[EL] Flaws in Politico and NY Times articles about gerrymandering

[David Ely]

A greater number of competitive seats also means a greater number of voters losing in their choice of representatives. If people are voting for their representational interests this is a bad thing. 

 

If the districts are competitive because they are made up of communities that are individually competitive but similar to each other then it makes sense. However if they are competitive because they contain a balance of different communities with opposing interests then they defeat the idea of communities of interest.  

 

This is also the problem with the idea of equalizing both population and CVAP in single member districts when you have distinct communities with radically different ratios of CVAP to Population combined with different representational interests.  That would be close to the definition of vote dilution.

 

This also relates to another problem with the question of what a Gerrymander really is. A purely partisan Gerrymander would try to maximize the number of districts which reach an acceptable level of “safeness” for the party doing the gerrymander while packing opponents into as few districts as possible. A commission with a partisan bias would be more likely to do this than a legislative body drawing their own districts. Legislatures would be more likely to indulge in self-interested gerrymanders which include a partisan element but also contain an attempt to minimize the risk of a same party challenge by avoiding or splitting communities (or individuals) which might produce such a challenge. They also reflect fundraising issues, strategic interests related to either the passage of a redistricting plan or the influence of the individual legislators among other things. There is really no simple measure of this without a detailed knowledge of the individual legislators and the political realities of the underlying geography. In my mind the best way to analyze this is to identify communities of interest and apply the concepts of packing, cracking and stacking to the treatment of various communities. The level of knowledge and understanding of political geography that is required for this analysis is rare outside of the active political community, and close to non-existent among journalists, so I don’t have much hope for meaningful coverage of this issue (especially unbiased coverage).

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Larry Levine
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 8:32 AM
To: djohnson at ndcresearch.com; 'Rick Hasen'; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Flaws in Politico and NY Times articles about gerrymandering

 

Let us not forget that a greater number of competitive seats means greater amounts of money to be raised and spent on campaigning. If it were such a sad situation I would be amused by the conundrum of the “reformer” mentality: independent expenditures are awful; but they are the by-product of contribution limits, which are wonderful; money in politics is evil; so let’s increase the number of competitive races and jack up the amount of money required. Everything, EVERYTHING, has a cause and effect. And in this case you can’t have everything.

Larry

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20150702/c961160f/attachment.html>