The GOP gets a break in the New York redistricting fight
Democrats in New York are outraged because their efforts to gerrymander themselves between three and four extra Democratic seats in the House of Representatives have backfired. But back in 2014, NY state had actually amended the NY state constitution and banned partisan gerrymandering:
New Yorkers recognized these harms and, in 2014, voted to enshrine in the New York Constitution an explicit prohibition against partisan gerrymandering, which banned maps drawn, “for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents or other particular candidates or political parties.”…
When the U.S. Supreme Court recklessly declared that federal courts could not address cases about partisan gerrymandering, state-level efforts to outlaw partisan gerrymandering became more important than ever.
I’m not sure how that amendment came about, although I’ve researched it a bit. I would imagine there’s quite a story there, though, because the Democrats have controlled NY state for a long time and I don’t know why they would relinquish their ability to gerrymander. Here’s a little bit about the history:
In 2014, voters in New York State voted yes on Proposition 1, a constitutional amendment to implement historic changes with the intent to achieve a fair and readily transparent process by which to redraw the lines of state legislative and congressional districts. The redistricting process occurs every ten years, informed by data obtained by the Census. The goals of this proposal were to reform the redistricting process to introduce greater independence, and guarantee the application of substantive criteria that protect minority voting rights, communities of interest, and rational line-drawing…
One of these important reforms was the creation of the Independent Redistricting Commission. The purpose of creating the Commission is to make the process independent from the legislature in favor of an equally bipartisan body. For the first time, both the majority and minority parties in the legislature will have an equal role in the process of drawing lines.
At any rate, recent developments have led to the following
But all the braggadocio was for naught when a New York State trial judge, then Appellate Division panel, then the Court of Appeals (the highest court in the state) threw out the Democrat maps as an unconstitutional political gerrymander. The Court of Appeals confirmed the trial judge’s decision to appoint a Special Master to propose a map. The Special Master has circulated his preliminary map, and like a tiger caught by the toe, Democrats are hollering.
The new map – which hasn’t been finalized yet as the law of the land – has these possible consequences:
The proposed maps, drawn by Jonathan R. Cervas, the court-appointed special master, would unwind changes that Democrats had hoped to use to unseat Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican; flip other Republican-held swing districts; and secure their own tenuous seats in the Hudson Valley region.
The new lines even cast the future of several long-tenured, powerful Democratic incumbents in doubt, forcing several to potentially run against one another.
Did the Democrats think that the judiciary would side with them despite the 2014 amendment? Probably. But apparently they thought wrong.
My understanding is that the Democrats wanted the anti-gerrymandering amendment because gerrymandering had been keeping the NY State Senate under GOP control (barely). It turned out that the amendment wasn’t needed to get the Senate out of GOP control because the Democrats ended up with control of the Senate even before the amendment went into effect.
Now that the Dems are in full control of the state, with no end in sight, they are upset that the NY Court of Appeals (the highest state court) is enforcing the amendment against them, even though every judge on that court was appointed by a Democrat governor, and 6 of the judges are registered Dems (the one Republican is a Manhattan RINO). The AOC wing of the party is screaming that the Democrats’ own judges have stabbed them in the back (but they scream like that any time the Court rejects the farthest-left position, which happens frequently, particularly in criminal cases).
djf:
Fascinating.
Thought it would never bite them, did they? It’s encouraging that NY courts are actually willing to enforce the amendment.
Personally, I find the way districts are formed to be preposterous.
All districts should be required to have not more than 8 sides, with a “side” being: A continuous roadway, a physical objective limitation (river, mountain range, precipice) or a straight geographic line.
If you can make a serious case for it, make it 12 sides. And the variation in district content (population) can be up to 20%, as the boundaries make it inherently needed.
That said, this is actually kind of fun:
http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
Unfortunately, it depends on flash player, which Adobe has disallowed the existence of, which is ridiculous. “We don’t support it in any way” is fine. Making all browsers stop working with it is bad.
There are actually only 3 legal criteria for Congressional districts IIRC. They have to be contiguous, compact, and of equal population (within a certain margin of course). Many years ago, I proposed as my Master’s Thesis in Geography a computer model that would allocate census blocks into political districts by random accretion from a core block via adjacent blocks. I proposed running the simulation 100 times and statistically comparing the resulting maps to those proposed by the powers that be. I figured that would give a non-partisan alternative at least. Alas, it never happened as my career was already going in a different direction.
ObloodyHell, Unfortunately Flash was inherently insecure and became a dangerous attack vector for cyber criminals. That is why all browsers ran away from it. Adobe is a company built by artists to make software they can use rather than software types building art software. A simplification but that focus has good sides and bad sides. We software types don’t think like artists and the other way around. I hear there are alternatives built by various vendors for running flash scripts, but I haven’t researched them. To quote the great insincere Goombah, “I feel your pain.”
At least in the US, legislative districts are of approximately equal population. Here is a decade-old example from Venezuela, of Hugomandering involving legislative districts with widely disparate populations.
And when the opposition won two-thirds of the legislative seats in the December 2015 legislative elections, Maduro in effect dissolved the legislature.
https://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/2011/01/most-undemocratic-moment-national.html
Here is an example of gerrymandering overturned. From about 10 years ago, I recall seeing a map of North Carolina’s I-85 Congressional District, of which one joker said that if you drove down I-85 with both car doors open, you’d kill most of the voters in the district.
https://cprnc.org/2021/08/12/redistricting-the-i-85-district/
The congressional district map for North Carolina is much better today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_congressional_districts
IIRC, one factor driving strange-shaped districts is the effort to create districts that have a majority of minority voters.
Interesting that some of the NY gerrymandered districts involved Jerry Nadler and AOC, neither of whom are my favorite pols.
Oh, yes, Gringo, I remember the outrageous I-85 district. Also outrageous are NC Dem’s complaints about gerrymandering, with that one in our past. In the next-to-last redistricting battle, Republicans were taken to court for trying too hard to provide 2-3 majority-minority districts, which made the rest lean Republican. So they decided to stop using race as a criterion at all — and that was racist, too! The current map is unlikely to stand past this election cycle, because it was drawn by an Appeals Court, not by the legislature.
It’s a good thing that NY Dems aren’t as good as PA Dems when it comes to finding hacks for their highest court. The Dems on the PA Supreme Court voted in 2020 to partially re-write a statute, for one year only, without actually holding the statute unconstitutional so as to avoid an anti-severability clause – a brilliant display of creative legal writing. I’m sure that they could have found a way around the NY constitutional amendment too.
“…And when the opposition won two-thirds of the legislative seats in the December 2015 legislative elections, Maduro in effect dissolved the legislature…”
No doubt part of the reason why an admiring “Biden” is cozying up to that most creative of regimes.
Sean Patrick Maloney versus Mondaire Jones? A recipe for eliminating at least one odious creep.
Jerrold Nadler versus Carolyn Maloney? Again – an odious creep elimination contest. Could it be the end of Jerroldmandering?
All Nadler has to say is “I’m a myth” and he has the thing wrapped up.
(It’s NYC.)
Frank: Could your model be combined with a program to find the block plan that minimizes the length of boundaries?
That is – the most compact blocks that each contains the same number of voters……..
If it were a computer program, the case for partisan gerrymandering would be harder to make, would it not?