| In 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate got the most votes, but the Republican candidate took office. In the last several congressional elections, Democratic candidates have gotten the most votes, yet the Republicans control the House. That's banana republic stuff. |
| When {Michigan} Republicans won the governor’s office and both chambers of the state legislature in 2010, they gerrymandered district lines so effectively that the GOP held nine of 14 congressional seats even in 2012 despite winning more than 200,000 fewer votes than Democrats -- and held control of the state house in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 despite losing the popular vote.
Wisconsin’s state legislature -- so gerrymandered that Democrats won the statewide vote by more than 200,000 in 2018, but gained only one seat and trimmed the GOP majority down to an imbalanced 63-36 -- instituted a voter ID law so draconian that many experts believe it helped tip the state to Donald Trump in 2016. Source: "What partisan gerrymandering has cost Michigan" by David Daley - Detriot Free Press - May 2, 2019 In 2010, Republicans won unified control of Wisconsin’s government for the first time in years. They were determined not to lose it anytime soon, so they turned the decennial redistricting process, which began in 2011, into a clandestine partisan operation. They set up a “map room” at a Republican-allied law firm, used refined data analyses to draw new, Republican-friendly district lines, and invited only Republican lawmakers to come in and see their new districts — after they signed nondisclosure agreements. It worked. In 2012, the first election using the new maps, Republican candidates won 48 percent of the vote, but 60 of the state’s 99 legislative seats. The Democrats’ 51 percent that year translated into only 39 seats, yet two years later, when the Republicans won the same share of the vote, they ended up with 63 seats — a 24-seat differential. In other words, Republicans had figured out how to draw maps to lock in their legislative majority no matter how many, or few, votes they received. Source: "Can the Supreme Court Fix American Politics?" NY Times - EDITORIAL BOARD - SEPT. 29, 2017 Both parties use gerrymandering to cement their hold on power. The effects are especially clear nationwide for congressional delegations, according to a 2012 analysis by the Brennan Center. In the 17 states where Republicans drew the maps this decade — for 40 percent of the total House seats in the country — their candidates won about 53 percent of the vote and 72 percent of the seats. In the six states where Democrats drew the lines, for only about 10 percent of the House, their candidates won about 56 percent of the vote and 71 percent of the seats. In the remaining states, the parties shared control over redistricting, or a court or an appointed commission drew the lines, or there were none to draw because there is only one congressional district. The Democratic plaintiffs who are challenging Wisconsin’s map in Gill v. Whitford, represented by the Campaign Legal Center, will argue to the Supreme Court next month that partisan gerrymandering, like racial gerrymandering, violates voters’ rights to be treated equally. They will also offer a second argument, based on the First Amendment, that comes from Justice Kennedy. He suggested in Vieth v. Jubelirer that gerrymandering could violate the right to freedom of expression and association, by ‘‘subjecting a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment by reason of their views.’’ {Two political scientists, Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine, and Gary King of Harvard}, who have studied redistricting for decades, proposed a baseline for assessing how much gerrymandering is too much. It’s called partisan symmetry and has widespread support among social scientists. The degree to which a map deviates from that standard is the degree of its partisan bias. ‘‘Measuring symmetry and partisan bias does not require ‘proportional representation’ (where each party receives the same proportion of seats as it receives in votes),’’ Grofman and King wrote. That’s important because the Supreme Court has rejected proportional representation, which the Constitution doesn’t provide for, as a measure of mandating fairness in elections. Instead of dictating that a party with 46 percent of the vote takes 46 percent of the seats, symmetry means that if Republicans win 60 percent of the seats with 46 percent of the vote in one election, then Democrats should be able to win 60 percent of the seats with roughly the same percentage of the vote in another election. If election results suggest serious and enduring bias, then courts can give the Legislature defending the maps a chance to show that there’s an innocent explanation. The Supreme Court’s conservative wing will probably argue that judges should stay out of redistricting, just as it did in Vieth. Kennedy could join this group and simply shut the door on partisan gerrymandering challenges. Or he could join the four liberals, who are likely to see Wisconsin’s redistricting as unconstitutional, and find that, at long last, the social scientists have come up with the ‘‘workable standard’’ he previously sought. The court could also tell Wisconsin that it went too far without settling on a particular metric to be used in all future cases, leaving it to lower courts to decide. At the moment, experts estimate that to take back the House by a bare minimum of seats, Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by at least six points. Source: "The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math" - NY Times - By EMILY BAZELONAUG. 29, 2017 In Pennsylvania, after the 2012 election, Republicans ended up controlling 13 of 18 U.S. House seats. In a democracy, a party should occupy 72 percent of a given state’s House seats if it wins something like 72 percent of votes in an election. But in Pennsylvania, it only won about 49 percent. The diabolical computers, however, were programmed to pack the Democrats’ 51 percent of the votes into the smallest number of districts statistically possible. (What’s that old computer programmers’ saying? Garbage in, garbage out.) And Ohio, American electoral history’s most famous swing state, swings no more: “The mapmaker did such a good job that it’s hard to imagine anyone in Ohio politics who thinks it can be reversed for perhaps two decades to come.” All told, {David Daley, the former editor of Salon, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy concludes, Democrats might not take back Congress in 2018 even if they receive a vote bonanza that, in an actual democracy, would constitute a landslide. Source: "The Republican Plan for a One-Party State" By Rick Perlstein / The Washington Spectator - 9/7/17 A combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms — which polls show is probable — they may not take back the House of Representatives. (According to a Brookings Institution analysis, in 2016, Republicans won 55.2 percent of seats with just under 50 percent of votes cast for Congress.) Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. “Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50 percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states,” Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas, told me. “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.” Source: "Tyranny of the Minority - by Michelle Goldberg - NY Times - SEPT. 25, 2017" |
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