gerrymander the rest of the state out of having a voice.
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Christopher Warshaw, a political scientist at MIT, argues that Republicans hold three or four more seats than they would have without such an extreme partisan gerrymander.
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So, just like gerrymandering districts, we gerrymander the rules by which we run elections, and it's done for the same partisan reasons with elections, with districting.
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Challengers say the partisan gerrymander was so extreme that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment equality guarantee and First Amendment rights related to party affiliation and views.
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Democrats were helped when the state Supreme Court (controlled by Democrats) voted to redraw the state's congressional map after finding the old one an unconstitutional gerrymander.
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In Pennsylvania, this would be a part that contains two districts (85033 – 8), which it would presumably be able to gerrymander so that it wins both.
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Where voters have risen up to banish the gerrymander, incumbents have sought to welcome it back in, through appeals and bids to nullify the voters' will.
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As more people move to cities — and as Republicans gerrymander Democrats into fewer districts — our congressional elections have become less representative of the will of voters.
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Later in 215, the Republican Party's "Redmap" strategy won the party control of enough state governments to gerrymander congressional districts across the nation the following year.
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The Maryland case was about a Democratic gerrymander, where the Democratic legislature redrew one district from performing majority-Republican to majority-Democrat to sustain its dominance.
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Flashback: In January, the state's Supreme Court ruled the existing map from 2011 was a partisan gerrymander that unfairly benefited Republicans and violated the state's constitution.
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The Supreme Court has never ruled a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional, and it passed up three separate opportunities to do so in the last term.
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The division had previously asked for such oversight after a court found that a map was "an impermissible racial gerrymander" that intentionally blocked people from voting.
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The two competing federal rulings in partisan gerrymander cases this week underscore the courts' angst over even getting involved in political decisions, much less overturning them.
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The district court's decision was the first from a federal court in more than 30 years to reject a voting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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They are giving states freer rein than they have had since enactment of the Voting Rights Act to aggressively gerrymander against the interests of minority voters.
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Rather, political science experts point to two predictors of a successful partisan gerrymander: state legislatures under one-party control and a recent history of close elections.
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The Supreme Court will hear the biggest case of all in October: a challenge to Wisconsin's partisan gerrymander with the potential to curb partisan gerrymandering nationwide.
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Common Cause and the League of Women Voters NC sued again over the new maps, arguing that the new districts still represented an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Supportive media outlets celebrated the downfall of the gerrymander, as you can see in this cartoon: Gerry's name has been inextricably attached to gerrymandering ever since.
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Appellate court ruling: A federal district court ruled that Virginia's third congressional district was formed from an improper "racial gerrymander" and would need to be redrawn.
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In one district Hispanics had been "intentionally deprived of their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice" while another showed signs of an "impermissible racial gerrymander".
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If your side has wasted a substantially larger share of votes than the other side, the odds are that you've been the victim of a partisan gerrymander.
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The case from Maryland involves a Democratic-led gerrymander, and therefore might offer the court a way to tackle this issue without appearing to single out Republicans.
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"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," the opinion said.
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It's like a giant gerrymander where designers of state boundaries packed Democratic voters in a few large states and Republicans in a large number of smaller states.
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If your vote did not matter, then wealthy interests would not try and buy it, and other sinister elements would not try to gerrymander or disenfranchise it.
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Common Cause, they say the map drawn by Republican legislators amounts to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that intentionally diluted the electoral strength of individuals who oppose Republicans.
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The plaintiffs in the Gill case challenged a Republican-favoring gerrymander in Wisconsin, and they proceeded for years primarily on a "vote dilution" theory of the case.
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Justice Kennedy did not tip his hand during oral argument last fall over a Republican-drafted gerrymander of district maps for Wisconsin's lower house, the State Assembly.
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The Supreme Court reversed almost every part of those rulings, though it did hold that a state House district in Tarrant County was an impermissible racial gerrymander.
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With their 2010 state-level Republican victories, the party was able to gerrymander a number of districts in ways that still keep Democrats at a political disadvantage.
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Perez, which upheld all but one district of a state legislative map that lower courts had ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that diluted the votes of Latinos.
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A three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in January that the state's map was an unconstitutional gerrymander.
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Perez involved an unusual set of circumstances where the state of Texas enacted a legislative map that, according to a federal court, was an illegal racial gerrymander.
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A three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in January that the state's map was an unconstitutional gerrymander.
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Democrats also benefited from court decisions that redrew the old Republican gerrymander, putting districts that had been resistant to the 2017 "blue wave" closer to the shore.
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It's also possible to racially gerrymander to benefit minority groups, by drawing districts in unusual ways to ensure certain racial minority groups make up a majority there.
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Meanwhile, swing states matter most because it's possible, with a creative gerrymander, to turn a 50-22010 state to one that sends a 220-225 delegation in Congress.
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To be considered an unconstitutional gerrymander, they suggest, a district plan must first be shown to exceed some chosen efficiency gap threshold, to be determined by the court.
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"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
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That means that if one party has majorities in both the state House and state Senate, as well as the governorship, they can gerrymander to their heart's content.
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In a special session next month, they will attempt to gerrymander trial-court districts in favor of Republicans and to cut judicial terms from eight years to two.
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And while a partisan gerrymander will usually have a large efficiency gap, the efficiency gap can also unintuitively take on large values when there are very few districts.
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Yet they are also the first to acknowledge that the same algorithms that can create equity in congressional redistricting can also be used to gerrymander with unprecedented efficiency.
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"In my view, however, the arguments are not so compelling that they require us now to bar all future claims of injury from a partisan gerrymander," he wrote.
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They cite his role providing legal counsel to the North Carolina Republican Party on the state's congressional map, which was struck down this year as a partisan gerrymander.
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They argue the maps represent extreme partisan gerrymander and that they prevent fair and effective representation by diluting voters' influence and penalizing voters based on their political beliefs.
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Roberts worried about the reputation of the court and that if it were to get involved in issues considering partisan gerrymander it would make the court look political.
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A three-judge panel in North Carolina on Monday struck down the state's Republican-drawn redistricting map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander for the second time this year.
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"Consider an active member of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin who resides in a district that a partisan gerrymander has left untouched (neither packed nor cracked)," Kagan posited.
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Last year, the court got into the nitty-gritty of redistricting when it decided by a 5-4 vote that Alabama's new district map was a racial gerrymander.
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The state Supreme Court threw out the state's current congressional map as an unfair partisan gerrymander, and issued a new map last month with very different district boundaries.
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Tuesday's Pennsylvania primaries are the opening act in a drama that Democrats nationally are eagerly watching: Who will win under new congressional maps that undo a Republican gerrymander?
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A three-judge panel on the federal District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled 2628-28500 in November that the map was an unconstitutional political gerrymander.
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Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, called the results "a beautiful gerrymander" because Republicans were protected even in a bad year for their party.
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But earlier this year, the state supreme court (which has a Democratic majority) threw out the map, saying it violated the state's constitution by being an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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"Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans have decried it when wielded by their opponents but nonetheless continue to gerrymander in their own self interest when given the opportunity," he added.
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It's a huge issue in North Carolina: The US Supreme Court ruled the state's old congressional maps were to be struck down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in 2016.
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It's official: Pennsylvania will get a new US House of Representatives map for 210, replacing an old map the state's supreme court struck down as a Republican partisan gerrymander.
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Driving the news: The justices will hear two hours of oral arguments Tuesday: one hour about North Carolina's map and one hour about a Democratic-led gerrymander in Maryland.
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"While special elections have costs," they "pale in comparison to the costs to voters of a racial gerrymander," a federal panel of judges in North Carolina wrote in November.
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"The lower court here struck down the maps as an intentional racial gerrymander," said Joshua A. Douglas an election law expert at the University of Kentucky College of Law.
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Now, the NLRB has determined that when a union petitions to organize employees it can "gerrymander the workplace" into so-called "micro-unions" based on very specific job descriptions.
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Democrats cite his role providing legal counsel to the North Carolina Republican Party on the state's congressional map, which was struck down this year as a partisan gerrymander. Sen.
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The plaintiffs, complaining about an egregious Republican gerrymander of the state legislature, have come up with a new test to measure when politics has over-infiltrated the redistricting process.
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They've given Republicans in many states free rein to gerrymander and pass restrictive voting laws that provide them with an artificial and undemocratic advantage in elections on every level.
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In 2016, North Carolina Republicans tried to defend a gerrymander that neutered the state's black vote by arguing that it wasn't targeted along racial lines, but rather partisan ones.
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In 2010, Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating a significant Republican push to gerrymander legislative districts after that year's midterm elections.
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"We're optimistic that the court will at last recognize that there is a point at which a partisan gerrymander goes too far," Mr. Geffen said in a phone interview.
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The majority held that the court is "not yet persuaded that it was the gerrymander (versus a host of forces present in every election) that flipped" the Sixth District.
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"This entire exercise, while cloaked in 'litigation,' is and has been nothing more than the ultimate partisan gerrymander," wrote House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.
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" Five of the seven justices on the court agreed with the League of Women Voters and others who brought the case alleging that the map is an unconstitutional "partisan gerrymander.
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The election installed all those new Republicans in state legislatures and governors' mansions just in time for redistricting, giving them far more opportunities to gerrymander district boundaries to their liking.
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At that point, very little is off the map, and getting the 24 seats we need to take back the House is suddenly a real possibility, GOP gerrymander or not.
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The only remedy for North Carolina's gerrymander was court action, because state law neither allows the governor to veto the legislature's districting plan nor provides for an independent initiative process.
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To get a sense of how powerful Pennsylvania's gerrymander was, consider that, in 20113, Democratic candidates won slightly more votes in US House elections and Barack Obama won the state.
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Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court on Monday tackled two racial gerrymander cases in a fresh attempt to determine how race can be taken into consideration when states draw district lines.
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Even if the Supreme Court overturns Wisconsin's gerrymander in a highly-watched case this term, there still will be wiggle room for partisans to skew the maps toward their favor.
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When Cooper vetoed the bill, Republicans used their legislative supermajorities—won via an electoral map that's been ruled an illegal racial gerrymander—to override him and muscle it into law.
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If the music industry is a group of horny, money-loving Congressmen (notice the gender distinction, it's intentional), then the Alternative genre provides them with a constant opportunity to gerrymander.
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A partisan gerrymander like the Republican-engineered map "evince[s] a fundamental distrust of voters by serving the self-interest of political parties over the public good" and cannot stand.
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Washington (CNN)A deeply divided Supreme Court took up a partisan gerrymander case on Tuesday that could change the way state legislators draw district lines and realign modern day politics.
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Washington (CNN)The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in the battleground state of Ohio on Wednesday, arguing that its congressional map amounts to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Democrats had cited Farr's role in providing legal counsel to the North Carolina Republican Party on the state's congressional map, which was struck down this year as a partisan gerrymander.
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Common Cause argues that because a Republican partisan advantage was an express criteria that the North Carolina General Assembly adopted for redistricting, the map is an automatic unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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David Daley is the author of the national bestseller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count and the forthcoming Unrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed the Gerrymander and Reinvented Democracy.
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The decision also presents the justices with an opportunity to set a test for what constitutes a partisan gerrymander, an issue the court has struggled to resolve in the past.
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Reno, the Supreme Court ruled against the existing districts and, in so doing, created the concept of the unconstitutional racial gerrymander: a separation of voters by race without sufficient justification.
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"They're using that because that's the only tool they have," Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said of liberals' use of racial gerrymander claims.
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Last month, a panel of judges in the state ruled the maps were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but said there wasn't enough time to draw new maps before Nov. 6.
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The compelling interest requirement is meant to address a big problem: In the US, lawmakers have often used racial demographics to gerrymander a legislative district map for personal political advantage.
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To get a sense of how powerful Pennsylvania's gerrymander was, consider that in 2012, Democratic candidates won slightly more votes in US House elections and Barack Obama won the state.
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The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander, and it instantly endangered Republican seats in the coming elections.
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The previous North Carolina decision, issued by a three-judge panel last week, was the first from a federal court to strike down a congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.
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In Wednesday's arguments, the majority of the justices appeared to agree that Maryland officials had created an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in redrawing its 28503th Congressional District after the 22019 Census.
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"The analysis by my team shows that, like the 2011 map, the map submitted to my office by Republican leaders is still a gerrymander," Wolf said in a statement Tuesday.
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After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymander of that state's congressional map last year, Democrats captured nine of 18 House seats, a gain of four from 2016.
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And political pros use powerful data tools to gerrymander districts to maximize the concentration of partisans and minimize the need to appeal to independents or voters from the other party.
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While the conservatives on the bench suggested the issue should be left to the political branches, Kennedy had been unwilling to bar all future claims of injury from partisan gerrymander.
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Experts I've discussed it with also note that the idea might be unworkable in practice, as affluent neighborhoods could simply push to gerrymander themselves into their own independent school districts.
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In November 2016, a panel of three judges ruled that the map was unconstitutionally drawn to favor Republicans, the first time a partisan gerrymander was struck down in federal court.
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Even his name is frequently mispronounced because of the term — gerrymander is typically pronounced with a "J" sound, like "jerry," but Gerry's name should be pronounced with a hard "G."
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"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," the opinion, authored by Justice Kavanaugh, read.
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"If you're never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that's unconstitutional?" said Wendy K. Tam Cho, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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That meant that if one party controlled the governorship and both chambers of the legislature, they could more or less gerrymander to their hearts' content, which Republicans did last time around.
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For Justice Alito, this deference to the district court's ruling looks more like "diffidence"—and is inconsistent with the Supreme Court's 2001 ruling upholding a gerrymander of the very same district.
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When the court ruled that the map in use since 2011 was an extreme partisan gerrymander that violates Pennsylvania's constitution, it gave legislators until February 9th to devise a new one.
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But this January, the state Supreme Court — which has a Democratic majority — struck down the existing map as a partisan gerrymander that, a majority of justices wrote, violated the state constitution.
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Although it tends not to disempower under-represented minorities, Democrats frequently engage in gerrymandering too: Democrats in Maryland passed a pro-Democratic map that plaintiffs challenged as an unlawful partisan gerrymander.
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In our own moment, it can feel as though the government has some kind of monopoly on the truth, as if the right wing can gerrymander the very principles of reality.
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But Kennedy, a conservative who has often sided with the four liberals on the bench, also seemed sympathetic to the idea that an extreme partisan gerrymander might violate First Amendment rights.
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Because they controlled the state legislature, they were able to gerrymander Pennsylvania's 220006 congressional districts so that they won 2202 districts (2628 percent) and the Democrats won only five in 28500.
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But with four or more districts, the minority party will have more and more ability to gerrymander its part so that it wins a proportional share of districts in the state.
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That can be hard to do when the states where many immigrants live — Texas and Arizona in particular — gerrymander Latino communities out of political power and limit funding to their neighborhoods.
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The term gerrymander was coined after Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts's governor, signed an 210 law that included a voting district shaped like a salamander to help the electoral prospects of his party.
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This means that if one party dominates in an election year ending in a zero — as Republicans did in 2010 — that party will get to gerrymander a disproportionate number of states.
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Those maps were drawn by a court-appointed special master earlier this year after a lower court held that some of the districts in earlier maps amounted to a racial gerrymander.
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The Republican gerrymander of Pennsylvania's congressional districts is one of the worst in the country, yet last week, a panel of federal judges, in the 2-1 decision of Agre v.
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The 2016 map was challenged in federal court as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that partisan gerrymandering claims have no business before federal courts.
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Three decades ago, the justices refused to snuff out a Republican-drawn gerrymander in Indiana, and in 2004, they could not agree on a standard for determining when redistricting offends the constitution.
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But the official plan is even more biased, favoring Democrats more strongly than 99.79 percent of the algorithm's maps—a result extremely unlikely to occur in the absence of an intentional gerrymander.
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"Apple's line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority decision.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last month that the state's US House of Representatives map was based on a Republican partisan gerrymander that violated the state's constitution — and struck the map down.
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Virginia State Board of Elections, voters in each of the districts challenged the new map, claiming it constituted a racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 2900th Amendment.
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Earlier this month, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, tore up two congressional district maps in North Carolina, holding that they amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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A panel of three judges struck down North Carolina's 2016 congressional map as unconstitutional on Tuesday—the first time a federal court had done so as a result of a partisan gerrymander.
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"At that point, very little is off the map, and getting the 24 seats we need to take back the House is suddenly a real possibility, GOP gerrymander or not," Moulitsas said.
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"The court clearly sided with voters today by declaring that an unconstitutional, partisan gerrymander in Maryland squashed political participation and speech," Kathay Feng, the group's national redistricting director, said in a statement.
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The practical implication is that one potential tool that could be used to check the power of state legislatures to gerrymander on partisan grounds — lawsuits brought in federal courts — no longer exists.
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A court in North Carolina ruled unanimously on Tuesday that the state's partisan gerrymander, which kept Republicans in power in the state legislature even as Democrats won popular votes statewide, is illegal.
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Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey are trying to gerrymander Republicans into a sort of permanent minority status, a controversial maneuver that some national Democrats say is unfair, The Times's Nick Corasaniti reports.
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They picked up just one more seat than in the current Assembly, a result of a gerrymander drawn so well that it protected nearly every Republican seat in a Democratic wave election.
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After a trial in 2017, the district Court then invalidated two districts of Plan C235 holding that one was enacted with discriminatory intent and the other contained was an impermissible racial gerrymander.
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Also, Emily Bazelon in The New York Times Magazine, on how math is being used to gerrymander voting districts, and what that means for arguments against the practice in the Supreme Court.
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The justices ruled narrowly against a group of Democratic voters in Wisconsin who challenged the state's 2011 redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in a case known as Gill v. Whitford.
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" The suit contends that one state House district's lines were so brazenly drawn that the result mirrors an oddly-drawn Massachusetts district in 1812, one that gave birth to the term "gerrymander.
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Republicans have not won a statewide political office since 2009, but had hung onto power in the state legislature in part due to past redistricting that a court deemed a racial gerrymander.
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In widely criticized lame-duck sessions of the Wisconsin and Michigan Legislatures, Republicans raced to strip powers from new Democratic governors, partly to protect their ability to gerrymander after the 20163 census.
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"It makes no sense for courts to close their eyes to new scientific or statistical methods," he wrote in a decision striking down North Carolina's congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Two questions are before the justices: Does the House of Delegates have the legal right, or "standing" to bring the challenge, and should the districts be struck down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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Another coalition victory in federal court overturned the legislature's "racial gerrymander" in 28 districts, requiring new district lines and a special election in 2017; the US Supreme Court is reviewing that case now.
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And now that it has refused to do so, Cris Dush, a Republican legislator, is calling for the five judges who voted down the Pennsylvania gerrymander to be impeached for "misbehaviour in office".
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The justices' ruling, issued in several unsigned orders, mean that the states don't have to immediately start redrawing the maps, after the lower courts found that current district maps constituted a partisan gerrymander.
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Loopholes exploited by Clinton and Obama regulations have allowed—and even encouraged—states to use old unemployment data or gerrymander areas in order to waive work requirements in as many jurisdictions as possible.
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It looks a lot like the salamander-shaped district drawn by then-Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry that bequeathed the name "gerrymander" (with a hard "g," by the way) to contemporary American political discourse.
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The arrangement of justices in Virginia House of Delegates v Bethune-Hill, a 5-4 decision dealing a death-blow to a racially biased gerrymander of Virginia's state legislative map, was particularly notable.
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He was extolled — or lambasted — in magazines and books and online as a father of the Republican strategy of cementing political control by controlling redistricting, and as the Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander.
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After Mr. Orban re-entered office in 2010 and began to subjugate the judiciary, take over the news media and gerrymander the electoral map, Mr. Orban was snubbed repeatedly by the Obama administration.
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Gerrymander opponents have argued in both state and federal lawsuits that partisan redistricting violates the First Amendment by punishing one party's voters for speaking with their votes in opposition to the other party.
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In another instance, Mr. Farr defended the state's partisan gerrymander before the Supreme Court, which struck down some of the districts after ruling they were drawn with the objective of disenfranchising black voters.
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That makes the real question — the one that has tied the court in knots for three decades — tougher: Can the justices devise a yardstick that reliably measures when a gerrymander oversteps constitutional bounds?
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Decisions on two cases Monday by the Supreme Court — an alleged Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin and a Democratic one in Maryland — shut down one novel approach to attacking partisan gerrymanders on constitutional grounds.
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Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics argues that a bigger House would be more difficult to gerrymander and would make it easier to draw majority-minority districts to ensure black and Latino communities are represented.
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" Speaking at a press conference in San Francisco on election security, Pelosi accused Republicans of trying to suppress the vote and gerrymander districts so that "just their people vote and not the general population.
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Now Republican state legislatures are using data and computer algorithms to purge inconvenient voters, gerrymander districts, institute racially motivated voter ID laws, and close key polling places in order to maximally suppress minority votes.
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Reuters investigates the effects of deforestation on South America's largest savanna, a federal court says North Carolina gerrymander is illegal and Russia is set to hold its biggest war games in nearly four decades.
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And given that North Carolina voters have suffered under the gerrymander "for six years and three election cycles", it may not behoove the courts to let them distort democracy a fourth time in November.
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" A 1902 publication from the Mississippi Historical Society described this gerrymander as "the legal basis and bulwark of the design of white supremacy in a State with an overwhelming and a growing negro majority.
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The justices have already heard Gill v Whitford, a challenge to a partisan Republican-drawn gerrymander in Wisconsin, and they will soon consider a partisan map favouring Democrats in Maryland in Benisek v Lamone.
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A partisan gerrymander tries to maximise the opponent's wasted votes by "packing" and "cracking"—creating a few safe districts that they win overwhelmingly, while spreading the rest of their voters as thinly as possible.
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However, the Supreme Court has explicitly, and correctly, concluded that a one-off outcome like the 21812 percent example cannot be used to prove a gerrymander, because such an outcome could occur by chance.
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It's that last point that will be a bone of contention going forward as the justices think back to a case from 2004 when the court denied a partisan gerrymander claim out of Pennsylvania.
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Tom Wolf, Governor of Pennsylvania, told the state's Supreme Court on Tuesday that he will not accept the proposed congressional map that state Republican leaders submitted last week, saying it remains a partisan gerrymander.
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It isn't clear whether the chief's decision to sign Justice Alito's dissent in Bethune-Hill translates into a willingness to tame the gerrymander—but that mystery should be resolved in a matter of days.
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"We needed for legal and PR purposes a good looking map that did not look like an obvious gerrymander," Mr. LaBrant wrote in May 2011 to Jeff Timmer, a consultant to the drafting process.
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The ruling sets up a delicate tactical question for the Supreme Court, which has never ruled a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional, passing up three separate opportunities to do so in its last term.
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So did Republican leaders in North Carolina's State Legislature, who hired Mr. Hofeller in 290 and 22000 to draw the maps that the state court on Tuesday struck down as a blatantly unconstitutional gerrymander.
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But the impact of the ruling ultimately will turn on an opinion by the Supreme Court, which is weighing decisions in two other partisan gerrymander cases involving congressional districts in North Carolina and Maryland.
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And there's important context for the 2018 House elections; the state's electoral map was redrawn earlier this year after the state Supreme Court ruled the old maps were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander by Republicans.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court drew a new map for the state's 18 congressional districts after previously invalidating the existing lines as an unconstitutional gerrymander, finding the Republican-controlled legislature drew them to marginalize Democratic voters.
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A North Carolina state court effectively threw out the state's map of congressional districts on Monday, saying critics were poised to show "beyond a reasonable doubt" that it was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander favoring Republicans.
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This would not merely allow voters to vote for their favorite candidate without risking their least-favored outcome, it would also address another major democratic infirmity by making it much harder to gerrymander House districts.
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Justice Thomas consistently votes against official consideration of race, no matter the political fallout: he rejects race-based affirmative action, voted against an earlier District 12 gerrymander in 2001 and did so again this week.
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Among them: Changing rules that allow lawmakers to "gerrymander" districts to ensure one party's dominance; reforming campaign finance; setting term limits in the House and Senate, and eliminating party control of the federal legislative process.
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This is a very successful partisan gerrymander: even in a Democratic wave year like 2018, it held up — only one race (in the 9th district) ended up being close, and the Republican even won there.
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In most cases, the state legislature controls the redistricting process, which means that the party with control over the legislature has the ability to gerrymander, or redraw congressional districts in the interests of that party.
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Pennsylvania GOP leaders are calling on the Supreme Court to overturn a state court ruling that declared the state's congressional map an improper gerrymander, scuttling its congressional districts earlier this year in favor of Democrats.
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Republican officials didn't dispute they had drawn the maps with the intent to favor Republicans, but intent to give one party a leg up, they argued, isn't enough to prove an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander occurred.
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"This is nothing more than a political ploy by the Democrats to create a system to allow them to gerrymander districts," said Saul Anuzis, a GOP strategist and former chairman of the state Republican Party.
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These are far more important than your run-of-the-mill primaries: In February, the state supreme court ruled that the GOP-drawn districts amounted to an unconstitutional gerrymander and ordered new lines be drawn.
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Linda Greenhouse There's been a flood of hand-wringing and tut-tutting over some observations that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered during the argument earlier this month in the big Wisconsin gerrymander case.
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This means it's up to judges to determine whether a particular gerrymander was legally or illegally motivated, and several candidates emphasized on Thursday that partisanship could now be used as a pretense for racial discrimination.
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If the ruling holds — and it is expected to, because it's based on state law, not federal — this will be the fourth Republican gerrymander to be eroded by the courts since the 2014 midterm elections.
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Democrats who sued to overturn the old maps always sought "a Democratic judicial gerrymander that ensures a Democratic majority," State Senate Leader Phil Berger, a Republican from south-central North Carolina, said in a statement.
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North Carolina Republicans approved a new congressional map Friday that would cost the party at least two House seats and potentially roil the state's delegation — but Democrats immediately objected, saying it's still a GOP gerrymander.
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But the current maps were drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2016, after a US Supreme Court case deemed older maps drawn in 2011 to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that disadvantaged the state's black voters.
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When Pennsylvania Democrats went to the Supreme Court in 2004 to ask that Pennsylvania's GOP-drawn congressional map be struck down as an unfair partisan gerrymander, they drew opposition from an unexpected source: fellow Democrats.
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The typical remedy for an illegal gerrymander is a new map drawn by the legislature or a "special master", but ordinarily courts do not order new maps to go into effect so soon before an election.
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Scrutinising district lines, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in 1946, could be a fraught exercise that brings judges into "the political thicket"; Paul Clement, the lawyer defending the North Carolina gerrymander, cited that warning on March 26th.
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On March 26th, the Supreme Court scrutinised North Carolina's map and another brazen gerrymander that turned a reliably Republican district in Maryland Democratic, boosting Democrats' share of the state's eight congressional seats from six to seven.
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When the court ruled on January 22nd that the map in use since 2011 was an extreme partisan gerrymander that violates Pennsylvania's constitution, it gave legislators until February 9th to send Mr Wolf a fairer map.
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Republicans currently hold the majority in the entire House of Representatives by 24 seats (assuming no special elections result in partisan change) — and the Pennsylvania gerrymander could be responsible for three to four of those seats.
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These exemptions are welcome, but they also amount to an effort to gerrymander the group of affected individuals so as to reduce bad press and to leave no individual plaintiffs legally capable of challenging the bans.
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So for Republicans to proclaim Ohio as a "red" state now -- well, they've worked overtime to gerrymander the state and make it harder for traditionally Democratic voters to make their voices heard at the ballot box.
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A threshold question in Tuesday's dispute over a 2011 Wisconsin redistricting plan that a lower court deemed an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander is whether federal judges should even review partisan claims arising from the inherently political process.
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These Valley players are motivated by their own interests more than by party politics, and they're not afraid to gerrymander their philosophies into weird snaky shapes that protect their financial interests without (mostly) sacrificing personal ethics.
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The Supreme Court has a big decision left to make as it heads into its final weeks of the term: whether to strike down a voter map for the first time as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Eight years ago, Republicans took advantage of an ideally timed wave election to gerrymander themselves some favorable seats in the House and in state chambers, giving themselves advantages that let them keep control in subsequent contests.
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The federal court's decision later not to call a special election left the existing legislative gerrymander — and a veto-proof Republican majority in both the state House and Senate — in place for roughly an additional year.
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Voting rights groups had accused Republicans of "seeking a stay of the district court's remedial order so that they can hang on to the fruits of their racial gerrymander labor for at least one more year. "
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Compounding the GOP's vulnerability, the new congressional map the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued Monday, after earlier ruling that the current district lines represented an impermissible gerrymander, strengthened the Democrats' hand in all three suburban Philadelphia seats.
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"The congressional map passed by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature simply replaces one partisan gerrymander with a new one," said former Attorney General Eric Holder, who leads the National Redistricting Foundation, which backed the lawsuit.
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This is certainly better for Democrats, but due to the degree the state was gerrymandered to benefit Republicans, it's more accurate to think of this redrawing as leveling out the balance rather than a Democratic gerrymander.
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Republicans in Pennsylvania, reeling after the state Supreme Court struck down their old congressional maps as a partisan gerrymander, are gearing up for 2018 by raising about $20183 million, compared to $1.4 million raised by Democrats.
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"We are convinced by the evidence that this partisan gerrymander was intentional and effective and that no legitimate justification accounts for its extremity," Judges Karen Moore, Timothy Black and Michael Watson wrote in their 300-page opinion.
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Hispanics were "intentionally deprived of their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice" in District 27, the panel wrote, and District 20173 showed signs of an "impermissible racial gerrymander"—line-drawing based predominantly on racial considerations.
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A year after this "devastatingly effective" gerrymander, a House seat which a Republican, Roscoe Bartlett, had won for a tenth time in 2010 by 28 points went to John Delaney, a Democrat with presidential ambitions for 2020.
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When the Republican majority in the state legislature drew the map in 2016 after the Supreme Court found its previous map was illegally gerrymandered along racial lines, legislators announced their updated gerrymander was partisan, not race-based.
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A second argument over a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland that erased a Republican-held House seat will be heard this year, and it is possible that the North Carolina or Pennsylvania cases will be considered as well.
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But one thing was clear: The judges who declared the state's partisan gerrymander unconstitutional on Monday adopted the roadmap of liberal Supreme Court justices over the sentiment of conservatives in the high court's recent political redistricting battle.
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The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office report, which reviewed 200 projects from 2015, appears to support claims that developers take advantage of lax requirements under the EB-5 visa program to gerrymander projects in poorer areas into wealthy areas.
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General Assemblyman David Lewis, the GOP strategist of a 21625 redistricting bill to replace the plan a panel of federal judges rejected as "an impermissible effort to dictate electoral outcomes," acknowledged that his legislation was a political gerrymander.
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Washington (CNN)A panel of three federal judges in North Carolina ruled Monday the state's congressional map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that favors Republicans, and said it may require districts to be redrawn before the November elections.
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But in their bid to win control of Midwestern state Legislatures — bodies that will have the power to gerrymander congressional, State Senate and state house districts after the 2020 census — they face a tough-to-crack Republican firewall.
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Besides asserting that legislators had misled the federal court about how quickly they could prepare new maps to replace their gerrymander, it also accused them of falsely claiming that race had played no role in the new boundaries.
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But the principle also works in Maryland, where the popular Republican governor, Larry Hogan, serves as a buffer against the state's Democratic Legislature, which created an extreme partisan gerrymander with the eager help of Mr. Hogan's Democratic predecessor.
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In strongly Republican Utah, the anti-gerrymander initiative is aimed more at boundaries drawn to protect entrenched incumbents than at any partisan imbalance, said Jeff Wright, a Republican and a co-chairman of the bipartisan group Better Boundaries.
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He has said that if judges intervened to find that partisan gerrymander had gone too far to infringe on constitutional rights, siding with either Democrats or Republicans, people would view courts as simply favoring one party over another.
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The lower court said that for a map to be considered an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander there has to be discriminatory intent, a large and durable discriminatory effect and a lack of a legitimate justification for the partisan effect.
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Wolf's press office confirmed that the governor told Pennsylvania's Supreme Court that he won't approve the new congressional lines on the grounds that it's a "partisan gerrymander that does not comply with the court's order" or state constitution.
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"North Carolina's gerrymandering was one of the most brazen in the nation, where state legislative leaders proudly pronounced it a partisan gerrymander," Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote on his election law blog.
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Of course, the only reason control of the Virginia House of Delegates election came down to a bowl game was because Republicans had used their previous control over the districting process to gerrymander themselves into a significant advantage.
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At the time, North Carolina was coming off of a US Supreme Court ruling that the 22 maps drawn by Republicans were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander meant to dilute the voting power of the state's African-American voters.
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The ruling in Ohio A. Philip Randolph Institute v Householder explains why the plaintiffs have the legal right to sue in court, the issue on which a challenge to a Wisconsin gerrymander foundered at the Supreme Court last year.
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They sued the state, arguing that its partisan gerrymander was so extreme that it violated their First Amendment rights to association and free speech and the "one person, one vote" principle enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause.
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"We would be perfectly comfortable with the court saying that the way that we know it's too much is if it results in a durable partisan gerrymander that will resist changes in politics over the coming decade," he said.
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The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June on one of them, the federal court's decision that a map of North Carolina's House of Representatives districts, drawn by Mr. Hofeller, is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Voting-rights advocates in Pennsylvania filed suit on Thursday to nullify the state's congressional-district map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, joining other court battles over the role of politics in redistricting already being waged in three other states.
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The partisan gerrymander has been the worst thing to happen to our politics in recent years, turning once-purple districts either bright red or deep blue, and accelerating the rise of the fringe and the decline of the center.
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Gill presents the Supreme Court with a new social-scientific metric for pinpointing when a gerrymander crosses that line—a mathematical analysis that may win over Anthony Kennedy, the justice most likely to swing the ruling one way or another.
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Meanwhile, nobody's quite sure what the district will look like because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (which has a 5-2 Democratic majority) will hear oral arguments this week on whether the congressional map should be overturned because it's a partisan gerrymander.
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So why would the Ohio Republican Party — which has controlled the governorship, dominates the state legislature, and drew the maps of its dreams in 103 — sign on to a deal that could limit its power to gerrymander in the future?
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The map in question has a tainted pedigree, with a previous version struck down as an illegal racial gerrymander and the 2016 revision drawn in a transparent attempt to keep the partisan advantage while not illicitly sorting North Carolinians by race.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday afternoon released a new congressional map for use in the 20113 elections — the result of a decision from the court in January that the existing map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander under the state's constitution.
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"As a consequence of their gains, Republicans now had four times as many districts to gerrymander as the Democrats" and the legislative power to pass a series of laws suppressing the vote of those who might not support their agenda.
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In a 5-2 party-line vote, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's Democratic majority last month invalidated the existing map as an unconstitutional gerrymander, ruling that Republican lawmakers marginalized Democratic voters to win more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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The chief reasoned that voters complaining about the gerrymander—in which Republicans took 60 of 99 state assembly seats in 2012 despite being the choice of just 49% of voters—did not show they had suffered an "individual" and "personal" harm.
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In October, when the justices heard Gill v Whitford, a 14th Amendment equal-protection challenge to a gerrymander engineered by Wisconsin Republicans to hurt Democrats running for the state legislature, even Justice Samuel Alito admitted that highly skewed districts are "distasteful".
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"If a group of politicians in a particular state wants to gerrymander the state to favor them, we can incorporate that into our algorithm and come up with districts which will satisfy their political agenda," Jacobson told me over the phone.
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"Members of the Republican Party in the Sixth District, 'deprived of their natural political strength by a partisan gerrymander, were burdened in fundraising, attracting volunteers, campaigning, and generating interest in voting in an atmosphere of general confusion and apathy," he added.
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The backdrop: The opposition coalition was led by Mahathir Mohamad, a 92-year-old former prime minister and mentor-turned-critic of current prime minister Najib Razak, who had attempted to gerrymander his way to victory despite a major financial scandal.
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A federal court in Wisconsin ruled in November that the state's Republican-controlled legislature had discriminated against Democratic voters, and it partly relied on the efficiency gap to find that the Wisconsin State Assembly map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Republicans' efforts to ensure a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, like state-level efforts to suppress the vote of people of color and gerrymander districts to dilute their electoral clout, are a clear expression of white fear.
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Karachi politicians from several parties say the national election commission used those census results to gerrymander the constituencies for this election in an effort to ensure that the city would never again be under the stranglehold of a single party.
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Perhaps most important among them is that advances in computing now permit experts to randomly generate thousands and even millions of hypothetical maps, all drawn using the same criteria, that can be compared with the maps challenged in gerrymander trials.
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Under the old map, this was the infamous District 7: the flagrant, "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" gerrymander that tied Democratic-leaning Philadelphia suburbs to heavily Republican Amish country, pulling in pieces of five counties and 26 municipalities along the way.
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But this is a Democratic gerrymander, so the goal is the opposite: This district is safely Democratic, and it extends to the countryside to soak up Republican-leaning turf that might otherwise make up a Republican district in western Maryland. 14.
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Instead, most of the top Democratic white working-class opportunities are in states like Iowa and Maine, where the political geography doesn't allow for a brutal gerrymander, or in states like New York and Illinois, where Democrats have more control.
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A panel of three federal judges said on Monday that the Wisconsin Legislature's 232 redrawing of State Assembly districts to favor Republicans was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the first such ruling in three decades of pitched legal battles over the issue.
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The provision allowed Massachusetts hospitals to gerrymander the arcane Medicare wage index system to their advantage by using an extremely remote, low volume hospital located on an extremely high cost of living island as the floor for all wages statewide.
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North Carolina Republican lawmakers are facing many legal challenges to their 2016 maps, which they redrew after a US Supreme Court case deemed older maps drawn in 2011 to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that disadvantaged the state's black voters.
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To these, Grofman adds two more requirements: simulations showing that the plan is an extreme outlier, suggesting that the gerrymander was intentional, and evidence that the people who made the map knew they were drawing a much more biased plan than necessary.
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In fact, as Wasserman points out, the electoral picture has gotten more favorable for Democrats leading up to 343, given the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled the state's congressional maps an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and drew new, fairer ones.
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All eight justices to hear the case—which was heard before Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Court—agreed that one of the majority-minority districts in question, District 20013, was a gerrymander based on race and hence unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Common Cause, is brought by voting rights groups and voters who filed a lawsuit arguing that North Carolina's 2016 congressional district maps drawn by Republican legislators amount to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that intentionally diluted the electoral strength of individuals who oppose Republicans.
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Mr. Rosenthal offers, as two examples, the holiday itself and this week's federal court decision that Wisconsin's redrawing of State Assembly districts to favor Republicans was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the first such ruling in three decades of legal battles over the issue.
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Michael Kimberly, who argued on behalf of the Republican voters fighting the map drawn by Democrats in Maryland, said his clients would be fine with a standard that looks at whether one party will be hurt by a partisan gerrymander for years.
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It's still too early to tell how successful a progressive populist strategy will be—populists lost special elections in Montana and Kansas, for example—and a populist candidate can't immediately solve years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts and suppress the vote.
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However, Maryland has the only effective Democratic gerrymander in the country (the ones in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Arkansas have a minimal net impact on the partisan composition of their delegations) and a suit to redraw the lines is pending before the Supreme Court.
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WASHINGTON — Pennsylvania's congressional district map is a partisan gerrymander that "clearly, plainly and palpably" violates the state's Constitution, the State Supreme Court said on Monday, adding to a string of court decisions striking down political maps that unduly favor one political party.
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The thrust of Monday's decision in the Wisconsin case is that an individual must show that his or her specific district was the product of a partisan gerrymander, though a four-justice concurrence left open a different possible path to statewide challenges.
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" In late August, the same panel of federal judges ruled that North Carolina's congressional map favors Republicans and "constitutes an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the First Amendment, and Article I of the Constitution.
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The suit, sponsored by a nonprofit group allied with the Democratic Party, claimed that the House map "may be the most extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander in American history" and asked that new districts be drawn in time for primary elections in March.
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In 2018, a district court in Virginia ruled the old maps an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and new maps fairer to Democrats were drawn at the beginning of the year (these maps may have also helped put them over the top in Tuesday's election).
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A three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled Tuesday that the state's 2016 redistricting plan constituted an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and said the state's districts need to be redrawn before the 2018 midterm elections.
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The ruling by Justice Alito and his four conservative brethren did find one impermissible racial gerrymander—in House District 90—but otherwise "goes out of its way to permit" Texas to elect its representatives using maps drawn "for the purpose of preserving...racial discrimination".
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But in the hearing on Maryland's gerrymander, Justice Kavanaugh, who grew up in the state and lives in Chevy Chase, a suburb of Washington, DC, seemed to envision a role for the courts in checking legislators who "penalise [voters] because of their political affiliation".
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On Monday, the justices, in an opinion with no recorded dissents throwing out the decision requiring special elections, said the lower court gave only a "cursory" analysis of whether such elections were "a proper remedy for a racial gerrymander" when it ordered them last November.
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Earlier this year, the Supreme Court held that the Republican-led Virginia House did not have the legal right to challenge a lower court opinion that struck down several district maps; the lower court had found those maps were drawn as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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American tech companies must also take responsibility for the effect of their platforms on our democracy–by revisiting incentives that reward the most incendiary content, algorithms that digitally gerrymander us into echo chambers, and rules that allow politicians to microtarget lies to the public.
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Weeks after a North Carolina court panel ruled that a state legislative map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the State Constitution, a new lawsuit filed in the same court on Friday took aim at another gerrymander — this time, the map of the state's 13 congressional districts.
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In North Carolina, after a panel of three judges ruled unanimously that the Republican gerrymander of the state's legislative districts was partisan and illegal, Democrats have agreed to redraw the voting map in a way that—wait for it—maintains Republican control of the legislature.
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Instead of chanting "serenity now," a la George Costanza, they're attempting to spin their way to calm by offering a number of arguments, some of which contain just a kernel of truth, while quietly thanking their maker for the gerrymander and praying it's enough.
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Through a series of fortuitous connection, their paper made its way to a group interested in challenging the GOP's partisan gerrymander in Wisconsin, which allowed the GOP to win 60 of 99 seats in 2012 even though it won less than half of the statewide vote.
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Washington (CNN)In a victory for Democrats in Virginia, the Supreme Court held Monday that the Republican-led Virginia House of Delegates did not have the legal right to challenge a lower court opinion that struck several district maps they had drawn as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
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That matters because the way to create a partisan gerrymander is to group together a whole bunch of heavily Democratic precincts in order to create a single district that serves as a vote sink while giving the GOP smaller, but still nearly insurmountable, edges in the others.
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"Last week, new documents were unearthed that suggest that the real reason the Trump administration sought to add the citizenship question was not to help enforce the Voting Rights Act at all, but rather to gerrymander congressional districts in overtly racist, partisan and unconstitutional ways," he added.
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The Maryland and North Carolina cases are now before the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices have long recognized partisan gerrymandering to be a problem but struggled to determine when a gerrymander crosses the line—and how involved the court should be in such a political process.
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The stakes are so high in Pennsylvania because this year, it's using a new congressional map — one imposed by the state Supreme Court, which threw out the map used for the 236 through 214 elections on the grounds that it was a pro-Republican partisan gerrymander.
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In a major blow to Republicans who control the Legislature in one of the nation's most bitterly divided states, a state court panel threw out North Carolina's state legislative maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordered lawmakers to draw up new ones in two weeks.
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"The plaintiffs' novel application of First Amendment jurisprudence, which would condemn a competitive congressional district as an impermissible partisan gerrymander, thus fails to resolve the essential problem of determining when the inherently political redistricting process has gone 'too far,' " the state attorneys said in court briefs.
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By taking up the case, the Supreme Court is essentially promising to rule on the merits of the efficiency gap as a means of determining whether an improper partisan gerrymander has happened — and, if one has occurred, on whether that violates either First or 14th Amendment protections.
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Common Cause was brought by voting rights groups and Democratic voters, among others, who argued that North Carolina's 2016 congressional districting plan was unconstitutional, saying the map drawn by Republican legislators amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that intentionally diluted the electoral strength of individuals who oppose Republicans.
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But rather than dive into the challengers' proposed principles for determining when political redistricting goes too far, he resolved the case on the threshold issue of standing: none of the plaintiffs, he wrote, were eligible to sue since they hadn't shown an "individual" and "personal" harm from the gerrymander.
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Considering just how important the Pennsylvania gerrymander has been for Republicans' control of the House — and considering that a Democratic governor and then a Democrat-controlled Supreme Court will have veto power of the new map — it seems all but certain that the new map will help Democrats.
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We've been fighting over whether to include these groups or not, and once we include them, [we get] this process that I call "administrative gerrymandering," where you gerrymander the procedures by which you organize and run an election by changing the number of precincts or the machines you use.
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An unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, according to the plaintiffs, is one that maximizes the wasted votes for the minority party while minimizing them for the majority party that drew the map (it includes both lost votes cast for the candidates who lose and surplus votes cast for winning candidates).
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This is the plan, as Vox's Andrew Prokop reported: So why would the Ohio Republican Party — which has controlled the governorship, dominates the state legislature, and drew the maps of its dreams in 2010 — sign on to a deal that could limit its power to gerrymander in the future?
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This is the plan, as Vox's Andrew Prokop reported: So why would the Ohio Republican Party — which has controlled the governorship, dominates the state legislature, and drew the maps of its dreams in 20163 — sign on to a deal that could limit its power to gerrymander in the future?
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Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lone black Republican senator, said on Thursday that he would oppose the judicial nomination of Thomas A. Farr, a lawyer who defended a North Carolina voter identification law and a partisan gerrymander that a federal court said was drafted to suppress black votes.
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Republican leaders across the country have tried to make voting more difficult; to keep some Americans from voting; to interrupt vote counts before they are complete; to gerrymander in the extreme; and now, in Missouri, to repudiate a constitutional amendment approved by 62 percent of the state's voters.
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The judicial system's experience with the effort to ban racial gerrymandering only to find itself sucked into a million debates over whether such-and-such a gerrymander is really about disenfranchising black people (which is bad) or just about screwing over Democrats (which is okay) is an unhappy precedent.
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Three of the Democratic candidates — Mary Gay Scanlon, a lawyer; Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran; and Susan Wild, a former solicitor in Allentown, Pa. — flipped seats previously held by Republicans, an achievement aided by a new map of House districts drawn this year to eliminate a Republican gerrymander.
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"We are convinced by the evidence that this partisan gerrymander was intentional and effective and that no legitimate justification accounts for its extremity," the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati panel wrote in its decision, ordering the state to create a plan to fix the map by June 14.
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When another partisan gerrymander claim in Texas also went by the wayside in 2006 because the Court decided the case on other grounds, lawyers decided that Justice Kennedy didn't really mean what he said about being interested in finding a manageable standard for such cases, and they focused their energies elsewhere.
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A 2-point edge here in the Electoral College, a Supreme Court majority that can advance a policy agenda while insulated from popular backlash there, a skew in Senate geography here, a helpful gerrymander or two — these are all the kinds of things that happen under the American constitutional system.
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"The Supreme Court has now made it abundantly clear to Republican legislators that their cynical game of using race as an excuse to gerrymander is over, and that the courts are not going to sit by when challenges are brought," said Marc Elias, the Democratic lawyer who argued the case.
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The court was set to hold a hearing the following week on a remedy to this gerrymander, with the potential that the judges would draw a new map for the 2018 election, but Justice Samuel Alito put the lower court's decision on hold as the full Supreme Court considers the appeal.
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The Wisconsin case involved an outrageous Republican gerrymander, where under the map Republicans in 2012 were able to win 833 of the 99 seats even though their candidates garnered only 48.6% of the statewide vote, and in 2014 they won 63 of the 99 seats with 52% of the vote.
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Whatever happens with this case — a harder case than many good-government types have admitted publicly or even privately — there are many more political hot-button cases on their way to the Supreme Court: voter ID cases, racially discriminatory redistricting cases, even other gerrymander challenges litigated under different constitutional theories.
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Yet even though the Supreme Court has said a political gerrymander may be so extreme that it violates the Constitution, it has never struck one down because the justices have not been able to agree on how much partisanship in map drawing is too much, or even how to measure it.
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The rulings marked a disappointment for voting rights advocates who had hoped the court would strike down a redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander for the first time and set a standard to assess when legislators have gone too far in drawing congressional maps that give their party an edge.
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Last year, with four sympathetic justices on the left and two cases (Gill v Whitford, challenging a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin and Benisek v Lamone, opposing a Democratic one in Maryland), plaintiffs hoped Justice Kennedy would mastermind rulings to curb partisan redistricting as a violation of democratic principles enshrined in the constitution.
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Whereas the chief summoned a raft of arguments to explain why there is simply no manageable way for judges to determine when a gerrymander goes too far, the dissent characterised the ruling as abrogating a "duty to declare the law" on a matter that is fundamental to the very functioning of American elections.
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Patrick LeahyPatrick Joseph LeahyAppropriators warn White House against clawing back foreign aid House panel investigating decision to resume federal executions Graham moves controversial asylum bill through panel; Democrats charge he's broken the rules MORE (D-Vt.), say developers use poor areas close to wealthy urban neighborhoods to gerrymander their projects into TEAs.
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On his way to pick up a few dozen Xavier University students to caravan with them to an early voting site, Mr. Pureval said that he had his "eyes wide open" about the difficulty of the district and that he was counting on a wave of energy to overcome the Republican gerrymander.
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"Clearly, the courts have realized that they do need to step in and police extreme partisan gerrymanders, and the court recognized that North Carolina's gerrymander was one of the most extreme in history," said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a lawyer representing some of the map's challengers.
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"The congressional map passed by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature simply replaces one partisan gerrymander with a new one," said Eric H. Holder Jr., who was attorney general under former President Barack Obama and now leads an effort to prevent Republicans from controlling the redrawing of congressional maps after the 2020 census.
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The tactics: Gerrymander districts to favor G.O.P. candidates, suppress the vote, meet at night and other odd times to ramrod unpopular legislation into law, and shred the social contract between government and the people until all that is left is a hollowed-out facade of what was once our sacred democratic institutions.
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More from the campaign trail … A new paper from The Brookings Institution says the GOP tax law is unlikely to have a big impact on the midterm elections (The Hill) … Judges struck down North Carolina's Republican-drawn redistricting map, deeming the partisan gerrymander unconstitutional for the second time this year (The Hill) … Kentucky Gov.
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You can add that the creators of the measurement, Eric McGhee, research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, propose that a gap of seven percent or higher should be enough to find that a state may have committed an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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That's because a panel of North Carolina judges recently upheld the use of a controversial new congressional map, drawn and approved by the state's Republican legislators in response to an October ruling by the same court that warned the state's previous map had a "substantial likelihood" of being thrown out as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
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Over the last several years, they watched and warred with North Carolina Republicans amid aggressive conservative efforts to deregulate industry, play down climate change, curtail access to the ballot box, strip a Democratic governor of some executive powers, launch their so-called "bathroom bill" and gerrymander districts in ways that made the courts recoil.
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Thanks to the Republicans' advantage in opportunities to gerrymander districts after their mid-term victories in 923, as well as Democratic voters' increasing tendency to cluster in electorally inefficient cities, even a 2006-level share of the popular vote, at 53.5% (after accounting for uncontested races), would be consistent with a close race for the House.
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That remarkable 15-point gap may provide a hint about the outcome in two of the most closely watched cases of the year: Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involving a Christian baker's plea for a right not to make a gay-wedding cake, and Gill v Whitford, a challenge to a Republican-drawn partisan gerrymander in Wisconsin.
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But the Supreme Court's conservative bloc doesn't just reflect the outcomes of America's undemocratic electoral rules; it is writing and, in some cases, rewriting them, to favor the Republican Party — making it easier to suppress votes, simpler for corporations and billionaires to buy elections, and legal for incumbents to gerrymander districts to protect and enhance their majorities.
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Robt Sarazin Blake: Recitative (SameRoom) In a vibrato-shaded baritone that recalls a French chansonnier more than an Americana guitar guy, the first singer-songwriter in history to linger on the word "gerrymander" enlists a limber band colored decisively by horn man Thomas Deakin to array sixteen talky songs lasting a mere hour and a half over two CDs.
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"The district court made extensive fact finding and followed the Supreme Court's instruction on how to deal with this to a 'T,' consistent with how the court has ruled in every racial gerrymander that has come before it this decade," said Allison Riggs, a staff attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who supports the challengers.
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Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor, a Republican, acknowledged in his dissent that recent federal court rulings "raise substantial concerns as to the constitutional viability of Pennsylvania's current congressional districts," but he argued that the court should have awaited the federal Supreme Court's decision in the Wisconsin gerrymander case, expected this spring, before making its own ruling.
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"Although this court has never addressed whether or when a special election may be a proper remedy for a racial gerrymander, obvious considerations include the severity and nature of the particular constitutional violation, the extent of the likely disruption to the ordinary processes of governance if early elections are imposed, and the need to act with proper judicial restraint when intruding on state sovereignty," the opinion said.
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You can gerrymander in two ways: You can do what is called "packing," where you try to pack all of a political party's voters into one district — so the idea there is, say Democrats are packed into a district where the Democratic candidate always wins by 85 percent, but that means that all of those Democrats are not available to vote in other congressional districts.
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The next legal challenge to partisan gerrymanders likely will come next year from North Carolina, where a three-judge panel ruled in January that the state's 13 House districts were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander For voting-rights advocates, there is no better case to take to the Supreme Court: North Carolina's Republican-dominated legislature boasted openly that it had drawn the districts to achieve the maximum partisan advantage over Democrats.
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" Last month, during the argument in the Wisconsin gerrymander case, Chief Justice Roberts worried aloud that if the court involved itself in the nitty-gritty of redistricting, with rulings that favored one party or the other, people would conclude that the justices were acting politically, "and that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.
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As long as conservatives can do something — steal an election, gerrymander crazy districts to maximize GOP advantage, use the filibuster as a routine tool of opposition, launch congressional investigations as political attacks, hold the debt ceiling hostage, repress voting among minorities, withhold a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee, defend a known fraud and sexual predator who has likely colluded with a foreign government to gain the presidency — they will do it, knowing they'll be backed by a relentlessly on-message media apparatus.
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It's not hyperbole that in 2018, Democracy won big at the ballot box on a statewide level: - Ethics reform initiatives passed in New Mexico, Missouri, North Dakota and Florida; - Money in politics reforms passed in Missouri, North Dakota, Massachusetts and in Baltimore, New York City, Denver, Phoenix; - Gerrymander reform passed in Michigan, Colorado, Missouri and Utah; - Voting rights initiatives passed in Florida, Maryland, Michigan and Nevada; - In Maine, landmark Ranked Choice Voting election system reform was affirmed by its citizens providing voters more choice and more voice in their elections.
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From the campaign trail … The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike down a voter map for the first time as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander (The Hill) … House Rules Committee Chairman Pete SessionsPeter Anderson SessionsHillicon Valley — Presented by CTIA and America's wireless industry — Lawmaker sees political payback in fight over 'deepfakes' measure | Tech giants to testify at hearing on 'censorship' claims | Google pulls the plug on AI council Lawmaker alleges political payback in failed 'deepfakes' measure As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges MORE (R-Texas) reelection race is rated a toss-up (Cook Political Report) … The proposal to split California in three would give Democrats more seats (The Hill) … The next Democratic National Convention will take place in July before the 2023 Olympics (The Hill).
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