Ballotpedia asked me to contribute to a mini-symposium on how the Supreme Court may deal with the partisan gerrymandering cases cases of Gill v. Whitford (Wisconsin) and Benisek v. Lamone (Maryland), and you can read the results here (see also my Cato write-up).
Separately, I’m scheduled to testify in Annapolis on state-level proposals for redistricting reform on Feb. 26 (House of Delegates) and March 1 (Senate). Come up and say hello afterward if you’re there.
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Looks like Pennsylvania has a new Congress-critter map. The old one….what a piece of work.
automate district generation without regard to gender/political registration, and any other protected class criteria. Use census data scrubbed for everything but number of adults and their dispersion.
Unfortunately, a great many courts who have weighed in on this issue have decided that it is somehow racist to disregard race in forming voting districts.
So in order to not be racist you have to make a determination based on race? Good thing there are electronic dictionaries, otherwise Webster couldn’t keep up…
Yes….if you have too many of one type of people in a district that’s wrong – they get their token representative. Too few, that’s wrong – they don’t get meaningful input in selecting the representative.
But this test is only for certain people.
See, people aren’t individuals, with unique hopes, dreams, skills, strengths, weaknesses. None of that matters. All that matters is how many boxes can be checked – what’s their skin color, do they prefer to sleep with the “right” kine of people, do they pray the right way, etc.
The only people that focus so hard on race, religion, who is sleeping with who and the rest, those who think the worth of an individual is based on those features, are the KKK types and the hard left. In that, the hard left and KKK types are indistinguishable to me. The outcome of that kind of thinking (judging the value of people on skin color, etc instead of their individual behavior & skills) is places like Manzanar and Auschwitz, differing only in magnitude of the brutality involved, but born of the same idea.