The Battle Over Voting Maps
posted by Dominque Elliott | March 2, 2018 | In NewsSenators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., are advocating for new standards to protect against partisan gerrymandering by encouraging the U. S. Supreme Court to determine a new national standard for the constitutionality of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the redrawing of electoral districts to favor the party in power. Gerrymandering has been around for over 200 years, according to The Atlantic. It comes from the constitutional decree that every ten years a census should be conducted to determine how many representatives are needed for each state. Gerrymandering fully came into fruition when Governor Elbridge Gerry redrew a district line in the shape of a salamander on the Massachusetts’s map in 1810 in a way that it diluted his opponents districts, and made it easier to win. The name Gerry and Salamander came together to form the new term “gerrymander.”
Gerrymandering allows certain particular districts to have partisan political advantage during elections. It leads to certain parties and party members having reliable job security that isn’t based on their platform and political reputation. Because of this, there have been many arguments about gerrymandering being unconstitutional on the basis that it forgoes democratic values that our nation holds so dear.
“The Court can clean up a cause of America’s crisis in confidence in our democracy, protect our elections from wildly partisan ‘bulk’ gerrymandering, and return control of our elections to the people,” McCain and Whitehouse said in a joint statement, as reported by Time. “We hope the Court will.”
This is not the first time the biased drawing of state districts has been seen as an issue. In 1986, the Supreme Court adopted a standard to assess redistricting done on the basis of race- something which violated the 14th amendment, according to the Brookings Institution. They did not have a standard for assessing partisan bias in the redrawing of districts, something which may have increased largely over the past decades.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case Gill vs. Whitford in the coming months, where Democrats in Wisconsin accused Republicans of gerrymandering the electoral districts. State cases have to go through the district courts, then three federal judges, then the appeal goes to the Supreme Court.
Federal judges declared North Carolina has to redraw its congressional district maps on the basis that it was unconstitutional because Republicans may have had orchestrated the map for better political gain. However, on February 9, a split Supreme Court decided to put a hold on the newly introduced remedial maps for Wake County and Mecklenburg County, meaning that in the upcoming 2018 election, their current partisan mapping may still be intact- granting a possible win for Republicans.
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