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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.
Our work on the Redistricting the Nation site proceeds apace for the big launch on October 21. We’ll be revealing it piece by piece over the coming weeks– head over there now for your first glimpse. In exciting news, we are partnering with the Committee of Seventy (a local political watchdog organization with which we’ve collaborated on election incident mapping) to launch a companion site focused on the Philadelphia region. Both websites are aimed at educating and engaging the public around redistricting issues, prior to the 2010 Census and the 2011 national redistricting process.
Meanwhile, our national countdown brings us to the ninth least compact district in the U.S. House of Representatives: Maryland’s Second Congressional District.
Maryland's 2nd Congressional District: the 9th least compact U.S. House District
This district has a colorful history, having existed since the First United States Congress in 1789. Since that time it has passed through the hands of numerous parties with colorful and unfamiliar names like Know-Nothing and Unconditional Unionist.
While a number of Maryland’s congressional districts earn low compactness scores because their boundaries follow the filigreed shores of the Chesapeake Bay, there is also clearly an element of intent at work here. The district largely curves around Baltimore City to include portions of Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford Counties. A contentious redistricting process following the 2000 Census enabled the state’s Democrats to draw boundaries that rendered the Second District competitive and resulted in a pickup after nearly 20 years of Republican control.
Although we were far from a consensus, a quick poll of the office found that a hanger (albeit fragmented and turned sideways) was the most common interpretation of the district’s shape. Tell us what you think.
New Jersey's 13th Congressional District: the 10th least compact U.S. House District, by our reckoning
We’ll be launching our Redistricting the Nation site on October 5th 21st and we’ve decided to kick it off in style (and give our loyal blog readers a sneak peek of what is to come) by counting down through America’s ten least compact Congressional districts.
Coming in at the 10 spot is NJ-13. This Garden State district — first created in 1933 — includes parts of Jersey City, Newark, and the New Jersey coastline. In fact, if it didn’t sneak out into the water, the district’s upper and lower halves wouldn’t be contiguous. Experts are divided on how congressional districts in New Jersey will change form following the 2010 U.S. Census. The state may even lose a House seat, meaning that this could be your last chance to marvel at the shape of the Thirteenth and ask yourself “Y?” Others on the team insist that the district looks a bit like a scorpion. Weigh in with your opinion or join our office game of Redistricting Rorschach by leaving your interpretation in the comments.
Update: The site launch has been changed to October 21st– check out the exciting news. Great content remains consistent.
With the 2010 Census and subsequent reapportionment and redistricting fast approaching, the Cicero team has been plugging away on an updated version of the Gerrymandering white paper and a companion website (keep your eyes peeled for more news). A key part of this process has been an expansion of the metrics used to measure district compactness, which is often used as a proxy to assess the extent of gerrymandering.
As we’ve run the calculations over the past few months, the members of the team have cultivated a sense of mixed horror and wonderment at the feats of contorted district drawing achieved at every legislative level. We’ll frequently send images or call colleagues over as we come across particularly astonishing examples. Most of our analysis has been conducted in ArcMap, supplemented with some of the great tools in the ET GeoWizards plugin. Once we have identified polygons of geometrically low compactness, we overlay the district boundaries on a base map to see how they correspond to the physical geography of the area.
One of my personal favorites has long been U.S. House District 4 in Illinois, based on the shape of the area alone. Imagine my surprise when I took a look at the district in context and discovered that the town of Cicero lies smack dab in the heart of the district. What a strange coincidence and incongruity that the Roman statesman who serves as the namesake of our elected official lookup application has also lent his name to a city in one of the strangest-looking legislative districts in the country.
We’ve decided to take this as a sign that fates of the two Ciceros are set to coincide: we hope that the tools provided by Azavea’s Cicero API and on our forthcoming Redistricting the Nation website can facilitate public engagement through a transparent and open process that brings fair districting to every part of the country.
