MS GREEN: Yes. I think – the pillars are whether the data is available in a usable format, whether there are requirements for public meetings, and whether the maps are published early enough to allow meaningful input from the public. But I think – and I alluded to this in my remarks – that the problem is that you can have a seemingly very transparent process that is public, while still cooking the sausage in the back room. Gerrymandering is also likely to deteriorate because the legal framework for redistribution has not kept pace with demographic change. Previously, most people of color in metropolitan areas across the country lived in highly segregated cities. Today, however, a majority of blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans live in various suburbs. This shift has led to powerful new multiracial electoral coalitions outside cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston that have won or are on the verge of taking power. Yet the Supreme Court has not granted these multiracial coalition districts the same legal protections as majority-minority ridings, making them a prime target for dismantling by partisan mappers. The purpose of partisan gerrymandering is to increase the power of a political party beyond what it deserves solely on the basis of its share of the vote.
This process is carried out by two complementary methods: packaging and cracking. „Packing“ occurs when many supporters of the victimized party are crammed into a small number of districts, giving them landslide victories. The remaining members of the victims` party are then „cracked“, spread over a large number of constituencies, so that they systematically win just under 50% of the vote. Fortunately, packaging and cracking create a distinctive pattern of gains for both perpetrator and victim parties, with the victim party winning its few seats by a crushing margin and the negotiating party winning its many seats by much smaller margins. This model, and thus partisan gerrymanders, can be recognized with the help of a little mathematics. In League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, on June 28, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of a Texas congressional map proposed in 2003 by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and signed into law by the state of Texas. [59] Decision 7-2 allows state legislators to redraw and manipulate counties as often as they wish (not just after the decennial census). In its dissenting opinion in LULAC v. Perry, Judge John Paul Stevens, joined by Judge Stephen Breyer, quoted Bill Ratliffe, a former lieutenant governor of Texas and member of the Texas Senate, as saying, „The political gain for Republicans was 110 percent the motivation for the plan,“ saying a plan whose „sole intent“ was partisan could violate the equality clause. [60] This was noteworthy because Stevens J.
had already expressed Breyer J.`s opinion in Easley v. Cromartie, who considered that an explicitly partisan motivation justified the permissible gerrymander and was a defense against allegations of racist gerrymandering. In this way, they can work to protect the prestige and number of seats of their political parties, as long as they do not harm racial and ethnic minorities. A 5-4 majority declared a congressional district unconstitutional in the ethnic minority injury case. And in terms of how the process can be structured to build confidence that it`s fair and reflects democratic principles, I think we`ve come a long way technologically when it comes to assessing what the cards actually do. PlanScore, as I showed you, as well as the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and a Tufts project – all three organizations use data to translate to the public what maps actually do. Are they competitive? Do they unfairly give one party power over the other? Do they protect the right of minorities to vote? And I think these kinds of data projects really make a difference in terms of translating what the legislator does, because in the past a map could be published, but it would be very difficult to say whether that map – what impact that map would have or not. And I think we see this round data being used to really translate what`s really going on.
There are also provisions in state constitutions that set out certain rules about how line pullers must draw their lines.