Many of us would agree that the fairest, as well as the best, method to decide an election is for the winner to secure the most votes from the eligible voters of the electorate. But in the high-stakes and cut-throat world of electioneering, there are no holds barred when it comes to manipulating the vote to one’s advantage. In the pursuit of fairness, Judge J. Layne Smith, of the 2nd Judicial Circuit Court in Tallahassee, may have spotted a potential violation of the State of Florida’s Fair Districts standards. Judge Smith ruled on 11 May 2022, in response to a lawsuit contesting the state’s Republican administration’s congressional redistricting plans, whereby the redesignated 5th Congressional District would be less likely to return an African-American Representative to the US Congress. The district in question extends west from Duval County (county seat: Jacksonville) to Gadsden County (county seat: Quincy), along the northern state line between Florida and Georgia, and is currently represented in Congress by Al Lawson, Jr, an African-American Democrat. Judge Smith ordered adoption of an earlier, seemingly fairer, version of the 5th District instead. This is, however, not the end of the matter, as it could still be overturned on appeal, by the 1st District Court of Appeals, or, if this fails, by either the Florida Supreme Court or the US Supreme Court.
This newly-designed Floridian Congressional map is part of a process by which the boundaries of US Congressional and state legislative districts are redrawn every ten years, if felt necessary, based upon new information from the most recent US Census population count. Under Article 1, Section 2, of the US Constitution, an apportionment of the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives must take place every ten years, depending on population numbers, as determined by the decennial census, which first took place in 1790. The sole legal purpose of the census is to guide this apportioning process. The current redistributing cycle is based on figures from the 2020 US Census. Each legislative district thus identified is allowed only one US Representative under the single-member district law, passed by Congress in 1967. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution also requires Congressional districts to have roughly similar populations that are not skewed in favour of people of any particular race, colour, or protected language minority group.
One of the potential risks of redistricting is that it may encourage unscrupulous gerrymandering, which refers to the manipulation of the size and shape of legislative districts to obtain an unfair advantage for a political party over the opposition, guided by the profile of race, language, religion, and social class within any particular district. The concept can be traced back to a political cartoon entitled “The Gerry-Mander”, which appeared in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812. The cartoon depicts a salamander-shaped state senate election district, created by Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts, in the hope of improving the electoral prospects of his Jeffersonian Republican-Democratic Party.
Gerrymandering can be achieved by either “packing”, whereby the opposition party’s voters are packed into a few districts where they would be expected to win, while simultaneously freeing up surrounding districts for the incumbent party, or by “cracking”, which enables the dispersion of opposition party voters across multiple districts, thereby diluting their impact on the vote. The Florida 5th District proposal could be considered an example of cracking, which would disperse around 370,000 Black voters among four other districts to reduce their influence on poll results within the district. The conditions for gerrymandering appear ideal in the US, with its two-party system, polarised and often readily identifiable populations of voters, and a prevalence of residential segregation which allows for predictable voting patterns in many electoral districts. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protects against racial gerrymandering, its civil provisions being enforced by the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
States are free to draw up their own legislative districts, comprising roughly equal-sized populations wherever possible, but subject to certain restrictions. The Apportionment Act of 1842 requires Congressional districts to be as geographically compact as possible, and contiguous, or contained within one boundary. In 33 American states, the state legislatures are in sole charge of the redistricting process, while in six others, the state legislatures appoint “independent” commissions, with the approval of the governor, to oversee the process. In a further three states with hybrid systems, redistricting is shared between state legislature and independent commission. Six small (Delaware, Vermont) or larger, but sparsely-populated, states (Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming) have only one Congressional district and redistricting is not required.
Redistricting can be seen as a political game, consuming much time, effort, and money. The National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT) and the National Democratic Redistributing Committee (NDRC) were both formed in 2017 to coordinate their respective party’s crucial nationwide redistricting strategies. Data mining, sophisticated software, and computer algorithms help political consultants, and ultimately state legislators, maximise the electoral prospects of their respective candidates. Nonetheless, the outcomes of redrawing Congressional maps may vary from state to state. Legislative districts may either enlarge or shrink in size, and neither party may gain ground in the newly-formed districts. Success ultimately belongs to the party that gains the most in terms of numbers of newly acquired districts, only for the next census to change the playing field yet again, while democracy comes second-best.
Ashis Banerjee