The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

Partisan Gerrymandering Goes Over the Line

By Damon Circosta
Published: July 26, 2011

RALEIGH - It shouldn’t be that hard, but somehow it is.

Once every 10 years, legislative districts need to be redrawn. The N.C. General Assembly is in session this week to make sure that every Senate, House and congressional district is adjusted to account for changes in population reflected in the U.S. census. If that were all there was to this whole ordeal known as redistricting, it could be accomplished with a map, the latest census figures and not much else.

Instead, the process of redistricting has become the ultimate in insider power games. He who gets to draw the lines can engage in all kinds of mischief. The power to redistrict is the power to carve out safe electoral districts for your friends, pit your opponents against one another, and ghettoize voters in a way that makes it nearly impossible for them to elect candidates of their choice.

The tactics are called gerrymandering and they are nearly as old as the republic. In fact, there is some evidence that even the ancient Greeks gerrymandered districts for political advantage.

Right now, with politicians drawing the lines, the results of many of next year’s elections are already a foregone conclusion. Before a single vote has been cast we can predict with a high degree of accuracy eight out of 10 races. And since gerrymandering makes so many elections less competitive, politicians don’t feel accountable to all the people in their district.

This lack of competition also erases any notion of compromise with the other party. After all it makes no sense to reach out to people with differing views if your district is packed with voters from one political party.

When you redistrict for political gain, not only are you thumbing your nose at the true spirit of democracy, but you also end up with some pretty odd district configurations. In draft maps released thus far we have seen legislative districts that snake through several different counties and voters whose next-door neighbors live in an entirely different district. Of course, anytime you draw a line on a map you risk dividing communities, but when your overarching concern is partisan advantage, these odd divisions tend to happen more frequently.

Gerrymandering didn’t start with the new Republican majority now in charge of the N.C. General Assembly, but it certainly hasn’t ended with them either. This week they are hard at work drawing districts that give them ultimate political advantage, even if most of their constituents find the process revolting.

No one is stopping to ask if this is really in the best long-term interest of our democracy. When questioned, the most common excuse is “the other party always did it this way, too.” That may be true, but it’s a defense better suited for an elementary school playground, not the state Capitol.

The best way to go about a fair mapping process is to simply take the power away from the legislators themselves. Even better, we need to establish a set of fixed criteria about what can be considered when drawing the maps. The Republicans who are now in charge are very familiar with ways to improve the redistricting process. In years past, they sponsored commonsense legislation that would hand this task over to an independent and neutral body.

Now that both political parties have proven that fair maps cannot be had so long as politicians are drawing their own lines, maybe we can finally fix this thing once and for all. It shouldn’t be that hard, but somehow it is.