[EL] Milhiser article on partisan gerrymandering

Wed Dec 3 08:08:19 PST 2014

More comprehensive versions of the Duke study have been carried out by
Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden (see here
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/florida.pdf>) and Roland Fryer and
Richard Holden (see here
<http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/fryer.pdf>). None of
these studies takes the VRA into account (or, for that matter, other common
criteria such as respect for political subdivisions and respect for
communities of interest). So I think it's fair to say that we don't know
what the partisan implications of randomly drawn *lawful* plans would be.
We know what the partisan implications are of randomly drawn and *maximally
compact* plans, but these aren't the same thing as legally valid plans.

On the issue of gerrymandering more generally, Eric McGhee and I have a
forthcoming article (see here
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457468>) in which we
introduce a new measure of partisan distortion and argue that it could
serve as the basis for a legal test. We're responding not to *Vieth* but
rather to the favorable comments by five Justices in *LULAC* about the
concept of partisan symmetry.

Nick

On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 5:30 AM, Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org> wrote:

>
> 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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-- 
Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos
Assistant Professor of Law
University of Chicago Law School
nsteph at uchicago.edu
(773) 702-4226
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