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

[Michael McDonald]

Since I was the consultant to the Arizona commission regarding competition in the 2000s, let me speak from personal experience, as reflected in my reports and scholarly writing.
 
Vladimir is correct that we should first evaluate commissions on their institutional structures. There is much scholarship that simply assumes all commissions are “independent” when the rules vary tremendously over the selection of members, their voting rules, sunshine applied to their deliberations, the criteria they operate under, and the geography of the state.
 
Arizona is the only state to explicitly require competition in their state constitution, but it comes at the end of a list of other criteria such that:
 
“To the extent practicable, competitive districts should be favored where to do so would create no significant detriment to the other goals.”
 
Some have noted that Arizona did not result in greater competition, and thereby indict all independent commissions, but this simple analysis takes none of the constraints the commission operated under into account. In a Republican-leaning state, where heavily Democratic Latino opportunity districts must be drawn, there are few Democrats left to spread around to create many competitive districts. In the 2000s, the commission created one competitive congressional district. That said, in the 2010s, the commission gave greater consideration to the competition clause. Elevating competition helped Democrats and sparked much consternation by Arizona Republicans, leading to the Supreme Court decision we are all indirectly reacting to. (Why elevating competition favors a minority party in a state was first theoretically described by Niemi and Deegan in 1978, many would also do well by reading Owen and Grofman’s 1988 theoretical analysis of similarities and differences between partisan and incumbent gerrymanders).
 
California, in contrast, has no requirement for competitive districts. A theoretical expectation there will be competitive districts could be inferred from examining alterative plans that comport with the criteria the commission operates under. While we have not done such analysis in California, in redistricting competitions and other plans available in the public record elsewhere, Micah Altman and I found in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia in the 2010s that the adopted congressional plans have 3 competitive districts of 55 total in these three states. There exist legal plans that have more competitive districts, the maximum for each state yields a total of 21 competitive districts (these alternative plans also tend to be more compact and fair than the adopted plans, so there is less “gerrymandering” involved, too). If there was an explicit mandate for competitive districts in these states, it would be possible to increase the number of competitive districts by about an order of magnitude. The difference would obviously not be as great elsewhere, particularly in states that heavily lean to a political party and have a small number of districts.
 
Note that you don’t necessarily need a commission to achieve this goal, rather an explicit constitutional requirement. Florida is an example of a state where criteria are applied to the legislature without a commission (competition is not among them, but partisan fairness is). I am thus waiting with much interest the ruling from the Florida Supreme Court on Plaintiffs’ appeal of the decision of a District Court, which, in my opinion, resulted in insufficient changes in the direction of complying with Florida’s criteria adopted by ballot initiative in 2010.
 
Whether or not competition is a goal that should be achieved is another (lengthy) discussion.
 
P.S. With regards to Rob’s claim of “pioneering” analyses using a partisan index, the Almanac of American politics has published presidential vote in congressional districts since 1972 and consultants have been evaluating districts using statewide vote shares for about as long, if not longer. Maybe someone on the list can remember who actually invented the method (I’d like to know!). My guess would be someone in the 1960s at about the same time automated redistricting algorithms were first developed. Maybe the inventor is lost to history. The infamous 1812 Gerry-mander was brutally effective, with Federalists winning 27% of the state Senate seats despite winning a majority of the vote. Someone knew what they were doing.
 
============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor
University of Florida
Department of Political Science
223 Anderson Hall
P.O. Box 117325
Gainesville, FL 32611
 
phone:   352-273-2371 (office)
e-mail:  dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com                
web:      <http://www.electproject.org/> www.ElectProject.org 
twitter: @ElectProject
 
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Kogan, Vladimir
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2015 3:19 PM
To: Rob Richie
Cc: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Flaws in Politico and NY Times articles about gerrymandering
 
To add to this point Rob makes: “As along as  accept winner-take-all electoral rules that make general election participation irrelevant in most districts, we can expect such results - and also the basic conflict between having fair representation and having electoral competition. If we moved toward multi-seat districts with ranked choice voting (that is,single transferable), you can have both.”
 
While I don’t disagree with the general argument, it is important to note that the lack of competitiveness produced by commission maps is not simply due to winner-take-all electoral rules. Once you require that the commission maps comply with VRA, are geographically compact, respect communities of interest, and various other requirements that are written in, you make drawing competitive districts even harder. A great deal of uncompetitiveness is baked in directly into the criteria both commissions are required to follow.
 
 

Vladimir Kogan, Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
2004 Derby Hall | 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1373
510/415-4074 Mobile 
614/292-9498 Office
614/292-1146 Fax
http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
 <mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu> kogan.18 at osu.edu
 
 
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