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What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

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Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#31

Post by bradleyjg »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #24
bradleyjg wrote: post #11

This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn't answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers. If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would…

That's the procedural reason -- the case ended up in the SC because the lower court sent it up the chain, but that's still not an explanation for why they chose to accept it. As far as I know, they still had the option to refuse it.

They only had the option to summarily affirm or take up the case on appeal. Technically I should not have used the term cert in my original post as it comes up through a different method (28 U.S.C 1253). In the old days there used to be many more mandatory appeals to the Supreme Court, but it has gotten narrower and narrower. The last change in 1988 got rid of most of the remaining paths, but there are still mandatory appeals written into a handful of statutory causes of actions.

See: http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91947 for more info.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#32

Post by opportune »

ChrisBland wrote: post #26
opportune wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that gerrymandering for democrats instead of republicans? I am open to the idea that districts could be drawn based on more than geography, but to me this just sounds like "helpful" gerrymandering simply because it assists the democrats instead of the republicans. There's no reason for congressional districts to be based on race, IMO.

You could argue that one race votes for one party over another, but the VRA goal was to ensure minority representation, regardless of the party affiliation. Full Stop.

That's a fair concern, but to me it seems like an "easy" yet flawed solution to systemic oppression, kind of like affirmative action. For starters, by drawing districts specifically along racial lines for minorities, you are de facto also drawing the other districts along racial lines for white people. I also think that more diversity in congressional districts is a good thing, as it avoids "lock-in" districts where the incumbent has essentially a 100% chance of winning every election due to homogeneity of their voters. Of course, the other side of the coin is that minority populations can get "diluted" to the point where they can be safely ignored by politicians.

I believe the real solution to our problems is to move away from geographic representation in its entirety. It's too easy to cheat, and by design it only ends up allowing representation of around half the constituents in its area. I'm not sure what could replace it; perhaps a parliamentary system based on opt-in voting blocks could work. But in its present form it does seem deeply flawed.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#33

Post by autokad »

tzs wrote: post #18
mtgx wrote: post #13

A proportional representation voting system would also largely solve the gerrymandering problem (no district would be dominated by a single party anymore so exploiting the gerrymandering system wouldn't help much), along with having many other benefits for democracy: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation > They complied with the Constitution’s one person, one vote requirement That line is interesting. How is th…

It's a bit of a tangent, but the discussion of voting systems reminds me of another modification to voting that I sometimes think might be reasonable: weighting votes based on voter age, with the weight starting off low for the youngest voters and increasing to a peak, and then dropping off again. What brought this on was thinking about the brexit vote over in the UK, which from what I read had very different outcome…

i dont think its a good idea to discriminate a voter on any metric: age, income, race, education, or status of health among them.

I am really surprised that anyone would even suggest it

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#34

Post by bluGill »

manyoso wrote: post #8
paulmd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase this a little more concisely: SCOTUS turns based on which side of the bed Kennedy wakes up on (on most issues). There are 4 solid liberal votes and 4 solid conservative votes and Kennedy in the middle. Kennedy indicated in a ruling a few years ago that in theory he's uncomfortable with gerrymandering and might be open to striking them down, but apart from "I know it when I see it" he doesn't know a neutra…

My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.

To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#35

Post by bluGill »

crb002 wrote: post #3

I wish SCOTUS would put out a Euclidian distance Voronoi metric, where the redistricting map presented with minimum error wins. You quickly get into non-linear territory by using travel time instead of Euclidian distance. Roads and bridges become weapons for cutting or connecting districts. Bad bad stuff.

Roads and bridges often exist on other natural lines that cannot be changed. A river is a good place to put a boundary, since cities and counties are already bordered there.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#36

Post by bluetwo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #10
bluetwo wrote: post #9

Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible. Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.

As possible given what constraints? There's no requirement that they have equal population; it seems like your rule would always require districts to cross zero county lines.

If it could be drawn while crossing zero lines, then yes. But even then it is likely several different options would exist, and each party would try to pick one that favors them.

I'm OK with that as a solution.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#37

Post by andrewla »

I'm not convinced that the "efficiency gap" is a good metric. My main issue, aside from the difficulty in describing what a "good" map should look like, much less measuring it, is that it is sharply discontinuous around the "winning" criteria -- for a single district, in a 49-51 victory vs. a 51-49 loss, there's a 2% difference in the number of votes, but the wasted votes goes from -50 to +50.

It's not difficult to see that the optimal partitioning is 75/25 (in either direction), which seems very arbitrary.

From a democracy perspective, it seems like the ideal partitioning would be much closer to 50-50 -- hopefully even in the margin of error for the area, so that candidates would have to make a real effort to represent their entire district in order to be assured re-election. Even this feels very questionable, because as I understand it, the idea of congressional districts is that representation should follow groups of shared problems and interests, irrespective of proposed solutions to those problems.

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#39

Post by manyoso »

bluGill wrote: post #34
manyoso wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is Kennedy will punt and say there are two many models to choose from with no clear way to determine which one is best even though they are clearly better than what we have now.

To a large extent the court should punt. Congress - as the ones who make the laws - should decide which model is used, not the courts. The job of the courts is only to say if any particular model congress decides on is fair enough.

So you think the very people who unfairly have benefit from this partisan gerrymandering should be able to choose whether to continue it?

Let me guess, you happen to politically side with the benefiting partisans?

Re: What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

#40

Post by Spivak »

s73ver wrote: post #15
bluetwo wrote: post #9

Personally I wish my state would enact a law that says representative districts must be drawn to cross as few county lines as possible. Yes, some manipulation would still be possible, but it would be greatly diminished.

Take the power to create districts away from the legislature. Give it to a non-partisan commission. 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 other/no party. We did that in California, and almost none of the legislators were happy with it, which means it probably did a good job. The state still wound up with mostly Democratic representation, but that's more a product of California being heavily Democrat. I'd imagine th…

Woo! Enshrining the current two party system in legislation. What could possibly go wrong?
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