I may have missed it, but I haven't seen anyone
mention that in 2004, the Texas Democrats didn't have
any nominees in 4 US House races (and each of those 4
seats had higher voter turnout than the typical
district in Texas). It's true the Republicans didn't
have nominees in 3 seats, but they were districts with
a relatively small number of voters. I did a
calculation involving the presidential vote in the
districts with no major party contest, and concluded
that, correcting for the seats with no nominees,
Democrats can be said to have polled 43% of the
two-party vote for US House in 2004, not the 40% they
actually received because of vacant nominations.
--- "Scarberry, Mark" <Mark.Scarberry@pepperdine.edu>
wrote:
I'm not sure who's right here ultimately, I might be
contradicting what I've
said in the past, and I haven't thought about these
matters nearly as much
as most of the list members, but (for those who are
willing to read further
after that disclaimer) ...
A redistricting plan that gave a party more seats
than the other party even
though it received fewer votes would seem to be
seriously flawed, absent a
strong justification for the feature of the plan
that created the reversal.
On the other hand, a plan that gave a party that
received a majority of
votes a higher percentage of seats than it received
of votes might or might
not be seen as flawed. Conversion of a small
majority of popular votes into
a more substantial majority of representatives can
be good for governmental
stability and accountability, right? And
multidistrict elections (as opposed
to proportional representation elections) are likely
to have this feature,
if I'm not mistaken, absent very homogeneous
districts.
The prior Texas districting plan seems (if I'm
reading David's post
correctly) to have nearly exactly reversed a 47%-53%
Democratic loss in the
popular vote into a 53% -47% majority ((17-15) of
the Texas House
delegation. That would seem to indicate a serious
flaw in the plan. In fact,
we would expect, I'd think, a neutral plan to result
in the GOP electing
more than 53% (more than 17 members) of the Texas
House delegation if it
received 53% of the popular vote.
Thus I think David's conclusion that the Delay
re-destricting was twice as
unproportional as the prior plan is not persuasive
for two reasons. First,
it discounts the perverse effect of a plan that
reversed the popular vote.
Second, it fails to account for the natural (and
perhaps desirable) effect
of multidistrict elections in magnifying the
electoral majority. Thus four
extra seats for the majority party is not twice as
perverse as a reduction
of two for the majority party, especially where the
reduction results in the
majority party holding a minority of the House
seats.
But perhaps I'm missing something.
Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine University School of Law
_____
From: owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu
[mailto:owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu] On
Behalf Of David J.
Becker
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 11:29 AM
To: 'election-law'
Subject: RE: Electionlawblog news and commentary
2/24/06
I'm sure none of us are surprised by Ed Blum's op-ed
on the Texas
redistricting. However, I must point out several
problems with his
analysis:
1. While he claims that the Delay re-redistricting
corrected a partisan
gerrymander, his math just doesn't add up. While
GOP congressional
candidates received 53% of the vote in 2002 (not
56%, as he cites), he
somehow states that this justifies giving 21 of 32
seats to the GOP. I
don't know where Blum studied math, but that equals
66%, a marked increase
over their 53% totals. Based on the 2002 vote
totals (the most recent ones
they had when they were re-redrawing the plans), the
GOP would have been
entitled to 17 seats, using Blum's math, yet
received 4 more - a windfall of
almost 25% more seats than the GOP was entitled to.
In fact, the Delay
re-redistricting is TWICE as unproportional as the
court's plan that
resulted in 15 GOP seats (4 more seats compared with
2 fewer). This may not
be an issue for Blum (I wonder if a 25% bump would
concern him if it was the
Democrats drawing the plan?), but it most certainly
should be an issue for
the Court.
2. Blum conveniently forgets the ample and
undisputed evidence of
partisan manipulation of the process, and exclusion
of Democratic and
minority input into the process, unlike any other
we've seen, including in
Pennsylvania and Georgia.
3. As pointed out by many, including myself, this
type of extreme
partisan gerrymander is not likely to be resolved
through the electoral
process - in other words, it is "capable of
repetition, yet evading review."
Just like the imbalanced gerrymanders at issue in
Baker v. Carr and Reynolds
v. Sims, incumbent politicians will continue to
maintain policies that
augment their power, and voters are powerless to
stop them. Thus, the only
possible remedy is through the courts.
4. Finally, it's interesting that I don't recall
Blum launching such a
vigorous defense of gerrymanders conducted by the
Democrats, at the expense
of Republicans. I don't recall him (or his patron,
Abigail Thernstrom)
writing one word supporting the upholding of the
Democratic gerrymander in
Georgia v. Ashcroft at the time it was being
considered by the courts (since
then, both Blum and Thernstrom have taken odd,
somewhat contradictory
positions about the Ashcroft case). Nevertheless,
Blum wrote an amicus
brief supporting the Texas re-redistricting. I
don't recall Blum writing
one word supporting the Georgia Democratic
redistricting in Larios v. Cox,
yet he writes an op-ed in the LA Times supporting
the Texas
re-redistricting. This despite the fact that the
state legislative
districts drawn in Georgia were much more
proportionally allocated by party
according to endogenous election results than they
were in Texas. Ed, it's
OK to be a blindly-partisan Republican - just don't
try to sell us that you
have a grand, unifying theory of redistricting that
applies equally to both
parties.
David J. Becker
Election Consultant and Voting Rights Attorney
(202) 550-3470
(202) 521-4040 fax
<mailto:david.j.becker@electionconsulting.com>
david.j.becker@electionconsulting.com
www.electionconsulting.com
<http://www.electionconsulting.com>
_____
From: owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu
[mailto:owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu] On
Behalf Of Rick Hasen
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 10:54 AM
To: election-law
Subject: Electionlawblog news and commentary 2/24/06
Foley and Lowenstein at Electronic Roundable
=== message truncated ===
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