I wanted to share a quick note that we launched RedistrictingTheNation.com today.
Redistricting the Nation allows the public to:
- Enter their address (nation-wide) and view the “shape” of their federal, state, and local election districts.
- Learn who is in charge of drawing the boundaries of their election districts (e.g., independent commissions or elected representatives).
- Compare the “compactness” scores of their election district to other, similar districts (less compact and unusually shaped districts are more likely to be gerrymandered).
- Draw new district boundaries on a map and generate compactness scores for the new district.
RedistrictingTheNation.com Screenshot
California
California
You’re such a wonder that I think I’ll stay in bed.
–Rufus Wainwright
California’s 23rd Congressional District is at the very top of our Top Ten list!
CA-23—a long, skinny strip of land along California’s central coast—is a product of the state legislature’s latest bi-partisan gerrymander. Several California representatives have admitted that the post-2000 Census redistricting effort was an “incumbent retention plan” for both political parties. CA-23 is in good company; the district joins CA-15(#12), CA-53 (#13), CA-38 (#15), and CA-7 (#18) at the top of our least compact Congressional District list, making California a true “wonder” when it comes to gerrymandering.
California's 23rd congressional district: The least compact U.S. House District
Hope (and a reason to get out of bed) is in sight. In November 2008, Californians narrowly passed Proposition 11—an amendment to the state constitution that places the authority to draw state-level district boundaries in the hands of an independent, 14-member commission. The task of redrawing Congressional districts was not part of Proposition 11, though a Congressional Redistricting Initiative may be added to the November 2010 ballot, just in time for the post-2010 Census redistricting process.
And with that we officially launch Redistricting the Nation!
The Sunshine State makes a second appearance on our Top Ten list with FL-22—a classic example of an incumbent gerrymander. Florida’s 22nd Congressional District starts its beach crawl in Jupiter and ends in a flourish around Fort Lauderdale (without including much of the city proper). Republican redistricters handcrafted FL-22 after the 2000 Census by removing a heavily Democratic section of Miami-Dade County and extending the district boundaries further into Palm Beach County. Their goal was to provide a safe seat for Republican Clay Shaw, who was soundly re-elected in 2002 and 2004, serving a total of 13 terms in office. Democrat Ron Klein later defeated Shaw in the 2006 election.
Florida's 22nd Congressional District: The 2nd least compact U.S. House District
Tomorrow morning we’ll unveil the #1 least compact congressional district before launching our hotly-anticipated Redistricting the Nation site. Stay tuned!
The countdown continues, and followers of redistricting politics are sure to recognize the third least compact U.S. House district in the count: North Carolina’s Twelfth Congressional District. From its re-establishment following the 1990 Census and reapportionment, the district’s boundaries have been the subject of frequent litigation. The legal wrangling ultimately resulted in a ruling in favor of the plan’s legality because it was a partisan—rather than racial—gerrymander, once again illustrating the perverse logic that governs gerrymandering.
North Carolina's 12th Congressional District: The 3rd least compact U.S. House District
In 1996 the Supreme Court ruled that the boundaries of the district (different than those shown here) were unconstitutional because race had been a predominant factor in their formation, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Over the next 5 years the proposed district boundaries underwent a series of changes and court challenges, and in 2001 the Supreme Court upheld the district boundaries as constitutional, finding that political party affiliation, rather than race, had been the predominant factor in the district drawing process. By that time, of course, the 2000 Census had already been completed and the cycle would begin again.
Similar to IL-04, the case of NC-12 exemplifies that tangled considerations that are at stake when devising a districting plan. States that are subject to the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act have often walked a fine line with respect to ensuring that racial minorities are furnished with an opportunity for elected representation without verging into race-based gerrymandering. From the perspective of political parties, Republicans and largely Democratic African-American voters often find their interests to be strangely aligned through the packing of minority voters into a single district. White Democratic candidates, meanwhile, can benefit from the breakup of such districts, which can boost their chances of election through the dispersion of African-American Democrats into neighboring districts.
New York makes its second appearance in our list of the nation’s Top Ten least compact U.S. House districts in the #4 spot: the state’s 28th Congressional District is affectionately known as “the earmuffs” (appropriate given both its shape and its location in the frigid northern climes along the Canadian border).
New York's 28th Congressional District: the 4th least compact U.S. House District
Although NY-28 has been represented by a Democrat for more than 20 years, it is in fact a product of a gerrymander by the once-majority Republicans of New York’s state legislature, who have long maintained a hold on state legislative districts in the northern part of the state through prison-based gerrymandering (more here and here). NY-28, however, represents a classic case of gerrymandering through “packing”: concentrating members of a voting bloc in a single district, thereby allowing the other party to win the remainder of the districts. The 28th District skirts the shores of Lake Ontario to connect Democratic enclaves in the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls in the west to those in Rochester, to the east. This gerrymander seemed to serve the Republicans well until NY-27 switched to Democratic in the 2004 elections and NY-25 and NY-29 flipped in 2008. Republicans still hold NY-26, directly to the south of NY-28.
It’s hard to predict what the future will hold for the shape of New York’s Congressional districts. Democrats currently control both houses of the state legislature, but the defection of two members of the Democrats’ slim 32-30 Senate majority prompted a leadership crisis earlier this year. Moreover, all of the seats in both the Assembly and the Senate are up for grabs in the November 2010 elections, leaving responsibility for the subsequent 2011 redistricting an open question.
Eagle-eyed blog readers will recognize the 5th least compact U.S. House district, Illinois’s Fourth Congressional District, from our earlier post, or perhaps from an article in The Economist called “How to Rig an Election” or the slideshow accompanying a Slate piece on the use of mathematical algorithms in redistricting. What is it about this Chicago district that attracts so much attention and how did it come to look this way?
Illinois's 4th Congressional District: The 5th least compact U.S. House District
Unlike some of the entries in our Top Ten list, IL-04 is an inland district whose shape has no apparent relationship to physical geography. The two major portions of the district are connected by a thin, C-shaped thread that is just one block wide in many places, running along railroad tracks and tracing Interstate 294 to the west. The district’s boundaries were drawn in relation to human geography, capturing two majority Hispanic communities—a largely Puerto Rican one to the north and a largely Mexican one to the south—and almost surrounding the majority African-American IL-07, which extends to the east.
The post-2000 Illinois Congressional redistricting plan was the subject of multiple lawsuits, some of which charged that it failed to meet the compactness requirements of the state constitution. The district is yet another illustration of the tensions inherent in the redistricting process, between the value of compact districts and the Voting Rights Act requirement that ethnic minorities have sufficient opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
The case of IL-04 also represents the challenge (likely to grow as the country’s Latino population increases) of drawing districts that afford both African-American and Latino communities the chance at elected representation, particularly in urban areas where these populations often live side by side but may be geographically dispersed due to historical patterns of urban development.
We suspect that 2011 will bring many more lawsuits challenging the spatial interpretation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act—not to mention political self-interest—that legislative district boundaries represent.
