On a map of Illinois congressional districts, there’s one in Chicago that looks a lot like a pair of earmuffs—two roundish blobs with a thin, curving strip connecting them. And one California district resembles a string bean, narrow but very, very long. Obvious examples of gerrymandering to hurt one political party or the other, right?
Not really, according to Dr. Mira Bernstein, whose Wednesday evening talk, “Gerrymandering: Why It’s More Complicated Than You Think,” was sponsored by Harvard’s League of Women Voters. Bernstein holds a research faculty position in Tufts University’s interdisciplinary program on science, technology, and society. She has a doctorate in mathematics and is a founding member of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group.
Those two oddly shaped districts, Bernstein explained, represent real communities with shared interests. The Chicago earmuff district connects two Hispanic neighborhoods that lie on either side of an African-American neighborhood. And the California string bean runs along the coast, where coastal property owners share concerns because of their location. In each case, the district shape allows people with common interests to elect a representative who will speak for them—exactly how the system is supposed to work. So shape alone is not necessarily an indication of gerrymandering to undercut the ability of voters to express their will.
Bernstein identified three kinds of gerrymandering that she said do undercut democracy by allowing one group to exclude another from office: racial, partisan, and incumbent. Racial gerrymandering is illegal under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And partisan gerrymandering, she said, is unconstitutional in theory, but in several cases the Supreme Court has said it cannot find a standard to measure when that constitutional line has been crossed. And gerrymandering in favor of incumbents is perfectly legal, she said.
State legislatures must redraw their congressional districts every 10 years, after each U.S. census. And the party in control of the state at that time often tries to draw those districts for its own advantage, except for the few states where a nonpartisan commission sets the boundaries.
When state legislatures engage in partisan gerrymandering, Bernstein explained, they rely on two classic techniques: “packing” and “cracking.” First they draw district lines to “pack” all the voters from the other party into as few districts as possible. And then everywhere else, they “crack” those voters into different districts, so they cannot form a majority anywhere.
So is Massachusetts gerrymandered? After all, Bernstein pointed out, in the 2000 election, about a third of voters here supported Republican George W. Bush. And yet every member of the state’s congressional delegation is a Democrat. Still, that does not necessarily indicate gerrymandering, she said, because maps of the voting patterns in 2000 show that Republicans were simply outnumbered in all parts of the state. “You can’t make a Republican district [in Massachusetts], no matter how hard you try,” she said. But she also acknowledged that analyzing voting patterns in the 2016 election might give a different result.
For more information and resources about gerrymandering, see https://sites.tufts.edu/gerrymandr/.
