[EL] The answer to the gerrymander; The courts need a standard to assess congressional maps

[Nicholas Stephanopoulos]

Almost all states that require districts to correspond to communities of
interest have separate provisions barring political subdivisions from being
divided. The clear implication is that communities of interest are not the
same thing as political subdivisions. It's also true that communities are
shaped not only by people's objective interests but also by their
subjective affiliations; therefore demographic and socioeconomic data *alone
* should not be used to identify communities (except as a proxy). It's
interesting, however, that the most recent and most extensive definition of
communities of interest -- that found in the California Constitution in the
wake of the state's 2008 and 2010 redistricting initiatives -- makes no
mention of subjective considerations and explicitly refers to objective
factors such as income, occupation, and population density. That
definition, a variant of which was successfully used by California's
Special Masters in the 1970s and 1990s, is as follows:

"A community of interest is a contiguous population which shares common
social and economic interests that should be included within a single
district for purposes of its effective and fair representation.  Examples
of such shared interests are those common to an urban area, a rural area,
an industrial area, or an agricultural area, and those common to areas in
which the people share similar living standards, use the same
transportation facilities, have similar work opportunities, or have access
to the same media of communication relevant to the election process.
Communities of interest shall not include relationships with political
parties, incumbents, or political candidates."

The problem with automated approaches that maximize district compactness,
of course, is that they ignore all the other democratic values that
redistricting is meant to promote: competitiveness, partisan fairness,
minority representation, and, yes, respect for communities of interest.
This is why the automated approaches have never caught on and why I predict
they never will.

Nick

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Jon Roland <jon.roland at constitution.org>wrote:

> **
> A standard that would satisfy the request of Justice Kennedy in the *Jubelirer
> * case has been offered in interventions in this and the previous Texas
> redistricting case, but no one with the financial means to champion it up
> to the Supreme Court has chosen to do so. Everyone with money would seem to
> prefer to keep the issue going than to solve it. All the Court has to do is
> look at the trial court record including the interventions to find it. But
> it is unlikely to so do unless someone can use argument or an an amicus
> brief to draw attention to it. The proposed solution is set forth at
> http://constitution.org/reform/us/tx/redistrict/cnpr.htm
>
> Trying to define "communities of interest" based on factors like income,
> education, or ethnicity is futile. That is an approach to defining classes,
> not communities. The closest things to communities are defined by political
> boundaries like those of counties or towns. The proposal by Nick
> Stephanopoulos is on the wrong track.
>
> -- Jon
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Constitution Society               http://constitution.org
> 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322           twitter.com/lex_rex
> Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001  jon.roland at constitution.org
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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