[EL] Milhiser article on partisan gerrymandering

[Rob Richie]

The mathematicians' failure to acknowledge the Voting  Rights Act is just
 one indicator of how  such simulations are only  as good as the
assumptions that govern them. Worth doing and discussing, but not to be
accepted without an understanding of the impact of those assumptions.

Anther example in the article is that it is based on analyzing the actual
votes cast in House races rather than the more indicative relative
presidential vote. The 2012 elections included some over-performing
Democratic candidates including one incumbent who received more than 20% of
votes from backers of Mitt Romney -- an extraordinarily high crossover vote
in today's partisan climate that didn't continue this year.

I'll also address one lurking  part of this discussion: the myth that
section two of the Voting Rights Act is the cause of the Democrats'
problems in the South. That certainly was true in the past,  but it is not
today absent adoption of independent redistricting commissions. That is,
the need to create majority-minority districts is the only reason that
Republicans drew plans that allows Democrats to win any congressional seats
at all in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Republican
mapmakers also could have knocked Democratic representation down two seats
in Georgia and one seat each in North Carolina and Tennessee. (We show this
in some alternative southern congressional districts
<http://www.fairvote.org/assets/Uploads/Redistricting-Reform-in-the-South.pdf>
map
work we did earlier in the year.)

As it is, the combination of single winner districts, polarized voting and
partisan  control of redistricting makes most of the South a true
basketcase when it comet representative democracy in congressional
elections. Note that when we issued our final November 2016 election
projections
<http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/congressional-elections/fairvotes-projections-for-u-s-house-elections-in-2016/>
earlier this month (on November 6th, more than two years before the 2016
elections), we projected winners in more than 85% of districts using a
methodology that resulted in a single error in more than 700 projections in
2012-2014.

In the South, the numbers are  extraordinary -- setting aside Florida and
Virginia, there are 126 districts in the remaining southern states and the
border  states of Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia. We project
winners in 125 of them; if all these seats were open, we'd still project
123 of them. The prospects of redistricting reform in any of these states
is very slight without Congress asserting its power over the time, place
and manner of elections -- something it onl  is using right now involving
redistricting  to mandate gerrymandering (that is, mandate single-winner
districts, as it required in 1967).

Rob Richie


On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 1:29 AM, Douglas Johnson <djohnson at ndcresearch.com>
wrote:

> Such studies have been done for decades. In fact the difference between
> the party getting more votes and the party getting more seats was fairly
> central to many of the arguments (though not to the ruling) in the Tom
> Delay Texas re-redistricting case. There is no “genius” to such analysis,
> despite Millhiser’s use of that term.
>
>
>
> The more simplistic versions of such studies (including this Mattingly and
> Vaughn study) completely ignore the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.
> In fact, the phrase “voting rights act” never even appears in the Mattingly
> and Vaughn paper. The only remote reference to it is “The two districts
> with largest African American representation had on average around 36% and
> 32% African American population, which compares favorably to the state wide
> percentage of 22%, but not to the current districts.” That sounds to me
> either like a total failure to understand the VRA, or a knowing attempt to
> distract reporters from recognizing that they’re deliberately ignoring the
> VRA despite the VRA’s significant impact on the redistricting plan in
> question.
>
>
>
> Millhiser specifically condemns redistricting plans that “are almost
> certainly the product of a legislature that carefully designed the maps to
> produce a desired result.” But that is exactly what the VRA requires – on a
> racial/ethnic and language front. The difficulty is not in proving that
> redistricting plans are not random (or at least that they’re not the
> most-compact plan possible). The difficulty is in proving the plans are
> drawn for partisan purpose, as opposed to drawn ensure compliance with the
> VRA or to follow city, county, or other community of interest boundaries.
> The filings in *Vieth * provide a look at a variety of potential tools
> for such analysis. Millhiser and Vaughn do not.
>
>
>
> This is a topic in desperate need of good solid analysis and study. I
> often describe *Vieth* as the Supreme Court’s version of a “Call for
> Papers.” Unfortunately neither the article nor the study qualify as such.
>
>
>
> -          Doug
>
>
>
> Douglas Johnson, Fellow
>
> Rose Institute of State and Local Government
>
> at Claremont McKenna College
>
> douglas.johnson at cmc.edu
>
> 310-200-2058
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> “If The Supreme Court Reads This Study, It Could End Partisan
> Gerrymandering Forever” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=68747>
>
> Posted on December 2, 2014 8:10 am <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=68747>
> by *Rick Hasen* <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> Ian Millhiser writes.
> <http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/01/3597643/this-study-could-end-the-worst-kinds-of-gerrymandering-if-the-supreme-court-took-the-time-to-read-it/>
>
> I was surprised to see no mention of Voting Rights Act requirements in
> drawing these districts.
>
>
>
>
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>
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