For the second time in as many years, North Carolina’s congressional maps are up for review by the Supreme Court. In 2017, the court declined to hear the case, sending it back to an appeals court, which again ruled the gerrymander unconstitutional. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case on March 26, after hearing arguments for a similar case dealing with gerrymandering in Maryland, in which Democrats are blamed for being unfair.
There are a number of arguments in favor of or in opposition to gerrymandering. On the one hand, proportional representation by party is not explicitly called for in the Constitution — indeed, the founders were notoriously mistrustful of political “factions.” On the other hand, in a nation where political identity is an increasingly stable and impactful demographic characteristic, discrimination based on partisan identity seems to pose serious questions about the democratic legitimacy of government.
That said, the plaintiffs in this case explicitly aren’t asking for the court to require proportional representation. Instead, they focus on the issue of intentionally diminishing the power of Democratic voters to elect someone who represents their ideals. However, the main difficulty in these gerrymandering cases has been creating a sustainable, objective way of determining when a map causes avoidable harm.
Last November, Jonathan Mattingly, a Duke math professor gave a talk at NC State about his work in developing a way for evaluating the fairness of maps. In a paper he co-authored, researchers discuss one method that, to me, exemplifies a powerful argument against gerrymandering: It prevents elections from producing real impacts on who is in power, which is the fundamental reason we hold elections in the first place.
Consider the results of the 2012 and 2014 congressional elections, which were conducted under maps that were later ruled unconstitutional and redrawn for being racial gerrymanders. In 2012, Democrats won 50.6 percent of the statewide vote, but only four of 13 seats, while in 2014, they dropped to 43.9 percent, but only lost one seat. In the 2016 and 2018 elections, Democrats again won only three seats.
In a state as evenly divided by party as North Carolina, this seven-point shift is about as large a vote swing as we could expect to see between subsequent elections, yet it scarcely affected our congressional delegation at all. Although Republicans are at fault this decade, Democrats have also previously taken their turn at influencing the outcomes of elections. This should raise substantive concern by people of any political party over whether our maps are allowing voters to actually have a say in the people representing us.
Many defenders of the current maps note that redistricting was explicitly granted as a power to political bodies and argue that this ensures voters have a say over the way maps are drawn. But when the drawers of the maps can essentially predetermine the outcome of most seats up for election, it doesn’t seem that voters really have that capability.
If we could agree that there’s a point at which gerrymandering becomes inherently undemocratic, there would still be the question of how to determine this line. So we return to the proposal given by the researchers, which involves looking at over 24,000 computer-generated maps which obey certain conditions and looking at the outcome of past elections under these maps.
Using this method, which takes into account current laws and court rulings governing how North Carolina draws its districts, the answer couldn’t be clearer. Both the 2012 and 2016 maps are major outliers. Under the simulation, less than 1 percent of the sampled maps produced the observed outcomes in these elections. None of them produced an outcome that was more favorable for Republicans.
At the point where it is seemingly impossible to draw a map which would produce a more skewed outcome across multiple elections, it seems fairly obvious that our current map is too biased to accurately represent the wishes of North Carolina voters.
Measures like these, the probability of a given outcome and a given map’s resistance to change across markedly different elections, should be relatively straightforward tests to apply in determining the fairness of a map. Let’s hope that the Supreme Court finally takes a stand against this undemocratic practice, and that North Carolina can draw more balanced and competitive maps in the future, for the benefit of all voters.
