We're not just a little gerrymandered here; we're outrageously gerrymandered.
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Maryland is gerrymandered to help Democrats, Virginia is gerrymandered to help Republicans.
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Go deeper: Judges rule Ohio's congressional map is unconstitutionally gerrymandered Federal judges rule Michigan's voting maps illegally gerrymandered
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When the law allows the partisan-gerrymandered present to look and act just like the racially-gerrymandered past, something's seriously wrong.
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They argued that the legislature merely substituted a slightly-less gerrymandered map for the radically gerrymandered one that the court threatened to invalidate.
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Allred, a Democrat, won in the 12th-most-gerrymandered district in Texas, which was drawn to favor Republicans in the suburbs of Dallas, and Fletcher won in the 10th most gerrymandered.
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And Democrats' woes are broader than just gerrymandered House maps.
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However, none of these states have excessively partisan gerrymandered maps.
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We have gerrymandered our political districts into incumbency protection rackets.
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Other gerrymandered states are still waiting for their Katie Fahey.
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New York's 236st State Assembly District is a gerrymandered monstrosity.
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Stevens wanted to apply the same standard for striking down electoral districts gerrymandered on the basis of politics as the Voting Rights Act calls for when districts are gerrymandered on the basis of race.
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Ohio is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.
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Earlier this year the state's gerrymandered congressional district map was redrawn.
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And your district is gerrymandered, so the primary's the general election.
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But he also found that Wisconsin's map gerrymandered far beyond expectations.
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His government has gerrymandered electoral boundaries to enhance the BN's chances.
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Go deeper: Federal judges rule Michigan's voting maps are illegally gerrymandered
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Senators represent entire states, not smaller districts gerrymandered into partisan enclaves.
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As a result, newly created maps could not be easily gerrymandered.
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And developers have been accused of providing gerrymandered maps to qualify.
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And developers have been accused of providing gerrymandered maps to qualify.
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His district is one of the most gerrymandered in the state.
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County lines are fixed and aren't gerrymandered from census to census.
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"If it has been gerrymandered, that's a serious issue," she said.
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The Legislature's 2011 gerrymandered maps drew a muted backlash years ago.
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The Legislature's 2011 gerrymandered maps drew a muted backlash years ago.
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The Senate, too, is in effect naturally gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
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Of the 42 seats the party lost, it had gerrymandered just nine.
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These are drawn with very broad strokes - not gerrymandered like political precincts.
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Mr Najib suppressed investigations into lost funds, hounded opponents, and gerrymandered elections.
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"They had gerrymandered the geography to make their case," Mr. Neaman said.
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Gerrymandered congressional districts and tribalized media have pulled us even farther apart.
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The district has been named America's most gerrymandered by The New Republic.
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They gerrymandered electoral districts, suppressed minority voters, or deprived them of citizenship.
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The court had previously ruled that the map had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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"It's a gerrymandered, suburban, Republican district," says Lunney, of the Georgia Democrats.
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In this heavily suburban and gerrymandered district around Charlotte, incumbent Republican Rep.
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Parliamentary districts were redrawn and gerrymandered to give Fidesz a leg up.
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What they had done, in effect, was create gerrymandered maps of risk.
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Slightly-less gerrymandered shouldn't be an acceptable standard for the people's house.
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This seems unlikely given the landscape of gerrymandered districts, which favors Republicans.
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They focused on delivering state legislatures and gerrymandered districts into Republican control.
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The key was that it was still an outlier, it's still gerrymandered.
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Idols die, voting districts are gerrymandered, and we're all driven into wage debt.
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We do nothing about the national debt, global warming or gerrymandered political districts.
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In effect, Republicans had laundered a racially gerrymandered map through the judicial system.
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In states that were still extremely gerrymandered, almost no seats changed partisan hands.
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And my town of Naperville has actually been gerrymandered into three congressional districts.
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That translated into 70 percent of House seats due to heavily gerrymandered districts.
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Perhaps fortified by the Republicans' gerrymandered advantage, Mr. Vos has been notably defiant.
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In two other big, gerrymandered states, Democrats gained seats — but only a few.
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I hope that the rigged, gerrymandered system we now have will be changed.
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Some place the number of severely gerrymandered House districts as high as 20.
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Instead, they should have focused on proving whether their particular districts were gerrymandered.
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When they were in power, Democrats gerrymandered maps to their advantage for years.
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Gerrymandered districts, as one report stressed, proved to be stronger than a blue wave.
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The court threw out the old district maps in January, saying they were gerrymandered.
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USA Today: North Carolina's GOP-gerrymandered map is unconstitutional, may have to be redrawn.
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The congressional district map is gerrymandered in a way that heavily favors the Republicans.
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A vast majority of congressional districts have been gerrymandered bright blue or ruby red.
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Voters across a state are significantly more moderate than those in a gerrymandered district.
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Democrats had not managed to win a single one of those gerrymandered congressional seats.
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After the Republican majority gerrymandered the Assembly in 2011, the party won a supermajority.
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We've demonstrated that in the most gerrymandered voter-suppressed political arena you could name.
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The saving grace for the GOP is that state legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered.
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That's because many state Houses and state Senates are themselves heavily gerrymandered to benefit Republicans.
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To qualify, boundaries are sometimes gerrymandered to create an economically challenged (but essentially manufactured) neighborhood.
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Perhaps they will introduce new evidence to show which specific voting districts were intentionally gerrymandered.
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Scheppele has shown how Fidesz gerrymandered districts and introduced election laws that distorted proportional representation.
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The Democratic bench is quite weak in these traditionally Republican and often heavily gerrymandered areas.
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First of all, the Senate isn't gerrymandered at all, and it is quite polarized, too.
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The court ruled North Carolina cannot use the current gerrymandered congressional map after the Nov.
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" Democrats, he said, "have gerrymandered this new federal enclave, and I'm saying un-gerrymander it.
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The Federalists, when they got their turn, gerrymandered just as energetically as the Anti-Federalists.
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The Democrat won — probably — in a district that was gerrymandered to ensure that would never happen.
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That, plus gerrymandered constituency borders and lax financial rules, play to Fidesz's advantage now, Laszlo said.
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A staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, Jordan has represented his heavily gerrymandered district since 2007.
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North Carolina map is barred: A state court said congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered for Republicans.
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Look at Wisconsin, where state Republicans gerrymandered the seats to make Democratic control a near impossibility.
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Winning a majority of seats in 2010, extremists gerrymandered voting districts to maximize their base's power.
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"It's a gerrymandered, suburban, Republican district," says Phil Lunney, legislative liaison for the Fulton County Democrats.
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Courts cannot close their eyes to elections being manipulated through burdens on voting and gerrymandered districts.
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"Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps," the report reads.
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Their efforts noticeably skip over America's most gerrymandered state, Maryland, which has systematically disenfranchised Republican voters.
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"Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps," the report says.
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Ohio is said to be one of the most pro-Republican-gerrymandered states in the country.
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Among the state's 36 heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, the 23rd is virtually the only competitive one.
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Fear that they will lose the gerrymandered districts they depend on for a trove of seats.
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The House is gerrymandered, the Senate represents states regardless of population, the Supreme Court is appointed.
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Democrats also gerrymandered in some states where they got the chance, Maryland being the starkest example.
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A historic court decision erased some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country last week.
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"But they kept going back to fix the map to make it more gerrymandered," she said.
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Both the US House map and state legislature maps there are badly gerrymandered in the GOP's favor.
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Democrats have often eagerly gerrymandered where they have happened to hold power, like in Maryland in 2010.
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The incumbency effect is strong, and the state has been heavily gerrymandered to work in their favor.
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So there's gerrymandered districts, right, the ones that look all funky and are like bendy and stuff.
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Then he promised a $20163,22016 prize to any reader who drew an equally gerrymandered map favoring Democrats.
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Pennsylvania's highest state court had found that the districts had been gerrymandered specifically to favour the party.
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Malaysia's ruling party had dominated politics since the 1950s and gerrymandered furiously to keep it that way.
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It was widely viewed as among the nation's most gerrymandered until the court redrew it in February.
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This is because the district lines are so egregiously gerrymandered, especially in states fully controlled by Republicans.
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Michigan is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
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The fact that super-liberal Austin isn't on this list speaks to how gerrymandered the city is.
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Erin E. Murphy, the attorney representing Wisconsin's (very gerrymandered) State Senate, had no good answer for Sotomayor.
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The justices handed Republicans a key victory by refusing to halt even the most extreme gerrymandered maps.
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Many governors, Sheehan added, can veto gerrymandered congressional district boundaries that state legislatures reshape once a decade.
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Many states have gerrymandered safe Republican seats that would require an extraordinary landslide to do the trick.
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That most of the gerrymandered Democrats happened to be African-American, the state has said, was incidental.
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Many of these elections will take place in districts that have been gerrymandered to benefit Republican candidates.
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Predominantly Republican and perversely gerrymandered, the Lone Star State is where Democrats send their dreams to die.
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So will electoral districts gerrymandered so narrowly for partisan benefit that even holding elections can seem pointless.
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The panel found that Republicans racially gerrymandered some congressional districts to weaken the growing electoral power of minorities.
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Whitford (2018), the Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by 12 Wisconsin voters challenging that state's gerrymandered maps.
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It ought to be safe Republican territory—not least because it has been gerrymandered to make it so.
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And it's gerrymandered, minoritarian legislatures restricting the voting franchise and aggrandizing their power over popularly elected statewide officials.
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FABER: WHERE A LOT OF THE DISTRICTS ARE GERRYMANDERED, I KNOW YOU GUYS – PELTZ: WE HAVE A SOLUTION.
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Details: The federal court ruling indicated that district boundaries were gerrymandered after the 2010 Census for Republican gain.
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The party hasn't won statewide office since 21966, and gerrymandered congressional districts are a realpolitik of entangled topology.
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Texas's congressional districts are particularly gerrymandered in the Austin region, which is carved into parts of six districts.
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Public land advocates had alleged the border was gerrymandered to carve out Noel's property and a water pipeline.
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Costello knew that the old map was heavily gerrymandered, but the rushed process struck him as blatantly partisan.
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Under those 2011 gerrymandered maps, Democrats in Virginia held just 3 out of 11 Congressional seats in 2016.
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A lower court struck down the plan last year, saying it was gerrymandered to give Republicans an advantage.
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In the meantime, Republicans have been considering impeaching the Supreme Court justices who struck down the gerrymandered map.
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Heading into Tuesday's election, how much of a built-in advantage did Republicans have thanks to gerrymandered districts?
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But the Court had long been vague about whether district maps could be unconstitutionally gerrymandered on partisan grounds.
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But Democrats have the trickier task — flipping enough seats in often gerrymandered Republican districts to take the House.
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Democrats won the three districts that were gerrymandered in their favor by an average of 133 percentage points.
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America's political system was broken before Mr. Trump took office: Gerrymandered electoral districts deprive voters of their voice.
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"It should not be too hard to find willing plaintiffs in each of the gerrymandered districts," she said.
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Two years later, the state enacted a new map that kept many of the gerrymandered districts in place.
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Perez, the five conservative justices reversed a lower court's decision to invalidate a racially gerrymandered Texas redistricting map.
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To be clear, Republicans still benefit from many of the gerrymandered maps they drew nearly a decade ago.
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Back in 2011, Republicans redrew Wisconsin's state legislature maps and heavily gerrymandered them to benefit their own party.
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"UNDEMOCRATIC", "gerrymandered" and "fix-up" are good words to describe Malaysian politics, dominated since independence by a single party.
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If San Juan County is gerrymandered, Lyman says, it's the federal government that did it back in the '80s.
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And the Brennan Center has found that Ohio has one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country.
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If the districts are gerrymandered, opponents say, it's because the Department of Justice forced them to be that way.
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Neutral election monitors are muzzled; opposition candidates locked up; districts gerrymandered; constitutions altered; and, in extreme cases, legislatures emasculated.
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Without it, the gerrymandered and legally bribed Congress and the leadership of both parties will block any significant change.
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But it would also be a godsend to Democrats, who are in the process of being gerrymandered into oblivion.
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He didn't abolish elections, but he gerrymandered parliamentary districts and seized control of the civil service that administers elections.
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Yet Republicans can still count on gerrymandered districts to protect incumbents in a large part of the red map.
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Second, racially gerrymandered maps, like the ones that the Justice Department can't fight as a result of Abbott v.
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Despite structural disadvantages of gerrymandered congressional districts favoring Republicans, Democrats have so far clinched 232 seats in the House.
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Malaysian elections heavily favour incumbent governments, which control most print media and can train vast resources on gerrymandered constituencies.
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In June, the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision striking down earlier maps as racially gerrymandered.
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Another 364 members will be directly elected, but in gerrymandered fashion: each of Venezuela's 340 municipalities will choose one.
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Whitford last year, where the justices returned to the lower courts a challenge to Wisconsin's gerrymandered state legislative maps.
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It would focus directly on the disparity between statewide and gerrymandered results that is the actual source of frustration.
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The Supreme Court has in the past ruled that congressional districts cannot be gerrymandered by race for partisan gain.
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For years, Republicans have schemed to suppress Democratic turnout with racially targeted voter ID laws and aggressively gerrymandered districts.
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His conservative constituents, by dint of the gerrymandered contours of his district, were all but predestined to support him.
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At the start of the last Congress, under a gerrymandered map, Republicans held 13 of Pennsylvania's 18 House seats.
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Many states have constitutions that may offer more scope for lawsuits challenging gerrymandered maps than the federal courts do.
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Having gerrymandered the single-member districts after winning power in 20173, the party continues to win almost all elections.
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This year, federal courts struck down many of the voting restrictions and gerrymandered districts, saying they harmed racial minorities.
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This case could be a blueprint for other states — like Wisconsin, Maryland, and Texas — that have extremely gerrymandered maps.
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Since those gerrymandered state legislatures draw their own district lines, it can seem enormously challenging to ever dislodge them.
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It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the deliberately gerrymandered House districts favored Trump even more than the Electoral College.
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The problem, the justices concluded, was that plaintiffs focused on proving the entire state map was gerrymandered against Democrats.
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The highest court in the land refused to block gerrymandered political maps — or districts drawn to benefit one party.
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Though with a district so horribly gerrymandered, the idea that the location of your residence means anything seems laughable.
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Yet unlike in many other GOP-controlled gerrymandered states, reform has come on the agenda in Ohio in recent years.
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A federal court ruled, once again, that North Carolina's congressional districts have been gerrymandered along partisan lines to favour Republicans.
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But the pro-democracy camp does not want to appear to legitimise the gerrymandered election process by proffering a candidate.
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Courts are "only fixing the process by which voters enact political change" when they keep an eye on gerrymandered maps.
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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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You're a Republican Congressman from Florida, turnout is 12 percent in your primary, your district is gerrymandered- Shitty turnout. Yeah.
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Justice Samuel Alito quietly rebuffed an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to preserve their highly gerrymandered map for congressional elections.
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The state of play: The lower courts found that district boundaries were gerrymandered after the 2010 Census for Republican gain.
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It also ignores the truth about the heavily gerrymandered district, which has a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas.
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He began when he lived in Texas and lost a bid for a congressional seat in a racially gerrymandered district.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is also currently deciding whether Wisconsin Republicans created unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative districts to benefit their candidates.
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The plaintiffs claimed that the gerrymandered map was in violation of both the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause.
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Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that two of North Carolina's congressional districts, drawn in 2011, were racially gerrymandered.
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Communities of color are increasingly facing gerrymandered districts, new voter-ID laws, limited or changed polling places, and excessive lines.
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The stakes grew higher when the Supreme Court refused to rule this year on several cases that challenged gerrymandered maps.
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Perez, in which the court overturned the lower court's ruling that Texas' districts were gerrymandered on racial grounds; Husted v.
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Yes, gerrymandered districts, the large influence of money in politics, and voter suppression tactics make this ideal harder than ever.
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In recent months, advocates convinced the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to invalidate that state's gerrymandered congressional districts on state-law grounds.
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State constitutions also typically guard against viewpoint discrimination, a principle that comes into play when a political party is gerrymandered.
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The tide was held back in the last decade by gerrymandered congressional districts drawn by Republicans to protect their candidates.
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Republicans have successfully gerrymandered House districts across the country expressly for this purpose: surviving a year of strong Democratic enthusiasm.
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He has gerrymandered and changed election rules, so that he doesn't need a majority of votes to control the government.
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Yes, Republicans have gerrymandered districts and shamefully suppressed votes (and Democrats should keep pushing for laws that make voting easier).
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They can seek to disenfranchise one class of Americans, and get away with it from the safety of gerrymandered seats.
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Go deeper: Supreme Court: Partisan gerrymandering "beyond the reach" of federal courts Federal judges rule Michigan's voting maps illegally gerrymandered
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It has been pushed along by everything from gerrymandered congressional districts to the increasingly ideological tilt of the news environment.
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A senior adviser to the group, Mark Elias, is involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits against states over their gerrymandered districts.
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The district, a heavily suburban area around Charlotte, has been gerrymandered so that Democrats haven't been competitive in recent elections.
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The other case was brought by Republican voters in Maryland who allege that their congressional district was gerrymandered to favor Democrats.
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A new typeface called Ugly Gerry does just that: Its letters are formed from the shapes of grotesquely gerrymandered U.S. districts.
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Furthermore, a federal court recently ordered North Carolina to redraw its racially gerrymandered legislative districts and hold new elections in 2017.
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In contrast, Pennsylvania, where gerrymandered districts were overturned by a state court, four of the 2100 seats flipped party, or 22%.
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Overall, the unemployment rate in the gerrymandered area is high enough for Hudson Yards to be eligible for EB-5 funding.
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They don't seem to care that not every Republican is from a heavily gerrymandered district that makes losing a seat impossible.
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The Washington Post (editorial board): Judges trying to fix gerrymandered North Carolina districts may cause mass confusion ahead of November elections.
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They can use that "voucher" to select the school they prefer instead of the one mandated by their gerrymandered educational district.
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Update: Dan McCready is the projected Democratic primary winner In this heavily suburban and gerrymandered district around Charlotte, incumbent Republican Rep.
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Republicans have actively gerrymandered every part of this country in an active attempt to nullify the votes of people of color.
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But Republicans pulled off such a thoroughly partisan gerrymandered congressional map that Democrats will likely have to tamp down their expectations.
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But the real death knell to legislation has been the proliferation of gerrymandered districts and closed primaries since the 2010 census.
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There are pending cases from each of the three states challenging their existing gerrymandered maps, whether congressional, state legislative or both.
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It upheld gerrymandered election maps in Texas, ignoring evidence that the maps were drawn to minimize the power of minority voters.
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The state's gerrymandered districts, drawn and redrawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature, mirror the inordinate and disproportionate power of this constituency.
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"It's almost going to take a historic wave to overcome the gerrymandered map in a handful of states," Mr. Holder said.
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The Republicans created their own monster when they gerrymandered so many Congressional districts to make it impossible for Democrats to compete.
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It's exactly the kind of weird-looking district you'd get in one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the country.
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Religion, as most Americans understand it, has something to do with care of the soul — not ramming bills through gerrymandered legislatures.
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Gerrymandered districts will buck the historical trends, but past midterms are a good indication of what will likely happen this November.
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Because like so many other districts across the country, Georgia's 2628th was drawn and gerrymandered by a Republican-controlled state legislature.
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The state's Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the congressional map was gerrymandered to the point that it was unconstitutional.
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And one more thing: Looks like North Carolina's much-criticized gerrymandered political maps will be used in the midterms after all.
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That district was one of those redrawn ahead of this election after a court determined the districts had been racially gerrymandered.
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In Michigan, they're working to protect their gerrymandered majority by kneecapping an independent redistricting commission passed by popular referendum just last month.
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It is the first time a court has declared as unconstitutional districts that have been gerrymandered along partisan, rather than racial, lines.
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No matter how well a district has been gerrymandered, candidates still have to get the party faithful to come out and vote.
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Prior to the gubernatorial elections in 1988 and 1990, President Reagan targeted Democratic state legislatures that gerrymandered congressional districts in their favor.
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Despite having to run in heavily GOP-gerrymandered districts, Democrats regained control of the House by winning as many as 28503 seats.
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The current path has proven unworkable for both parties, with the healthcare debate vividly illustrating the limits of governing by gerrymandered majority.
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Significantly, since the ballot initiative changed the Florida constitution, overturning the poll tax only requires electing new politicians (albeit in gerrymandered districts).
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In February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state's gerrymandered congressional map and ordered new district lines in place for November.
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North Carolina is going ahead with November elections under its current gerrymandered map because there isn't enough time to redraw new districts.
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One GOP-held seat — in now de-gerrymandered Pennsylvania — is considered a Safe Democratic win; two others are considered Likely Democratic pickups.
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In the House, Democrats are hoping they will overcome a disadvantage built into gerrymandered maps and capture seats designed to elect Republicans.
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The best argument Republicans can make for maintaining control may be the number of candidates running in heavily gerrymandered, Republican-dominated districts.
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The hypothesized wave had better be a big one if it's going to have any chance of breaching the Republicans' gerrymandered levees.
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Those states include some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country, and Democrats face uphill battles in the majority of them.
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The lawsuit filed Friday challenges a House map drawn by Republicans in 2016 after some districts were found to be racially gerrymandered.
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A coterie of House Republicans debased themselves on national television all year so Trump wouldn't back primary challengers in their gerrymandered districts.
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The GOP has something of a "red wall" in the House through years of gerrymandered districts by Republican governors and state legislatures.
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And often the attendance zones are gerrymandered to put white students in classrooms that are even whiter than the communities they live in.
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A monumental elections lawsuit, in which the state's high court invalidated its gerrymandered congressional districts, could blow the state's House races wide open.
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The real drama will come if the court considers arguments for those positions and then insists the gerrymandered map must be immediately replaced.
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Meanwhile, Republican legislators in North Carolina, who recently gerrymandered themselves into a veto-proof majority, have taken repeated aim at the state courts.
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According to community advocates, developer SJP Properties gerrymandered the city's zoning code by using a hodgepodge of land lots to build more floors.
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In the lead-up to the vote, Mahathir's supporters had complained that Najib enjoyed clear advantages, including benefiting from heavily gerrymandered electoral districts.
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It was released shortly after a 5-4 decision along partisan lines that held that federal courts may not block gerrymandered congressional districts.
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Resolving those complaints—by upholding or striking down a gerrymandered map—will push the court directly into the political fray, the chief fretted.
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Heavily gerrymandered, the district is overwhelmingly white and went for Trump by 33.4 points in a state where Trump won overall by 8.
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Why it matters: Republicans won 16 more U.S. House seats than suggested by vote share because of gerrymandered maps, per an AP analysis.
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John Kennedy Pennsylvania's map had been so aggressively gerrymandered for partisan purposes that it silenced the voices of Democratic voters in the state.
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Using these gerrymandered maps, the Republicans established a chokehold on state legislative seats and a 10-3 majority in North Carolina's congressional delegation.
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They also allowed more states to take names off of voting rolls without any evidence of voter fraud while preserving GOP-gerrymandered districts.
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Gerrymandered safe seats also offer the GOP some insulation in the House by limiting the number of seats that are really in play.
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Social media, the balkanization of the news industry into ideological fragments and gerrymandered congressional districts are often blamed for the bitter political tone.
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Democrats hope to pick off several of those seats, which would in many states give them the power to veto gerrymandered congressional maps.
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The district's boundaries were redrawn in February 20183 after a US district court found that the state had been gerrymandered along racial lines.
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Holder is attempting to make sure the two dozen democratic presidential hopefuls connect the dots between gerrymandered districts and their own presidential ambitions.
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And a panel of federal judges ruled this year that 22013 state legislative districts had been gerrymandered to dilute African-American voting power.
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One group of federal judges ruled that North Carolina's congressional districts had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered for partisan advantage — the first-ever such ruling.
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When this data is compared with electoral district information, we can see whether representatives in gerrymandered districts are far more extreme than others.
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In a gerrymandered map, you concentrate opposing voters in a few districts where you lose big, and win the rest by modest margins.
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The women won in districts that were redrawn to replace a gerrymandered Republican map that the State Supreme Court ruled illegal in January.
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Humanity cannot be genetically gerrymandered into a small number of distinct subgroups, but racial discrimination is a real phenomenon requiring robust legal responses.
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Similarly, Republicans gerrymandered state electoral districts to ensure dominance in many state legislatures and disproportionate numbers of Republicans in the House of Representatives.
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Yet they are strongly incentivized to not compromise thanks to our electoral system of gerrymandered districts, closed primaries, and winner take all duopolies.
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Voting rights advocates say the Wisconsin State Assembly was gerrymandered by its Republican majority before the 2012 election, causing Democrats to lose seats.
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The court also ordered Michigan to hold special state Senate elections next year, rather than in 2022 as scheduled, in any gerrymandered districts.
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The Supreme Court left the decision to state courts, where voting rights groups have taken on cases to throw out gerrymandered electoral maps.
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North Carolina redistricting The Tarheel State has some of the most gerrymandered legislative districts in the country - but perhaps for not much longer.
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Reformers also could file challenges to gerrymandered maps in state courts, whose authority under state law is unaffected by the Supreme Court's decision.
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The state's district maps were redrawn for this election after several courts ruled that the state had been racially gerrymandered to benefit Republicans.
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Given the gerrymandered map Democrats need to compete on, it in effect takes a landslide nationwide to eke out a majority in Congress.
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The gerrymandered maps that Republicans drew after the 2010 census, which let them hold the House majority in 2012, continued to pay dividends.
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"These Republicans have gerrymandered their way to have power over everything," Billy Corriher, a researcher with North Carolina progressive advocacy group Facing South, said.
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Richard's 2014 study found that districts with rapid changes in racial makeup end up having school attendance zones that are gerrymandered to further segregation.
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In fact, the entire fight to win Congress is so difficult because of politically gerrymandered maps implemented by new Republican state majorities in 22012.
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And state house districts are gerrymandered in a way that would make it very difficult for Hood to win a majority of those districts.
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Pennsylvania's 5th: Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon won against Republican Pearl Kim in the district which was reformed after the state's gerrymandered map was redrawn.
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At their conference on June 21st, the justices will discuss their options in a case involving a challenge to North Carolina's gerrymandered congressional map.
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The majority of the court, which has five Democrats and two Republicans, appeared sympathetic to the argument that Pennsylvania's congressional districts are illegally gerrymandered.
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Najib's coalition lost the popular vote in the last general election in 24.3, but still won a majority of seats in Malaysia's gerrymandered constituencies.
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It's likely that they believed they would never again lose control of a chamber of Congress, considering how gerrymandered their unnatural House majority was.
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Judges for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in June that the state's districts were gerrymandered along racial lines.
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North Carolina's congressional districts were redrawn after a court concluded that the previous boundaries were gerrymandered to limit the representation of African-American populations.
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Some of the most gerrymandered congressional districts are essentially Rorschach tests: you might see a ring, other states, a vortex, or a mythological beast.
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She said that, in a politically gerrymandered state, the minority party can get a majority of seats in the legislature, not that they can't.
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Then discuss: Do you think the shape of a district can be used to reliably determine the extent to which a district is gerrymandered?
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Mr. Avila devoted his career to challenging gerrymandered districts and at-large voting, which diffused the potential political power of geographically concentrated minority groups.
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We conducted an analysis to measure how hard it would be for Democrats in each state to win additional seats under these gerrymandered maps.
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Gerrymandered maps were once part of an unspoken agreement between rivals that pressing for political advantage was, within limits, part of the electoral game.
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In February, a Federal District Court struck down the maps of the two congressional districts under scrutiny, finding that they had been racially gerrymandered.
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Despite structural barriers that favor Republicans in many states (from gerrymandered districts to voter ID restrictions), the House of Representatives flipped to the Democrats.
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The biggest blow, however, came when the Democratic-majority State Supreme Court threw out a Republican-gerrymandered map of congressional districts early this year.
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He said the compactness of a district — and how squiggly or rectangular it was — was rarely a good indication of how gerrymandered it is.
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That's in no small part because states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan are so heavily gerrymandered that there aren't many competitive districts at all.
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Their second votes would ensure that parties are represented according to their national proportions, which gerrymandered districts — a big problem today — could not prevent.
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GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a state court's decision that found Pennsylvania's congressional map was unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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Meanwhile, many states with severely gerrymandered districts have legislatures and courts dominated by the same party, making it unlikely that judges would take action.
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On Maryland's eastern shore, Jesse Colvin, a former US Army Ranger, is trying to win a heavily gerrymandered district represented by ultra-conservative Rep.
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So what the plaintiffs are alleging is that there is now a way to measure clearly whether somewhere has been partisan gerrymandered too aggressively.
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But the very next year, the Federalists won such an overwhelming election victory that they took the state Senate, including the infamous gerrymandered district.
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Second, many state legislatures draw US congressional maps every 10 years, and Republican legislatures are the root cause of gerrymandered districts in some states.
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"Both Democrats and Republicans have gerrymandered to shore up districts," said Michael Li, an election law and redistricting specialist at the Brennan Center for Justice.
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Down ballot from the Senate race, Democrats won two heavily gerrymandered congressional districts in the suburbs of Houston (Lizzie Pannill Fletcher) and Dallas (Colin Allred).
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Using software that compares everything from voters' political preferences to recent online purchases, they gerrymandered districts across the country, allowing them to guarantee Republican wins.
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But erasing the lines of a comically gerrymandered district nicknamed "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" is not enough to satisfy an order from Pennsylvania's Supreme Court.
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The state Supreme Court ruled all the House district map drawn by the Republicans in years past was unfairly gerrymandered in favor of the GOP.
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In today's gerrymandered landscape, Brennan researchers estimate Democrats would have to win the popular vote by 11 points, something neither party has achieved in decades.
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His brother, Kevin Dougherty, won a state Supreme Court seat with union help, then helped strike down the state's congressional map for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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Republicans have a solid hold in the gerrymandered districts where the electorate is blood red and where there is little chance of a Democrat succeeding.
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America's most brazenly gerrymandered congressional district maps have nothing on an election where some seats were elected directly by members of pro-government neighborhood groups.
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Felder says he's doing right by his constituents; he represents a very gerrymandered district in Brooklyn with a robust Orthodox Jewish community, which leans conservative.
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Congressional districts are far more gerrymandered than they were even 20 years ago; Republican members of Congress, by and large, come from very Republican districts.
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That court ruled 85033-1 that 11 House of Delegates districts were gerrymandered along racial lines, ordering lawmakers to redraw the lines by Oct. 30.
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Virginia's House of Delegates was heavily gerrymandered in the GOP's favor in 2011—Republicans had a 66-34 majority at the start of the night.
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It's also worth noting that in some states, lawmakers from gerrymandered districts have tried to quash those voter-backed reforms before they could take effect.
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If history is a judge, I'll bet that memo is so full of cherry-picked "dots" that it looks like one of their gerrymandered districts.
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For instance, the lead plaintiff, a Democrat, lived in a district including Madison that would perform well for Democrats even under a less-gerrymandered map.
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I also don't accept our obviously flawed congressional system, with its gerrymandered districts and its unequal representation that favors rural states because of the Senate.
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And the analytics firm Azavea, which mapped all 435 U.S. congressional districts, found that Maryland's 6th was one of the most gerrymandered in the nation.
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The party has adopted discriminatory voter suppression measures, attacked campaign finance regulations, gerrymandered districts, overturned ballot initiatives, and even waged power grabs after losing elections.
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The judges in that case described North Carolina as one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, the News & Observer reported at the time.
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Despite intervention by the courts, we shall still be voting in gerrymandered districts with unreasonable restrictions of various kinds hindering free exercise of the franchise.
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The makeup of Congress skews disproportionately white, and among the minority House members, a large percentage represent gerrymandered districts made up predominantly of minority voters.
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He recently got good news from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which redrew the state's congressional district map to replace one gerrymandered heavily to favor Republicans.
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Also, the fate of the measure depends on a statewide vote by New Jersey residents, not on a vote by members of a gerrymandered Legislature.
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Scanning a map, the Eighth District looks like it could be one of those gerrymandered snake districts, winding around to find certain kinds of voters.
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The state Supreme Court earlier this year ruled the existing map was gerrymandered by Republicans to such a degree that it violated the state constitution.
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One of them, in Pennsylvania, was accused in a state lawsuit this week of drawing one of the most gerrymandered House maps in the nation.
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These maps were not as bad as the old maps, so the court declared victory and went home: Slightly-less gerrymandered will have to do.
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Still others stood silent because gerrymandered congressional districts made it easier to win reelection even if it meant ignoring the best interests of the nation.
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Cris Dush circulated a letter to House colleagues Monday urging the ouster of five justices who ruled that the legislature must redraw Pennsylvania's gerrymandered maps.
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In Washington, D.C., little gets done because most members of Congress represent gerrymandered districts and are elected via a partisan primary controlled by party insiders.
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The swing districts generally do not look very much like the Midwestern areas that won Trump the presidency (partly because those areas are heavily gerrymandered).
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The gerrymandered lines have been worth two or three additional seats to Pennsylvania Republicans, according to Michael Li, a redistricting expert at New York University.
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Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 and, with the help of gerrymandered districts, Republicans began last year with 20 of 33 State Senate seats.
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Courts have ruled the congressional map is illegally gerrymandered in order to give Republicans an advantage and have ordered it to be redrawn and more representative.
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Scanlon was long favored to win the district, which was recently redrawn after the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court determined that Pennsylvania's congressional maps were heavily gerrymandered.
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After Republican waves in 2010 and 2014, Democrats badly want to win back governors' seats, especially in notoriously gerrymandered places like Ohio where Trump won big.
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As a result, Democrats were shut out of the redistricting process in 27, leading to gerrymandered boundaries that would reinforce Republican control for the next decade.
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The suit claims the legislature violated the state constitution by contorting the map to favor Republicans with some of the most gerrymandered districts in the country.
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Also, Maya Angelou will be honored with a work of public art in San Francisco, maps of gerrymandered districts were turned into a typeface, and more.
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And then we get a gerrymandered state assembly and a state senate where the districts are all drawn so that they can maintain their Republican advantage.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the practice of politics in America cannot begin to repair itself without addressing the problem of gerrymandered Congressional districts.
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Republicans have historically come out in higher numbers to vote in midterms, and liberal groups say they hold a gerrymandered advantage in district lines as well.
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Federal courts have struck down gerrymandered district maps before -- including North Carolina's -- but courts have never overturned district lines drawn with specifically partisan purposes in mind.
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Gerrymandered Republican House districts, which produce very conservative members, and the probable sweeping out of moderate members in a presidential year combine to make it so.
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The House — a mélange of gerrymandered districts that largely insulate members from political forces like a controversial presidential nominee— is unlikely to turn blue this year.
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Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court struck down the old map in January, just months ahead of the May primaries, ruling that the districts were gerrymandered by Republicans.
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Most of the Freedom Caucus members hail from safe red districts, often gerrymandered, and they are likely to return in the 116th Congress with increased seniority.
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Legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered, and the government controls the airwaves and media companies to such a degree that the opposition can't get a fair hearing.
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House members packed into gerrymandered, ultra-Democratic districts face pressure to position themselves to the left of where you'd want to be for a statewide run.
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The decisions come days after the Supreme Court had sent back down to a lower court a decision that Republicans had gerrymandered North Carolina's congressional districts.
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WASHINGTON — Newly disclosed emails show Michigan Republicans angling to give their party a dominant position through gerrymandered maps and celebrating the plight of their Democratic rivals.
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That means most Americans will participate in this year's elections under gerrymandered congressional maps that were created in the wake of the 22020 Tea Party wave.
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A model for Democratic efforts, several strategists said, might come from Pennsylvania, where an all-Republican government implemented an elaborately gerrymandered map after the 2010 elections.
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While state Democrats have certainly gerrymandered — Maryland being a particularly egregious case — it's not nearly as nationally systematic as it has been on the Republican side.
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Mr. Holder leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a political group seeking to untangle gerrymandered districts that have helped Republicans hold power in Washington and elsewhere.
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In fact, Common Cause had recently filed a new lawsuit in state court, challenging gerrymandered maps of North Carolina's legislative districts drawn by Mr. Hofeller himself.
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Whitford, reviewing a three-judge panel's determination that Wisconsin's Republican-drawn district map is so flagrantly gerrymandered that it denies Wisconsinites their full right to vote.
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But these successes were dismissed by party leaders who became increasingly beholden to the social extremists who were winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.
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Mr. Najib, however, had many political advantages, including a strong party organization, greater access to campaign funds and gerrymandered districts that favor his National Front coalition.
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In Maryland, another three-judge panel will hear arguments over whether a Democratic legislature gerrymandered House districts in 2011 to oust a 10-term Republican congressman.
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The NRF is hoping to build on an earlier victory in September after a state court panel declared North Carolina's legislative maps to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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" Under the gerrymandered maps, Republican state Senate candidates "won a minority— 49.5%—of the two-party statewide vote, but still won 29 of 50 seats (43%).
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Perez case, the court's conservative justices found that a lower court "erred" in its findings that several districts were racially gerrymandered, and left them in place.
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By contrast, the issue of gerrymandered district boundaries, regarded by experts as the worst aspect of US voting procedures, was never seriously debated during the campaign.
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Ironically, some of the same Republican lawmakers who gerrymandered the current maps have supported redistricting reform bills in the past, when they were in the minority.
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In a similar vein, Chen and Rodden have used simulations (though with many fewer maps) to suggest that Florida's 2012 congressional plan was almost surely intentionally gerrymandered.
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Their wins signal demographic and ideological shifts since the maps were drawn in 26, but they should also be read differently than wins in less-gerrymandered districts.
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Why it matters: The high court has never struck down a gerrymandered election map as unconstitutional, and it punted on opportunities to do so last this year.
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Uncompetitive districts make legislators less effective, he says: to be precise, he compares politicians in gerrymandered seats to "overweight" people who should "go to the fucking gym".
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So Democrats' selection of their slate of House nominees in Tuesday's Pennsylvania primaries — with a new congressional map to replace the old gerrymandered one — was hugely consequential.
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AMERICA'S BEEN GERRYMANDERED AROUND, SO WE'RE NOT GOING TO CHANGE PARTIES, BUT WE ARE GOING TO GET THOSE PEOPLE OUT OF THE SYSTEM -- WANT TO SOLVE ANYTHING.
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In his proposal, he has shamelessly gerrymandered the electoral districts to be able to obtain an ample majority even with less than 20 percent of the vote.
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In Pennsylvania, another swing state, Republicans gerrymandered their way into winning 13 of the state's 18 congressional seats with only half of the votes cast in 2012.
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" Holder, 67, said the NDRC needs to "raise the consciousness" of people and show them how gerrymandered districts "have an impact on their day-to-day lives.
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Because gerrymandered districts undermine competitive elections, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives and in many state legislatures have become far less responsive to that moderate majority.
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This comes after it heard a similar case from Democrats in Wisconsin who say the GOP-controlled legislature gerrymandered the entire state map to maximize their majority.
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Republicans have also gerrymandered a fortress of remarkably safe seats, forcing House Democrats to have to outperform Republicans nationally by massive margins to win back the House.
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In doing this, the state was trying to avoid tougher legal standards applied to considerations over race in gerrymandered maps than are applied to considerations over partisanship.
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A group challenging the map for North Carolina's state legislature says the files show that Republicans misled a federal court to prolong the life of gerrymandered districts.
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It's easy to lose faith in American democracy when the two major political parties have gerrymandered themselves into impregnable bunkers and bathe in rivers of campaign cash.
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The lame duck, heavily gerrymandered Republican Legislature plans to vote on Tuesday to limit the powers of the incoming governor and attorney general, who are — surprise — Democrats.
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Whitford, in which Democrats allege that Republicans in Wisconsin gerrymandered legislative districts to discriminate against Democratic voters, in violation of their equal protection and First Amendment rights.
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His lead is surprising in part because Republicans gerrymandered the competitive district to split up the capitol city, which has not elected a Republican mayor since 1972.
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Actually, they were the shapes some people saw when looking at federal and state legislative districts that had been gerrymandered to within an inch of their lives.
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Over time, the Ninth District had been gerrymandered to include Charlotte's prosperous, Republican-leaning suburbs, its conservative exurbs, and rural counties left behind by Washington's trade deals.
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The Republicans suppressed voter turnout in Democratic areas, gerrymandered for years in state capitals, and most troublesome, engaged in a multiyear smear and disinformation campaign against Mrs.
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Whitford, a case regarding whether a 2011 redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin's Republican-controlled state legislature was so excessively gerrymandered that it amounted to a constitutional violation.
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Many pending cases are politically charged, including two (from Wisconsin and Maryland) testing whether redistricting maps were impermissibly gerrymandered to favor one political party over the other.
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And discourage people who live in these gerrymandered districts from bringing complaints because they're worried now that they're not going to win and we will see more gerrymandered districts which often will either disperse, uh voters of color or collect voters of color so that even if they are a majority of a population, or have a good stronghold, they're not fully represented in the Statewide vote results.
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Democrats have a 13-point advantage, which could be enough to overcome gerrymandered districts and allow Democrats to retake the House if it holds for the next month.
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The opposition won the popular vote in a general election in 2013 but fell short of the number of seats required to take power because of gerrymandered constituencies.
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The voting for the special elections could be complicated by a state Supreme Court decision that ruled the state's past electoral map was illegally gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
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If they do, gerrymandered districts and closed primaries will ensure that the most likely threat they face will come from even more extreme forces in their own party.
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Some are institutional, like an Electoral College that's increasingly tilted toward Republican voters and gerrymandered congressional districts that create one-party rule across vast parts of the country.
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I believe it just as strongly today as I read daily news reports of severely gerrymandered districts and efforts by citizens to address issues within their own states.
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Pennsylvania Democrats have expressed optimism about the district since it was redrawn following the state Supreme Court's ruling that the previous lines had been gerrymandered to benefit Republicans.
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That should carry weight in a gerrymandered district like Ohio's 252th, which has voted Republican for around 40 years and went for Trump in 2016 by 11 points.
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In recent years, a few GOP state lawmakers have floated proposals to allocate their states' electors by congressional districts that also happened to be gerrymandered in their favor.
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Gerrymandered districts and partisan primaries produce politicians who need only listen to 5 percent of the most partisan voters in their party in order to stay in office.
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A unanimous panel of three federal judges on Wednesday ordered Maryland to draw a new congressional map for 2023, saying its current districts are gerrymandered to favor Democrats.
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Of course, threats to democracy and fair voting — such as gerrymandered election districts and disinformation campaigns on Facebook and other social media platforms — go well beyond election technology.
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What it's more focused on is hybrid identities, particularly those not represented by the Trump administration or a political party that has gerrymandered its way to minority rule.
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Justice Elena Kagan said she was concerned that the law had been "gerrymandered" to address only some providers, something she said would pose a serious First Amendment problem.
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Even so, there are already some things that seem likely: Mr. Meehan's district, the Seventh, is routinely listed as one of the most severely gerrymandered in the country.
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A panel of three federal judges again declared North Carolina's congressional district map to be unconstitutional, ruling on Monday that it was gerrymandered to unfairly favor Republican candidates.
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The conceptual map drawn up by the White House looks torturously gerrymandered, all but erasing the pre-1967 boundary that long formed the baseline for a potential agreement.
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Partisan media and punditry profit from furthering these political gulfs, and in self-sorted gerrymandered districts, most representatives fear backlash, rather than expect reward, for bridging the divides.
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" Boeing had asked the National Labor Relations Board last week to stop the vote, calling the proposed bargaining unit of 176 workers "an artificially gerrymandered sub-set of employees.
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On Friday, Holder hung out with activists and autoworkers in Michigan, one of the most awkwardly gerrymandered states in the country, and encouraged them to get out on Nov.
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In a separate case, a federal court last month ordered North Carolina lawmakers to redraw 28 state House and Senate districts on the grounds that they were racially gerrymandered.
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Some argue that Democrats should focus on defending the system, rolling back things like voter ID laws when they win state legislatures and challenging gerrymandered districts in the courts.
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A political win in a state as gerrymandered as Texas, with such incredible barriers to voting, remains a very limited expression of the ideologies and desires of its citizens.
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But in Wisconsin and Michigan, which are both battleground and gerrymandered states, incoming Democratic governors Tony Evers and Gretchen Whitmer, respectively, will be able to veto Republican-drawn maps.
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In his remarks Mr Obama brandished political polarisation, which he blamed on gerrymandered electoral districts, money in politics, a politicised media landscape and voter apathy, especially among young people.
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"The fact that national Republicans have had to pull out every stop in a district this gerrymandered says it all," Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper told BuzzFeed News.
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Editorial The North Carolina legislature is hurriedly redrawing the lines of two congressional districts that had been gerrymandered along racial lines and ruled unconstitutional by a Federal District Court.
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Republicans gerrymandered on purpose, with stunning success, and no evidence suggests the maps served any function other than to guarantee a 3-to-1 advantage for the Republican Party.
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Earlier this year, a court-ordered remapping of Pennsylvania's heavily gerrymandered congressional districts turned most of the collar counties surrounding Philadelphia from safe Republican seats into probable Democratic pickups.
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We already have a Congress that is so gerrymandered that it would take a Democratic landslide of 56 or 57 percent to simply get a change in the majority.
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Democrats also have openings to pick up a few House seats in heavily gerrymandered Sunshine State, and both parties have decisions to make on congressional candidates in Tuesday's primaries.
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It is the second time this year that a state has been found explicitly to have gerrymandered its congressional map along partisan lines (the other state being North Carolina).
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Roberts led a five-justice majority to a decision that federal courts could not take up challenges to voting district maps excessively gerrymandered to entrench the controlling political party.
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" Gerrymandered maps, like the one recently struck down in Pennsylvania, he said, are "really inconsistent with our founding documents, inconsistent with the Constitution, inconsistent with a variety of statutes.
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Two congressional races are unfolding in districts whose boundaries were ordered redrawn this year after a federal court ruled that they had been gerrymandered to dilute black voters' influence.
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It can be dicey to pivot to the suburbs, as Jon Ossoff's campaign in Georgia proved, but the demographics of O'Connor's gerrymandered district leave him little room to maneuver.
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What's next: The court heard a similar case last October from Wisconsin where Democrats say the GOP-controlled state legislature gerrymandered the entire legislative map to maximize their majority.
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About a half-dozen congressional races in Florida remain competitive, in no small part because voters amended the state constitution in 2010 to require "fair" — read: less gerrymandered — districts.
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The other really significant factor is the change in Pennsylvania's congressional map from one highly gerrymandered to favor the GOP to one that's about proportional in its partisan lean.
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A voter ID law has been the subject of contentious litigation, and a different three-judge panel concluded that many of the state's legislative districts had been racially gerrymandered.
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His critics argue that he has undermined the country's checks and balances, gerrymandered the electoral map and placed the judiciary under the management of one of his oldest friends.
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Democrats not only swept Virginia's statewide races but neared a majority in the House of Delegates, a legislative chamber that was gerrymandered to make the Republican majority virtually unassailable.
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If gerrymandering caused polarization, we should see both Democrats and Republicans in swing districts looking more like each other than their brethren who have been gerrymandered into safe districts.
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It's more than geography: Multiple academic studies, involving tens of thousands of neutral maps, consistently show that the partisan-drawn maps in the most gerrymandered states are radical outliers.
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The Supreme Court previously refused to hear a challenge to the state high court's ruling that the previous maps were gerrymandered in a way that violated the Pennsylvania Constitution.
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And even heavily gerrymandered districts (or deeply blue or deeply red Senate races) would feature well-financed candidates who are able to chase the median voter and ignore donors.
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Whitford — 12 Wisconsin Democratic voters who sued to strike down the state legislature map, arguing it was gerrymandered against the party — failed to establish standing to bring their lawsuit.
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Donald Trump won Michigan by 0.2 percent in 2016, and Barack Obama won by double-digits twice — yet its US House delegation was dramatically gerrymandered in Republicans' favor in 2011.
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Cooper and Democrats at the top of the ballot had won the election — narrowly — but an extremely gerrymandered state map allowed Republicans to keep a supermajority in the state legislature.
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Nathan Deal on the HOPE scholarship and ruling in favor of Republican-drawn districts later found to be badly gerrymandered both came up as issues in the race against Evans.
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And if Republicans romp in state elections, they'll be very well positioned to cement many gerrymandered district maps for their party for yet another decade — all the way through 22020.
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To protest this phenomenon, Chicago-based digital creatives Ben Doessel and James Lee released a new font, named "Gerry," that renders maps of gerrymandered districts into letters of the alphabet.
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Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court ruled that the districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered by Republicans and ordered a new congressional map ahead of the state's May 15 primary election.
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Washington (CNN)During heated Supreme Court arguments Tuesday over whether the justices should take up challenges to politically gerrymandered voting districts, Chief Justice John Roberts confessed what matters to him.
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They gerrymandered the House so severely that Democrats would have to win the national House popular vote by over 7 points to merely have a chance at retaking that chamber.
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Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that federal courts were powerless to hear challenges to gerrymandered district maps and closed to door on legal arguments against partisan maps.
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The decisions therefore won't have major implications for other states -- including North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia -- where legislatures controlled by one party drew so-called "gerrymandered" district lines.
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ANALYSIS: Here are the most obscenely gerrymandered congressional districts in America T-shirts and retaliatory speech The court will also hear a case about political apparel at the polling place.
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Democrats were also aided in this election by a June Supreme Court decision to redistribute voting districts that were previously racially gerrymandered, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.
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To be sure, in states with large anti-abortion majorities (and gerrymandered legislatures), heartbeat bans seem smart — a way to rally voters and take a shot at Roe v. Wade.
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As in Wisconsin, the state legislators forging ahead with the controversial bills are not only Republicans, but deep-red conservatives who represent tightly gerrymandered districts engineered to produce conservative results.
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He has gerrymandered and changed election rules to undermine his political opponents, taken over much of Hungary's media, packed the country's courts with allies and demonized Muslim immigrants and Jews.
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He hasn't had to campaign much in the past: He won his first race in 2004 in a newly gerrymandered district by defeating a Libertarian candidate by over 60 points.
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Delegates would be chosen according to the contours of the gerrymandered State Senate — three from each of the 63 districts plus 15 at-large representatives, for a total of 204.
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Texas districts are gerrymandered by the GOP legislature so that Republicans are favored in the majority of districts, although a certain number are structured for Latinos, which usually favors Democrats.
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Washington (CNN)A federal court concluded Tuesday there is "insufficient time" before the November midterm elections to redraw an electoral map that the same court earlier ruled is unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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He left that to the candidates and elected officials for whom he supplied the statistical foundation to defend affirmative action in college admissions or challenge gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts.
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Just this week, judges ruled that the district map of battleground state North Caroline was illegally gerrymandered by Republicans — the second time in a decade — and must be re-done.
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Gerrymandered districts have also helped create an epidemic of minority rule nationwide, driving state politics to extremes not supported by voters who find themselves unable to do anything about it.
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North Carolina's congressional maps will face another legal battle after Democratic-backed voting rights advocates sued the state, alleging its district maps were gerrymandered to give Republican candidates an advantage.
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Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a new congressional map in the state that was drawn after the old one was deemed gerrymandered.
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Wednesday's vote is just their latest reminder that North Carolina's Republicans have written the playbook on partisan power grabs for gerrymandered state legislatures across the country — like Wisconsin and Michigan.
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A three-judge panel in Wake County preparing to hear a case over whether the congressional districts are politically gerrymandered granted a motion Monday to put the map on ice.
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But in 2012, California Democrats won 62 percent of the House vote, and got 72 percent of the seats — so some have argued that the state just ended up gerrymandered anyway.
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Evidently the legislators have not been chastened by that experience, nor by the judgments from federal courts against their voting restrictions and gerrymandered electoral districts, which were recently ruled unconstitutional, too.
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A federal court in North Carolina concluded on Tuesday the November midterm elections will be held using the current gerrymandered congressional map that has been deemed to unfairly favor Republican candidates.
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Changing gun policies "is easier to do on a state-by-state basis than it is on a national level, because Congress is gerrymandered to such an extent," Mr. Malloy said.
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The lower court found the "serpentine" 12th to be so "contorted and contrived" by the legislature that it may be the least geographically compact of all the nation's many gerrymandered districts.
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In five states where gerrymandered lines were still in use—Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin—incumbent political parties lost control of only two out of 21990 seats, or 222%.
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The Republican strategy was a reminder that most lawmakers in divided, gerrymandered America are more concerned about being primaried by a more radical activist than seeking the disappearing political center ground.
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The exhibitions, Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street, at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at MoMA PS1 feel like gerrymandered shows, though one is much less so than the other.
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A federal court on Tuesday ruled that Virginia's legislative districts were gerrymandered along racial lines and ordered the state to come up with a redistricting plan by the end of October.
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With the support of Republican Governor John Kasich, Ohio voters this year overwhelmingly chose to reform the state redistricting process to counter one of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation.
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The gerrymandered lines plus a white bloc voting and lower African-American turnout has adversely affected the black vote in one of the state's most predominantly black communities, the lawsuit argued.
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House districts have been gerrymandered so that most are safe, Senate seats are seen as either competitive or not based on registration, and voter migration is making those distinctions more clear.
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The State Senate and House districts in Midwestern states governed by the Republican Party after 2010 have been masterfully gerrymandered, and the Republican legislative majorities are now, with few exceptions, huge.
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The State Supreme Court ruled in January that Pennsylvania's House map was gerrymandered unlawfully and redrew congressional boundaries that may cause either candidate to run in a new district in November.
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Democrats have already sued to throw out congressional maps in several states and the United States Supreme Court is expected to consider a number of cases this year involving gerrymandered maps.
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An efficient gerrymandered map doles out just enough support to governing party candidates to let them win and hold seats safely, even in "wave" elections when their opponents do especially well.
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They say the maps effectively punish supporters of gerrymandered candidates for expressing their political preference, violating both the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal treatment under the law.
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In October, the court heard an appeal of another three-judge panel's ruling that Republicans had unconstitutionally gerrymandered Wisconsin's State Assembly in an attempt to relegate Democrats to a permanent minority.
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His bonhomie has played well in this heavily gerrymandered district, stretching from the diverse, gentrifying neighborhood of Bay Ridge to the mostly white, conservative areas of Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park.
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Six of the 10 most gerrymandered states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia — all reside in the South, and nearly all have been dominated by Republicans for years.
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These trends include growing ideological consistency in the electorate, geographic sorting, gerrymandered districts, the perception of partisan opponents as mortal enemies and the emotional intensity underpinning issues of race and sex.
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George Holding and open-seat candidate Ted Budd in heavily gerrymandered North Carolina — are nervous about Democrats' strength in their state, though no one believes they are in any real danger.
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It also poses a particular danger to the G.O.P. in a number of carefully gerrymandered districts where Republicans count on rural white voters to cancel out well-educated, liberal Democratic enclaves.
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Judges in a number of states have recently thrown out election maps, saying that they have been gerrymandered to the point of being unconstitutional, effectively dooming one party to permanent underrepresentation.
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It's a very gerrymandered district, they cut most of the heart of Pittsburgh out of it, but he still did well in the areas outside there and improved the Democratic performance.
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But the judges said North Carolinians would be irreparably harmed if the 2020 election — like the preceding ones in 2018 and 2016 — were conducted using maps that appeared to be illegally gerrymandered.
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A lot of the rest of the state is relatively conservative and heavily gerrymandered, so we're always having to fight with the state GOP over our public transit and public education funding.
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The 2010 elections resulted in severely gerrymandered maps in states like North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, where Republicans have hung onto outsized congressional majorities even as their states have gotten more purple.
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Scanlon, who beat out nine other Democrats in the primary, was heavily favored to win the district, which was re-formed after the heavily gerrymandered Pennsylvania map was ordered to be redrawn.
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But Democrats are still facing a heavily gerrymandered House map, and the frank reality that their (younger) supporters have historically been less reliable voters in midterm elections than the GOP's (older) base.
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If this crisis unfolds as depicted here, the country's final hope for avoiding a terminal slide into authoritarianism would be the midterm election, contesting control of a historically gerrymandered House of Representatives.
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The request comes after judges for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in June that the state's 11 House of Delegates districts were gerrymandered along racial lines.
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In Pennsylvania this past January, the Supreme Court forced the state to redraw its congressional map, which was so gerrymandered, the justices wrote, that it "clearly, plainly, and palpably" violated its constitution.
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When the party wants to take legal action over what they say are political boundaries unfairly gerrymandered by Republican state legislators, Elias is the one to file suit and argue in court.
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"We've got a dilemma, a challenge, where you've got these gerrymandered districts, and a lot of these Republicans are representing a point of view that's pretty solid where they come from," Rep.
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It seems more likely that the GOP's anti-democratic tactics will have to be defeated either through hard-fought electoral wins by Democrats or court rulings that reject gerrymandered maps—or both.
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But Democrats are still facing a heavily gerrymandered House map and the frank reality that their (younger) supporters have historically been less reliable voters in midterm elections than the GOP's (older) base.
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And while Democrats won the House and several state legislative chambers in 251, gerrymandered Republican districts have proven to be a durable challenge for the party to surmount over the past decade.
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Because of the way gerrymandered districts are stacked, a state like North Carolina has far more Republican representatives than Democratic ones, even if half of its voters actually vote Democratic, Prokop notes.
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The congressman has been regarded as a target for Democrats because his district, which is considered among the nation's most gerrymandered, was carried narrowly by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
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But doing so, Kim says, would likely create several dozen House seats that are by definition not gerrymandered — and, as a result, are more responsive to the actual demands of their constituents.
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Residents have grown weary of having their House seat held up as one of the most gerrymandered in the country, used to explain the country's descent into tribal politics and voter cynicism.
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Arthur: I bet you if she really made an effort to reach bipartisan compromise, the heaviest resistance would come from the hard left (the liberals in safe, gerrymandered districts), not the right.
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The emails emerged as part of a federal lawsuit, brought by the League of Woman Voters and other Democratic groups, that alleges the 2011 congressional maps are gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.
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House Republicans said that their voters, the people who elected them in districts gerrymandered to be solidly Republican, wanted no compromises; they wanted smaller government and to block all of Obama's initiatives.
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The 103-page ruling is the first major decision on partisan maps since the United States Supreme Court ruled in June that even the most extreme gerrymandered maps were beyond its jurisdiction.
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Tony Evers (D) is taking a new weapon into the fight for control of the decennial redistricting process in a state where Democrats say Republicans have consistently built themselves a gerrymandered advantage.
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New districts that were handed down by the state Supreme Court after ruling the current lines were gerrymandered in favor of the GOP could put more seats in play come the fall.
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Democrats have turned out well in special elections in 2017 and 2018, but Republicans have a sizable advantage in the race for the House thanks to gerrymandered districts that protect GOP incumbents.
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The initiative will focus on raising money for candidates, launching ballot initiatives to create independent redistricting commissions, and challenging gerrymandered electoral districts, which have made it harder for Democrats to win state elections.
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Imagine the impact this might have on gerrymandered swing states where you can map an issue to align with known voting blocks (gerrymandering tends to group people of certain party affiliations and ideologies).
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The court also upheld racially gerrymandered districts in Texas, with at least two justices, Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, expressing the view that the Voting Rights Act does not cover any challenges to redistricting.
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Since Mark Herring, Virginia's attorney-general, declined to appeal a lower-court ruling striking down the gerrymandered map and appointing a special master to draw up a fair replacement, the case is closed.
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Dive in if you want—but the overall takeaway is that local conditions (like what sort of candidates the opposition party fields and how aggressively gerrymandered House districts are) will matter a lot.
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A panel of three federal judges struck down the maps last summer, calling them racially gerrymandered, but weeks later, the Supreme Court weeks later kept the challenged maps in place, citing Texas' appeal.
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Like several other states, North Carolina has been gerrymandered by the GOP; this summer, a federal court ruled that the US House map in the state so favored Republicans that it was unconstitutional.
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Even a Democratic wave is not expected to hand the party control of the House, because there are many safe Republican seats in rural areas, as well as gerrymandered districts that favor Republicans.
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Many of these seats were gerrymandered by Republican state legislators to protect incumbents, but that was in the pre-Trump era, when Republicans could more reliably count on the votes of moderate women.
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The far-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, above, stacked the courts, gerrymandered Parliament and co-opted much of the press so that Hungarian democracy has been hollowed out, slowly and subtly.
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But our system for allocating resources in public education, with local property taxes funding schools and districts gerrymandered to be socioeconomically homogeneous, does as much to perpetuate inherited privilege as to level it.
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Running up big numbers in districts gerrymandered to include large numbers of voters of color, Mr. Halle said, would be less valuable than remaining viable in other rural districts filled with white voters.
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In the early 1990s, when Mr. Farrell gerrymandered a downtown Assembly district to help elect the borough's first Asian-American Democratic district leader, he said the outcome would depend on local political leaders.
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Roberts, eyes wide shut again, suggested that voters have the power to undo gerrymandered maps, ignoring a decade of election results across the country that have advantaged the party that draws the maps.
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But in Virginia, courts ruled that some of the state's political maps had been racially gerrymandered, meaning that too many African-American voters were placed into the same districts, diminishing their voting power.
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There is real animosity between the two sides that gets reinforced due to gerrymandered districts that insulate members from accountability, and we have a media environment that funnels partisan news to target audiences.
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"This opinion, declaring Ohio an egregiously gerrymandered state, completely validates every one of our claims and theories in every respect," Freda Levenson, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, said in a statement.
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After the 2014 elections, Huffman — then a Republican state House member who had played a key role in passing the recent gerrymandered maps — introduced redistricting reform plans for both congressional and state legislature maps.
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"North Carolina Republicans tried to beat democracy with their gerrymandered maps, and the U.S. Supreme Court would have let them get away with it," Stanton Jones, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said on Monday.
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Texas' 21st District is gerrymandered to look a bit like a whale, and to include just the right parts of San Antonio and Austin to guarantee that a Republican gets elected, as retiring Rep.
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The House Republican majority will have been vanquished despite defending a map that they ingeniously gerrymandered after 251, and which extended the dominion of an increasingly out-of-touch GOP over our national life.
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If Trump loses such that the down ticket suffers, alt-reality congressmen are the most likely to survive, given their gerrymandered districts, while Ryan's reality-based comrades are more likely to get tossed out.
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In June, a divided U.S. Supreme Court sent a message to voters who are upset at how gerrymandered election maps distort elections and damage their sense of being fairly represented: Sorry, not our problem.
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There will be a very strong element of regression in the Clinton presidency, given she has to work with a gerrymandered House of Representatives, where it is highly unlikely that Republicans will lose control.
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Democratic national committees would (and still will) put money only behind centrist whites with establishment support down South, viewing progressives and candidates of color as sure losers if they weren't running in gerrymandered districts.
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These historic wins defied the significant structural barriers that favor anti-reproductive health politicians, including the most gerrymandered congressional maps in decades, the traditionally low voter turnout of the midterms and rampant voter suppression.
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That's not because Democrats have a chance of capturing the heavily gerrymandered chamber (Republicans now hold 66 of its 100 seats) but for further indications of whether Trump is hurting the GOP in suburbia.
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Tuesday's ruling concerned only the state legislative districts, but legal experts have said it could open the door to a similar lawsuit challenging North Carolina's congressional map, which is also widely seen as gerrymandered.
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Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan presented bills last week that would restrict the powers of incoming Democratic governors out of fear of losing the gerrymandered districts they depend on for a trove of seats.
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They'd lose seats in Democratic-gerrymandered states like Illinois and Maryland, but Republican gerrymandering is much more common (since the party controlled more legislatures during the last redistricting), so Democrats would gain on net.
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Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 22017 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.
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To the Editor: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. worries that the Supreme Court's legitimacy would be hurt if it gets involved in striking down gerrymandered districts in favor of one party or another.
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The Pennsylvania state Senate president pro tempore said Wednesday he will not cooperate with the state Supreme Court's request to turn over data after it found that the state's congressional map was unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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Unlike colleagues in deep red Trump states or House members in gerrymandered districts, senators from purple states face a delicate balance in their decision making, even if they eventually opt to side with Trump.
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Rauner called Illinois' existing political maps, which are drawn by Democrats who control the General Assembly, "rigged and gerrymandered" because they have left a majority of legislative races this fall without challengers to incumbent legislators.
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A strange thing happened during Ohio's primary: One of the most pro-Republican-gerrymandered states in the country put an actual bipartisan deal to reform gerrymandering in front of its voters — and it passed, easily.
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The opposition fears that heavily gerrymandered elections, due in 2018 but generally expected to take place this year, will hand Mr Najib's party (which has led Malaysia for 60 years) yet another term in power.
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But in 2016, after battles in both state and federal courts, the United States Supreme Court ruled that two of the 13 districts were racially gerrymandered to dilute black voting power, and ordered them redrawn.
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The Supreme Court struck down two gerrymandered districts in North Carolina, ruling they were created to group voters based on race rather than political affiliation, limiting the electoral power of black voters in the state.
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The voters who brought the case in 2013 argued that the district that Scott represents, stretching from Richmond to Norfolk, was racially "gerrymandered," cramming black voters into it and reducing black influence in neighboring districts.
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But erasing the lines of a comically gerrymandered district dubbed "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" was not enough to satisfy an order from Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, said Tom Wolf, the state's Democratic governor, on February 13th.
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But his remarks in the middle of an intense hearing over gerrymandered districts in Wisconsin offered the sharpest statement to date of his thinking -- and perhaps motivations -- regarding the institution that informally bears his name.
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"In fact, the only substantive change that the Legislature made to the maps was to add more discrimination in the form of a new racially gerrymandered [House District] 90, as the majority concedes," Sotomayor wrote.
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After a long discourse on what is broken in politics — gerrymandered districts, a flood of undisclosed campaign contributions and negative advertisements — Mr. Obama cited the low turnout numbers in American elections, especially by young people.
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In highly gerrymandered districts where only the Republican primary matters and the opinion of the president carries great weight, both incumbents and challengers will feel strong incentives to reflect the Trump agenda for the party.
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Six of the 10 most gerrymandered states, like West Virginia or Kentucky, are also not targets, for the obvious reason that fair redistricting for Republican dominated states would not yield additional congressional seats for Democrats.
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" Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) said in a statement that it is "unfortunate that House Republicans wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and months of litigation in a futile effort to protect racially gerrymandered districts.
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And as Justice Sotomayor observed during the oral argument, the gerrymandered map, "at best", is a product of "the legislature as a whole" or "the people of Virginia"—not of the House of Delegates alone.
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Since The Showbox isn't directly connected to the Pike Market Mixed Zone, the suit claimed that that the ordinance was "unlawful" and that it used "gerrymandered mechanisms" to include the venue in the Historical District.
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But the court could throw up its hands instead, and say that gerrymandered maps are a political problem that the courts cannot solve — or kick the can down the legal road based on technical issues.
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" Klaas continued: "While no party is innocent when it comes to gerrymandering, a Washington Post analysis in 2014 found that eight of the ten most gerrymandered districts in the United States were drawn by Republicans.
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Doing nothing is exactly what the climate deniers, the Koch network, the N.R.A., the fossil fuel industry and every self-important yahoo in every gerrymandered district in this country wants us to do, as well.
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Such is the discord already simmering as the justices prepare to hear another dispute over politically gerrymandered voting districts -- from Maryland, on Wednesday -- and over Trump's travel ban on certain majority-Muslim countries, in April.
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Common Cause is just the latest in a series of court decisions and ballot initiatives that either undercut Republican gerrymanders or that seek to prevent either party from drawing similarly gerrymandered maps in the future.
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The Wisconsin State Assembly, for example, is so thoroughly gerrymandered that Republicans control 218 percent of the seats, despite the fact that Democrats won 25 percent of the popular vote in the most recent election.
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As Fedor detailed in a Medium post, algorithmically optimizing district boundaries for compactness (such as Bdistricting) or randomly generating the boundaries actually leads to districts that are more gerrymandered than the boundaries drafted up by politicians.
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The end result for North Carolina is a congressional delegation that looks just like it did under its purposefully racially gerrymandered map: a 85033-3 Republican advantage, with no improvement for the state's African American communities.
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By scuttling a racially gerrymandered map that Republicans adopted in 2011, the Supreme Court sets the stage for a possible Democratic takeover of Virginia's Senate and House of Delegates when Virginians vote on November 5th 2019.
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Considering the national vote was nearly the opposite of the 7003–49 Clinton loss here it shows you just how gerrymandered America is, and how difficult it will be for Democrats to win the House back.
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The Supreme Court heard a legal challenge on Wednesday, arguing that a congressional district in Maryland was gerrymandered to favor Democrats — with an attorney claiming that the decision violated the First Amendment rights of Republican voters.
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Federal judges ruled Tuesday that North Carolina's congressional district map drawn by legislative Republicans is illegally gerrymandered due to excessive partisanship that gave GOP a rock-solid advantage for most seats and must quickly be redone.
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A panel of federal judges that deemed North Carolina's congressional maps to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered ruled on Tuesday that those same maps should be used for the November election, citing "insufficient time" to create new ones.
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Rather, like many "red" states, Kansas is a gerrymandered, dark-monied place where election outcomes may have more to do with who votes and how those votes are counted than with the character of the place.
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The G.O.P., which lost the House in November as well as four key governorships in the Midwest, depends on its gerrymandered districts in the region for a trove of seats in both Congress and state legislatures.
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"It's a marvel of modern technology how gerrymandered you can make the New York Senate map," said Evan Stavisky, a partner in the Parkside Group, a political consulting firm that represents the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.
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The same three-judge Wake County Superior Court panel several weeks ago blocked the state from using a congressional map created in 2016 in next year's elections, suggesting that map's boundaries were gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
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In this case, the opponents argued that the developers, Mitsui Fudosan America and SJP Properties, created a "gerrymandered" 39-sided zoning lot to take advantage of the development rights from a number of tenuously adjacent lots.
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Meanwhile, Republican primary election voters, who are the real arbiters when polarized and/or gerrymandered districts make the general election irrelevant for many politicians, live in a Fox News bubble into which awkward truths never penetrate.
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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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"This is something that candidates need to talk about, out of concern that if you win and you got a gerrymandered House of Representatives — we've seen that picture before," Holder said in an interview with POLITICO.
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Original post: A strange thing will happen during Tuesday's Ohio primary election: One of the most pro-Republican-gerrymandered states in the country will put an actual bipartisan deal to reform gerrymandering in front of its voters.
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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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Even with heavily Republican gerrymandered maps and a national popular vote advantage that experts considered lower than necessary to even flip the House, Democrats are on track to turn at least 39 seats from red to blue.
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"Perhaps for the first time ever in North Carolina, state legislators have freely and publicly admitted that they gerrymandered for rank partisan advantage," Common Cause NC executive director Bob Phillips said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
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When the GOP rails about "election integrity" and "voter fraud," what they're really talking about is suppressing votes—the absurd, process-driven arguments used to defend gerrymandered districts in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan, notwithstanding.
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Colorado, Michigan, and Utah have also advanced state constitutional amendments that, if implemented, would allow independent commissions to redraw gerrymandered districts instead of state lawmakers—a key issue as legislators prepare for redistricting after the 2020 census.
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Just last week, the high court declined a GOP request to intervene in a Pennsylvania case where the state Supreme Court invalidated the state's pro-Republican gerrymandered congressional map and replaced it with a court-drawn plan.
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In gerrymandered districts, for example, elected officials are often more worried about primary challenges than about winning in the general election and are thus more likely to take relatively extreme positions than to take centrist, bipartisan ones.
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It also devalues the vote of voters who already reside in districts that were gerrymandered to destroy the democratic efficacy of voting in those districts, which were altered to achieve an outcome predetermined by the gerrymandering party.
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"I will do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from gerrymandered districts," he wrote in his Monday op-ed.
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Heightened political activism in the Trump era brought out many more men running for office, too, and many of the female candidates were Democrats running in districts that are gerrymandered or all but assured to vote Republican.
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Judge P. Kevin Brobson of Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg noted that Republicans hold 13 out of 18 Congressional seats in Pennsylvania, a perennial swing state that has one of the most extensively gerrymandered maps in the country.
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"This is Trumpism at the lower level," said Bernard Grofman, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine who redrew Virginia's congressional map in 2015 following a federal court finding that districts had been racially gerrymandered.
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In the Pennsylvania primary election on Tuesday, Democratic voters will choose their candidates in several of the most important House of Representatives races in the country — races that will be conducted under a new, less gerrymandered map.
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The district, moderate enough to give hope to good candidates of either party, even though it was gerrymandered to be more Republican, is one of two in the state that Democrats hope to flip in November's midterms.
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But before his death a year ago, the public record of his work was limited to gerrymandered political maps in North Carolina and a handful of other states, and a sheaf of expert-witness depositions in lawsuits.
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That&aposs because the data makes clear that putting a relatively small amount of money into a key selection of battleground states could ensure Democrats are not gerrymandered out of power in Congress for decades to come.
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Pat Meehan (R-PA) announced he wouldn't seek reelection after news of his settlements for sexual harassment claims came to light, and the other as the state's Supreme Court struck down the state's very gerrymandered congressional map.
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But whether Ossoff can pull off the improbable upset or not, Democrats will continue to face deep structural disadvantages to reclaiming Congress — most notably, gerrymandered congressional districts and the incumbency advantage that favors those running for reelection.
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He's not running for office himself but he wants to lead an effort to get redistricting on the ballot in the 37 states where you can do that and then to fund legal challenges to gerrymandered districts.
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A US district court ruled earlier this week that North Carolina's partisan gerrymandered congressional districts were unconstitutional, raising the very real possibility that new maps might need to be drawn mere weeks before the 24 House elections.
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Democrats are contending with gerrymandered districts in many House races, they have to defend 10 Senate seats in states that Trump won in 2016, and issues like health care and immigration will likely dominate the policy debate.
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If the Navajo don't want gerrymandered districts, they should go back to the at-large elections — no matter that the county's at-large elections were precisely what was found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
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While other state legislatures fight to retain gerrymandered political maps and enact voter-suppression schemes, California took the lead (under Schwarzenegger) in getting rid of gerrymanders, a movement Schwarzenegger himself is now trying to extend across the country.
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After a Democratic governor won in North Carolina in 2016, Republican lawmakers who held a supermajority of gerrymandered seats in the state legislature stripped the state's executive branch of some of its powers, triggering a prolonged constitutional showdown.
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But a ruling from the state Supreme Court that state legislative districts cannot be gerrymandered for partisan gain under the North Carolina constitution would likely apply equally to U.S. congressional lines, which are also drawn by state lawmakers.
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It also has wildly gerrymandered borders aimed at guaranteeing Republican control unless the incumbent does something incredible, like championing anti-abortion legislation after hinting to his mistress that she ought to get an abortion if she's pregnant. Whoops.
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Before news of his settlement, Mr. Meehan already faced an uphill battle in a suburban Philadelphia district that is among the most severely gerrymandered in the country and that Hillary Clinton narrowly carried in the 2016 presidential election.
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The decision will almost certainly force Democrats, who control 14 statehouses, to reconsider their belated crusade against gerrymandered maps and begin drawing their own — an eat-or-be-eaten response to Republican success in gaming the redistricting process.
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His daughter recently discovered a study on his hard drive showing that adding a citizenship question to the census — as the Trump administration has done — would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.
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Even as Democrats gained at least 32 seats and won a clear majority of the popular vote, they failed to capture even a single seat in three big states with aggressively gerrymandered lines: Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
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As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.
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JON HARRISON, POULTNEY, VT. To the Editor: Michelle Goldberg cites various reasons for the nonrepresentative nature of our national government, including small-state bias in the Constitution, gerrymandered congressional districts and uneven distribution of voters throughout the states.
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And that was noticeable even during Democrats' big wins in 2017; even though Democrats won the overall vote by about 9 points in House of Delegates races, gerrymandered districts made it so Republicans still controlled the chamber — barely.
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A panel of federal judges in North Carolina two weeks ago threw out that state's Republican-drawn map as illegally gerrymandered and ordered new lines drawn, a potential boost to Democrats in U.S. House races in that state.
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With other states — including Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Maryland (a rare state where Democrats have gerrymandered the districts) — in similar situations, many people are taking Wolf as an example of how to tackle gerrymandering in their own states.
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In places where the legislature itself seems too hopelessly gerrymandered for Democrats to have a prayer of taking control before 2021, the NDRC thinks a total overhaul of the process is the best way to improve the party's odds.
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Three delegates are selected from heavily gerrymandered Senate districts all across New York state and independent people not affiliated with parties have much higher hurdles to clear to become engaged and involved in this process and to become delegates.
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And while the conservative justices handed Republicans a major victory last week by ruling that federal judges can't fix gerrymandered legislative districts, Chief Justice John Roberts also delivered a setback to the party's efforts to pervert the 2020 census.
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Even the former Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, said the district was gerrymandered, but it was ok because it was in response to Republican gerrymandering and, anyway, he is now all for the Supreme Court to rule against all gerrymandering.
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RALEIGH, N.C. (Reuters) - North Carolina's state legislative districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to entrench Republicans in power and must be thrown out, a lawyer for state Democrats and a good-government advocacy group told a panel of judges on Monday.
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With our legislature composed mostly of millionaires, elected through a gerrymandered system, funded by a precious few and managed by an established elite, Mr. Trump's supporters — and Bernie Sanders's — may represent a desperate last gasp to reaffirm true democracy.
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Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on "wing nut welfare" — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.
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But states can provide their own solutions — as California did when it went from being one of the most gerrymandered states to one of the least, after its voters chose by referendum in 2010 to make the process nonpartisan.
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An efficiently gerrymandered map has a maximum number of districts that each contain just enough governing-party supporters to let the party's candidates win and hold the seat safely, even during "wave" elections when the opposition does especially well.
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The state's Republican-dominated legislature redrew the House map in 22019 under orders from a different federal court, which had ruled that some districts drawn in 2011 were racially gerrymandered, a practice the Supreme Court has already ruled unconstitutional.
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"Here's the bottom line: There's nothing easy about winning 23 seats under the current gerrymandered maps -- in the face of massive outside Republican spending -- and we're taking nothing for granted," said Tyler Law, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's spokesman.
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Earlier this month, a panel of North Carolina judges backed a new congressional map approved by state lawmakers saying there was not enough time ahead of the November 2020 election to determine whether it was politically gerrymandered or not.
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Trump's entire viability, by contrast, has been due to the geographic happenstance of the Electoral College, backed up by the Senate's structural underrepresentation of people of color and boosted by a House GOP majority that gerrymandered itself into softness and complacency.
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If you look at the Houston Chronicle ranking of "most gerrymandered" Texas congressional districts, ranked by "squiggliness," you can see how the maps are drawn to isolate Democrats into single districts, leaving the rest to be handily won by Republicans.
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The state is also home to a heated battle over redistricting, after a panel of federal judges ruled in January that the district maps were gerrymandered to benefit the Republicans in power and must be redrawn in time for 2018 elections.
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In an "amicus" brief in the gerrymandering case before the Supreme Court this term, Paul Diller of Willamette University cites five states—Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin—with supposedly gerrymandered statehouses and a history of quashing urban priorities.
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The House will likely get a bit easier in 2022, as Democrats now hold governorships in some big states that have GOP-gerrymandered maps where they'll be able to fight for court-drawn or compromise maps after the next census.
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It's because of these gerrymandered maps that we see progressive cities like Austin, Texas, represented by more Republicans in Congress than Democrats, and why overall the median House seat is much further to the right than the nation as a whole.
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Democrats need to win the nationwide popular vote by at least 10 points in 2018 to do so, in part because of gerrymandered lines, according to Michael Li, a redistricting expert and lawyer at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.
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"I will do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from gerrymandered districts," he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed announcing his decision.
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Many suburban and rural districts were artfully gerrymandered by Republican state legislators after the 2010 census and have proved impenetrable since then; they aren't likely to change hands without a healthy number of recent Republican voters being persuaded to vote Democratic.
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Over the last decade, Fitzgerald has played a key role in pushing through a host of measures—voter ID and other restrictive voting laws, gerrymandered election maps, and legislation weakening campaign finance protections—that together have badly undermined the state's democracy.
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But in this case opponents of the project argued that the developers, SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan America, created a "gerrymandered," highly unusual 39-sided zoning lot to take advantage of the development rights from a number of tenuously connected lots.
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Pennsylvania's Supreme Court recently ruled that the state's congressional districts were gerrymandered and put a new map in place for November's midterm elections, which means the 18th District will only exist in its current form for a few more months.
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The stakes are largely psychological: Pennsylvania's Supreme Court recently ruled that its congressional districts were gerrymandered and redrew the map -- meaning both candidates would face choices about where to run if they want to be on the ballot in November.
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Under the rules, the mapmakers cannot consider past election results when drawing boundaries; must follow accepted practices, like keeping districts compact; cannot hire outside experts without court approval; and cannot use the gerrymandered maps as starting points for drawing new ones.
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That year Democrats collectively sat on our hands while Republicans invested roughly $30 million into down ballot races, won control of two-thirds of state legislatures across the country, and gerrymandered themselves into dozens of congressional seats for the next decade.
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"I will do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from gerrymandered districts," added Holder, who currently serves as chairman of the NDRC.
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Third-party candidates are not to blame for the spoiler effect — it is gerrymandered single-member voting districts, state boards of elections' limitations on ballot access and winner-take-all counting methods keeping us from breaking free from our stalemated government.
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The Republican leaders then drew a new map with less convoluted district lines than before, but Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, refused to approve it, saying it was just as severely gerrymandered for partisan advantage as the old map was.
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He has attacked the independence of the court system, gerrymandered electoral districts so it's nearly impossible for his Fidesz party to lose its electoral majority, and gotten his allies to buy up independent media outlets to mute criticism and disseminate propaganda.
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The parties have until August 31st to file briefs suggesting whether the November election should go forward with the gerrymandered map and, if the answer is no, whether the legislature should be given another opportunity to draft another map that meets constitutional muster.
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These include: A suit over the constitutionality of a gerrymandered electoral map in North Carolina, which the court did not resolve last term Legal challenges that could affect the DACA program Efforts by the Trump administration to restrict transgender troops in the military
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Since 2012, the country's electoral map has been so heavily skewed toward Republicans that in severely gerrymandered states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan, Democrats could win more than half the vote and still walk away with a minority of congressional seats.
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That familiarity to voters would be a boon to a mayoral run, and Gutiérrez's popularity in his district — a gerrymandered horseshoe of a region in central Chicago where the population is more than 70 percent Hispanic — would lend him a clear head-start.
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Because more and more voters make their decisions in the polling booth based solely on party identification, those politicians we all hate are able to draw themselves into safely gerrymandered districts, making it exceedingly rare for an incumbent to lose re-election.
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The problem, as all nine justices of the Court agreed, was that for that theory to work, all plaintiffs must individually prove that they live in a gerrymandered district where their votes were wasted—but the plaintiffs here failed to do that.
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Gerrymandered electoral maps often concentrate voters who tend to favor the minority party into a small number of districts to dilute their statewide clout and distribute the rest of those voters in other districts in numbers too small to be a majority.
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Thomas Hofeller, a Republican strategist who died last year, left behind computer files showing that he wrote a study in 2015 that said adding a citizenship question would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to cement the party's power.
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They also established a new legislative power to intervene in litigation challenging state laws and wrested the right to decide on legal action against the Affordable Care Act from the attorney general's office, placing it with the heavily gerrymandered legislature's budget committee.
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Douthat: Well, part of it is certainly the gerrymandered advantage Republicans have from the last round of redistricting, which fell conveniently just after their own wave in 2010, and the fact that the Senate map is particularly favorable to them this year.
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The argument is that incumbents tend to be more extreme if their districts are gerrymandered, because when they're sure to win the general election, they'll focus on appealing to the more extreme members of their base in order to prevent a primary challenge.
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Costello's announcement comes on the heels of several tough developments for Republicans in Pennsylvania, including a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week to reject the state GOP's plea to reverse a redrawing of the state's congressional districts because they were gerrymandered.
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A year and a half later, I'm still bewildered by the election (oh come on, Russian meddling and gerrymandered voter districts and $130,000 payout to a porn actress haven't made anything any clearer), but I am no longer confused about Harry Potter.
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Instead, the United States has drawn the lines in a series of maps that sketch out a future Palestinian state that is so gerrymandered that it requires the construction of a giant tunnel across Israel to connect two areas of Palestinian control.
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WASHINGTON — North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature, under a court order to throw out its gerrymandered congressional map, on Friday enacted a new one that effectively gives the party eight of the state's 13 congressional seats instead of the 10 it had before.
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But what directly drives the attack on democracy, I'd argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.
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All this paid off spectacularly — aided by gerrymandered maps (and, some analysts argue, the geography of where each party's voters happen to live), the GOP has held the House easily ever since, even when they won fewer votes in House races nationwide, as in 2012.
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The O'Rourke campaign, and the organizing efforts that accompanied it, helped shift the electorate in Texas despite the fact that the state is, as one volunteer put it to me, "gerrymandered to high hell" after the Republican-led state legislature redrew the maps in 2011.
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In the meantime, the legislature must quickly redraw the First and 12th districts, which a three-judge panel of the lower court said had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered after the 2010 census to pack African-American voters together so their political power would be diluted.
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NC-9 is a heavily suburban and gerrymandered district around Charlotte; the district lines were redrawn just before the 2016 elections, opening the race to not only a challenge from Harris but also a strong third challenger that ate away at Pittenger's voter base.
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Automated redistricting algorithms basically face the same problem articulated by the Supreme Court ruling in 2004—there continues to be no way to measure at what point a district has been "gerrymandered," and there are no hard rules for what a "fair district" is.
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John DelaneyJohn Kevin DelaneyDelaney shakes up top campaign staff Poll: Nearly 4 in 5 say they will consider candidates' stances on cybersecurity Native American advocates question 2020 Democrats' commitment MORE (D), in a heavily gerrymandered district that stretches from the D.C. suburbs into Western Maryland.
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These changes have, among other things, moved or closed polling places, shortened or canceled early-voting periods, required proof of citizenship or a photo identification to register to vote, erroneously purged voters from the rolls and gerrymandered districts to dilute the power of minority voters.
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A panel of federal judges on Thursday ruled that many of Michigan's districts -- including nine of its 14 congressional districts, two of which were previously held by Republicans but picked off by Democrats in last year's midterm elections -- were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor the GOP.
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Given the current gerrymandered state of American electoral maps, many Republicans are more scared of challenges from the right than from the left—if they united with the dreaded Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to provide a pathway to citizenship, the ads would write themselves.
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That's because Democrats will need to over-perform against a generic ballot to score big gains in the House since — as Nate Cohn at the NYT notes in a worthy read — gerrymandered congressional districts give the GOP a clear electoral edge heading into the fall.
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He will also hold a fund-raising event in New York City for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group led by his former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., that is focused on unraveling gerrymandered congressional maps that heavily favor Republicans, including in Ohio.
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He reported that a consultant who had played a crucial role in the Trump administration's decision to add the citizenship question wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding the query would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.
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They'd picked up only four seats in the state House and lost one in the Senate, leaving Republican supermajorities in both chambers — this despite Democrats having won a near majority of total votes in those races, a sign of just how effectively gerrymandered districts were.
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While Democrats won the governorship by nearly nine percentage points and won a similar margin in total votes in legislative races, it appears likely, unless recounts reverse seats, that they will fall just short of taking control of the state's heavily gerrymandered House of Delegates.
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The state Supreme Court ruled that the House map "clearly, plainly and palpably violates" the state constitution and must be redrawn in the next three weeks after Democrats filed a lawsuit, alleging that Republicans unreasonably gerrymandered the districts to give the GOP a partisan advantage.
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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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The filing asks the Supreme Court to put a hold on the lower court's ruling while it considers Republicans' argument, according to the AP. The state court ruled earlier this week that Pennsylvania's congressional map was gerrymandered to the point that it was unconstitutional.
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The kind of soaring unemployment that followed the worst recession since the Depression is not likely anytime soon, and with many House districts gerrymandered by Republicans and few Republican-held Senate seats open in 2018, the political terrain is more forbidding for Democrats now.
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And they get away with it because of the way they've gerrymandered House districts, because of an ideological right-wing media that obfuscates facts and because the one thing they've done astonishingly well is to make a big chunk of the country hate liberals.
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Florida offers reminder of Cruz's tough slog ahead Winning districts in Maryland won't be easy, Republicans on the ground here say, in a state home some of the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the United States, which make other states' partisan-rigged congressional maps look clean-cut.
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Forward Majority says Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, and they hope chipping away at the state legislature will lay "the groundwork to build a Democratic bench in the state for years to come," said Forward Majority Communications Director Ben Wexler-Waite.
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And the problem for Democrats is that the electoral precincts out of which the maps are made are themselves "gerrymandered," such that it is far more common to find that there's a precinct that's 85 percent or more Democratic than one with such a heavy GOP tilt.
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Liberal Justice Elena Kagan announced a lengthy dissent from the bench, noting that the gerrymandered districts have violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans, whose votes count for less than they should merely because of their political views, undermining free and fair elections.
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I grew up in a house where Ziggy Stardust and Dr. Funkenstein were not gerrymandered off into different universes, where the dots between Prince and Nine Inch Nails were readily connected at the dinner table, and where Chuck Berry was always the King of Rock n' Roll.
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Unsurprisingly, many of the most notoriously gerrymandered states--such as Virginia and Wisconsin--not only pile voters (such as people of color) into the same districts: often, through strict voter ID laws, they attempt to keep them from getting to the polls in the first place.
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Trump's decision to pardon Arpaio, like Trump's success in the Republican primary, is an outgrowth and an emblem of the GOP's decision to foster the intellectual and cultural climates of Fox News across the country—concentrated in heavily gerrymandered congressional districts—to help them win elections.
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The Supreme Court's decision last week to sidestep what could have been a landmark challenge to partisan gerrymandering, citing procedural faults, has drawn attention to a case over North Carolina's GOP-gerrymandered congressional map, which legal experts believe offers clear evidence of direct injury to voting power.
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But if the Democrats do take power—which, considering how gerrymandered the legislature is, would be far from a certainty even in a huge wave election—Jackson says his first priority wouldn't be to mirror the GOP's tactics, but rather to pass an independent redistricting constitutional amendment.
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Republicans also still have crucial structural advantages: The economy is roaring in many of the states where they hold power, the political committee led by Mr. Haslam has $87.5 million to spend on the midterms, and in state legislative elections, Republicans are shielded by gerrymandered district lines.
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That project gained a prominent new advocate in 2016, when it was announced that Obama Attorney General Eric Holder would chair the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), an effort to unwind the gerrymandered districts that have advantaged Republicans in Washington and at the state legislative level.
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Democrats pulled off a startling coup in seven California House districts long held by Republicans, took over four New Jersey districts after a wave of Republican retirements, and won four Pennsylvania districts once the state's gerrymandered congressional map was redrawn after a state Supreme Court ruling.
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WASHINGTON — Republicans are scrambling to save a heavily conservative House seat in western Pennsylvania, dispatching President Trump to the district on Thursday while preparing a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to stave off another embarrassing special election defeat in a district that was gerrymandered to stay Republican.
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During public arguments, the nine have appeared sharply divided in disputes over politically gerrymandered voting districts; a baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a gay couple based on his religious beliefs; and public-sector employees who do not want to pay union fees.
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GOP leaders of the state House and Senate asked the court for an emergency stay blocking the implementation of the maps, which were unveiled last month by the state Supreme Court after it ruled that the previous maps had been gerrymandered in violation of Pennsylvania's Constitution.
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"We've already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court's order to redraw gerrymandered lines," Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the group, said in an interview.
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Pat MeehanPatrick (Pat) Leo MeehanFreshman lawmaker jokes about pace of Washington politics Many authors of GOP tax law will not be returning to Congress Dem Scanlon wins House seat in Pennsylvania MORE — considered one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country — now heavily favors Democrats.
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The GOP leaders of the state House and Senate asked Tuesday for an emergency stay blocking the implementation of the maps, which were unveiled this month by the state Supreme Court after it ruled that the previous maps had been gerrymandered in violation of Pennsylvania's Constitution.
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In the third ruling about voting rights in North Carolina in the past month, the nine justices on Monday upheld the ruling of a lower court that the state racially gerrymandered 28 districts — nine state Senate and 19 state House, all adopted in 2011 by a Republican-controlled Legislature.
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The truth is that our so-called democracy is more of pseudo-democracy, with ridiculously gerrymandered districts, large-scale voter suppression tactics, unequal representation, an Electoral College system that disregards the popular will of the people, and fake news sources that play to echo chambers and voter ignorance.
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Instead, they hope to use all the structural advantages they enjoy—a demographic edge in the Senate and the Electoral College, a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and gerrymandered seats in state legislatures—to overcome their greatest disadvantage of all: getting fewer votes than their opponents.
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Despite Republican-led efforts across the country to draw gerrymandered congressional districts, flood our politics with special-interest money and suppress the vote, the American people elected a wave of Democratic candidates who are committed to unrigging our broken political system and making it more responsive to the public.
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Voters on Tuesday restored the voting rights of 1.4 million Floridians who have been disenfranchised (Trump won Florida by about 100,000 votes); endorsed redistricting reform in Michigan, Colorado and Missouri; and took control of the Supreme Court of the heavily gerrymandered North Carolina, which will revisit that issue.
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People who choose not to vote frequently cite frustration with the political process, or a feeling that their vote doesn't really matter—perhaps due to gerrymandered districts, or because they feel both parties are equally bad, or because they feel people in power don't care about people like them.
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One group of Texas siblings who grew up in a gerrymandered district in the Austin area created a board game called Mapmaker in which players simulate politicians from different political parties drawing maps, with the object of the game being to draw as many favorable districts as possible.
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Many of Trump's judicial nominees have proven controversial, but Farr's nomination has stood out for his defense of a number of North Carolina's most controversial voting-related measures, including its gerrymandered district maps that were partially struck down for packing minority voters into a small number of districts.
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Worried about the prospects of a negative Trump effect on some House races — even though gerrymandered districts make it exceedingly unlikely for Republicans to lose the House — Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, is advising members to focus on local issues and priorities in their respective districts.
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The presidency is the least gerrymandered branch of the federal government (the Electoral College gives the GOP about a 2-point edge, enough to make Trump president but smaller than their edges in the House or Senate) and therefore the prize Democrats have the best odds of capturing.
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And Mr. Meehan's decision resets the calculus for a field of at least three Democrats vying for their party's nomination to run in the sprawling district, which is considered among the most severely gerrymandered in the country and which Hillary Clinton narrowly carried in the 2016 presidential election.
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Democrats also face some structural roadblocks to a huge blue wave, as Vox's Dylan Scott pointed out recently: Democrats are still facing a heavily gerrymandered House map and the frank reality that their (younger) supporters have historically been less reliable voters in midterm elections than the GOP's (older) base.
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A bipartisan group of voting rights advocates says the lower house of the Wisconsin Legislature, the State Assembly, was gerrymandered by its Republican majority before the 20103 election — so artfully, in fact, that Democrats won a third fewer Assembly seats than Republicans despite prevailing in the popular vote.
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He could cast the deciding vote in two other high-profile disputes on the upcoming calendar: one testing whether the Wisconsin state legislature unconstitutionally gerrymandered voting districts to favor Republicans, the other whether the Christian owner of a Colorado bakery may refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision to scrap the old, gerrymandered congressional map and replace it with a new one this fall meant Costello's Chester County district had shifted from one that split almost evenly between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 to one that favored Clinton by nearly 10 points.
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Between the Electoral College, which has chosen two presidents that did not win the popular vote since 2000, and the impact that gerrymandered districts had in 2016, which created three times as many safe Republican seats as Democratic seats in battleground states, it is argued that the playing field is unfair.
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"Every American deserves representation in Washington, but the gerrymandered map struck down by the court today robbed much of the state of a representative voice in the nation's capital," said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, one of the groups that first brought the challenge, said in a statement.
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Democrats' other preparations for the next round of redistricting was a mixed bag last month: Though they lost the Wisconsin race, the party notched a provisional win in Michigan when a panel of federal judges in Michigan threw out GOP-drawn congressional and state legislative maps, calling them unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
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The idea came to Doessel and Lee after they noticed that their gerrymandered Illinois 4th District is shaped like the letter U. "Then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let's create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can't ignore," they said.
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Conservatives, who tormented former Speaker John BoehnerJohn Andrew BoehnerLobbyists race to cash in on cannabis boom Rising star Ratcliffe faces battle to become Trump's intel chief This little engine delivers results for DC children MORE (R-Ohio) and are now complicating life for Ryan, will be reelected in their safe, gerrymandered districts.
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The United States Supreme Court is expected to consider a number of cases involving gerrymandered maps this year, and Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said the group is considering new litigation against state legislative districts in the Pennsylvania courts, which voided a Republican-drawn congressional map last month.
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The highly gerrymandered 18th District, an "r" shape with tentacles that wrap around most of the city of Pittsburgh, is the latest battleground that pits millions of dollars from outside the district in an election that has little to do with the candidates and even less to do with the concerns of voters.
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But for now, in a deeply gerrymandered district whose far-flung constituents have little in common ideologically, educationally, economically or culturally, the election will be decided not by any policy nuance or local infrastructure plan but by a brutal calculus: Which 18th District will turn out the most voters on March 13?
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Stephanie, who told the Times she is a progressive who believes in government transparency but does not specifically support one party, then contacted Common Cause, a nonprofit organization that pushes for open government and voting rights, which was already pursuing a state legal challenge to North Carolina's gerrymandered districts drawn up by her father.
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"He has already rigged the system so much that he thought he would not have to worry any more," says Ms Laning, referring to districts gerrymandered to favour Republicans, which voters are challenging at the Supreme Court (see article), and voter-identification laws that make it harder for minorities and poor people to vote.
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Remember, the White House winner didn't actually win a majority, members of the Senate Republican majority have received an absurd 23 million fewer votes than the Democratic minority, the House is gerrymandered to explicitly lock in minority control and — on top of all that — Republicans are working to make it harder for Americans to vote.
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That race, which Hegar lost by less than three percentage points, saw her try to flip a heavily Republican seat in the suburbs of Austin — a district "gerrymandered to be much redder than the rest of the state, so it was really like a giant focus group for running a statewide campaign," said Hegar.
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So it's noteworthy that so far in 223, Democrats' lead in the generic House ballot has shrunk from 222 points — which would give them a comfortable majority — down to "only" 000 points, which, though still a big lead, is actually small enough that it's possible the scandalously gerrymandered House map would deliver a narrow GOP majority.
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Once one of the most heavily Republican -gerrymandered states in the country, the state's Supreme Court has mandated a new congressional map for 2018 — one that will change Costello's district, which was part of a messy configuration of Philadelphia's suburbs, from a "toss-up," to a likely pick up for Democrats in 2018, according to Cook's Political Report.
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Gerrymandering: At this point, it is obvious that our gerrymandered Congressional districts have been a huge drag on the Obama administration and the nation, not only cementing a Republican majority in the House but ensuring that the particular Republicans elected are free to engage in such productive activity as moving to repeal the Affordable Care Act over fifty times.
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Democrats still face significant structural hurdles in the 2018 election: the tendency of minority and especially younger voters to turn out in lower numbers during nonpresidential years, gerrymandered House districts in several states that fortify Republican defenses and a Senate map that forces them to defend more than twice as many seats as the GOP this year.
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But if the court doesn't try — if it continues to refuse to adjudicate challenges to gerrymandered districts — and allows grossly politically manipulated district lines to stand, no matter how egregiously unfair and undemocratic they may be, it risks reaching the tipping point where no national governmental institution, including the court itself, will be able to command the respect of the polity.
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David Cohen, co-founder and executive director, who was also one of Obama's first hires in 2007, said states were selected based on how many congressional seats are available, how gerrymandered the states are in Republican's favor and how many seats Democrats would stand to gain if they ran redistricting — and tie that to the price tag of winning the chamber.
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The example of Eric CantorEric Ivan CantorEmbattled Juul seeks allies in Washington GOP faces tough battle to become 'party of health care' 737 crisis tests Boeing's clout in Washington MORE similarly shows how the most embryonic discussions of bipartisan cooperation will mobilize partisan media and invite a primary challenge, often in scientifically gerrymandered districts where the primary can be the only competitive election.
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The classic example is Hungary, where Fidesz, the white nationalist governing party, has effectively taken over the bulk of the media; destroyed the independence of the judiciary; rigged voting to enfranchise supporters and disenfranchise opponents; gerrymandered electoral districts in its favor; and altered the rules so that a minority in the popular vote translates into a supermajority in the legislature.
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"If the most competitive race you've got is against some right-wing or left-wing person in the primary, and you don't have to worry about the general election, you end up with representatives who aren't really representative," Thomas Mills, a onetime Democratic campaign consultant who ran his own losing campaign for a gerrymandered House seat in 2016, said in an interview.
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Any subtlety goes for naught, because soon the speaker says: All I once knew of the world now fills With lies and fear and terror, flies past us And dies as you lie back, the last sentence Ever spoken in the lost tongue of the poets That went This was our planet, a past tense, Some dot gerrymandered into fire.
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These maps are key for determining which party is in control of state, local, and federal seats for the next 10 years; after a wave of Tea Party Republicans were swept into office in 2009 and 2010, Republicans gerrymandered districts, all but ensuring their control of the U.S. House of Representatives and many state houses for the next 10 years.
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That's according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, which finds that Republicans have so effectively gerrymandered key states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin that it could prevent Democrats from reclaiming the 24 seats they need to retake the House majority, even if they win the popular vote by the same margins they did in past wave elections, like 20203.
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Will Hurd is the 533th GOP house member to announce he's retiring this year, and it may jeopardize the GOP's chances of a House takeover in 2020Ray further pointed out that many of the districts in the Houston, Dallas, and Austin suburbs were specifically gerrymandered to optimize the chances of a Republican victory, making it all the more concerning that Republicans' margins of victory in those areas are getting slimmer over time.
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In just a few years, North Carolina Republicans have not just run quickly through the conservative policy checklist; they've tried to permanently skew the balance of power in the state in their favor, passing some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country and drawing some of the most egregiously gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts in modern American politics (though their moves have repeatedly failed to pass muster with the courts).
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Get real, indeed, with the cyclical redundancy of Wuthering Heights — a national legislature, ossified by safe gerrymandered districts, and fluctuation between complacent gridlock or sadistically conceived proposals such as cutting the IRS budget to aid-and-abet $300 billion in uncollected taxes per year, or starving enforcement budgets against massive fraud on Medicare, Medicaid, or the Pentagon, which brings in between $10 and $20 in revenue for every $1 in enforcement funds.
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Pennsylvania's current map is considered to be one of the most gerrymandered in the U.S. President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump pushes back on recent polling data, says internal numbers are 'strongest we've had so far' Illinois state lawmaker apologizes for photos depicting mock assassination of Trump Scaramucci assembling team of former Cabinet members to speak out against Trump MORE captured the state with 28503 percent of the vote in 22019, but Republicans hold 13 of the state's House seats, compared to only five for Democrats.
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This morning's episode also includes an interview with Cook Political Report editor David Wasserman about the constitutionality of gerrymandered districts, and The Hill's Jordan Fabian reports that President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump pushes back on recent polling data, says internal numbers are 'strongest we've had so far' Illinois state lawmaker apologizes for photos depicting mock assassination of Trump Scaramucci assembling team of former Cabinet members to speak out against Trump MORE changed his tune about being interviewed by the special counsel in charge of the Russia probe.
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