I’ll be testifying in Annapolis on behalf of comprehensive redistricting reform on Monday (Maryland House of Delegates) and Thursday (Senate) of this week. In the mean time, here are two new audio contributions, first (above) a Cato Daily Podcast in which I’m interviewed by Caleb Brown.
The second clip is a narrator’s reading for Cato’s “Cato Out Loud” feature of my recent piece on why libertarians and others should oppose gerrymandering:
I’m also in the question period a bit more than two-thirds through this Federalist Society program featuring former Rep. Chris Shays (R-Ct.) and Weekly Standard senior writer Jay Cost.
On recent redistricting fireworks in Pennsylvania — which are being decided under that state’s constitution, and thus do not directly affect the federal constitutional issue or the situation in other states — see Nate Cohn, Matthew Bloch and Kevin Quealy, New York Times and Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s map scores high on a measure of partisan proportionality — that is, matching the number of seats won by a party to its share of overall vote. As Cohn et al. note, however, partisan proportionality in general “is not usually a goal when redistricting,” in part because it calls for conscious affirmative attention to partisan considerations as distinct from neutral principles. In this case it also comes as “something of a surprise, since the court’s order didn’t specify that partisan balance was an objective for the new map.”
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