Dr. Erin Fouberg, Northern State University professor of geography, offered a useful lecture on redistricting at last night’s gerrymandering forum hosted by the League of Women Voters at Aberdeen’s K.O. Lee Public Library.
Dr. Fouberg traced our system of territorial representation back to our Founding Fathers’ disgust with the “virtual representation” offered by our British overlords before the Revolution. The crown told the colonists that Parliament represented all British subjects, but the colonists didn’t really have a voice in the taxes imposed from London. Thus, the Revolutionary victors wrote proportional representation in the House of Representatives into the Constitution and vested taxing power in that proportional House.
The Founding Fathers’ system doesn’t guarantee perfectly equal representation: while the national average of people per House member is 747,000, South Dakota has 870,000 people represented by a lone House member. That puts us among six significantly “underrepresented” states with more then 800,000 people per Representative. (Worst is Montana, where one Rep. must field calls from just over a million constituents.)
Of course, one can argue that what we lack in House power we more than make up for in the Senate, where our 2% of the vote is eight times our share of the national population.
Dr. Fouberg said that the only constitutionally required criteria for drawing Congressional and Legislative districts are equal population and racial equity. The courts have allowed Legislative districts more leeway on population than Congressional districts: in South Dakota, we practice deviations of 5% above or below the target population of 23,262 (and remember: the deviation is far larger if we look at how many participating voters end up picking our legislators). But racial equity puts in tighter straits: we cannot dilute minority voting power, and we cannot draw district boundaries that are likely to result in reducing the number of minority elected officials.
That racial equity stricture complicates independent redistricting efforts. Even if we had a computer draw South Dakota’s district boundaries, based solely on population and geographical compactness and contiguity, blind to race, party affiliation, and other scale-thumbing factors, if that map ended up dividing our 9% American Indian minority into 35 geographically ideal districts in which Indians were never more than 20% of the population, the courts would toss that map. The computer had no racist intent, but the map would dilute Indian voting power. Because South Dakota legislators have unconstitutionally diluted Native voting power in the past, we must submit our proposed redistricting maps for to the Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for pre-clearance to ensure that we have not carved up Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, and other Indian voting areas.
Dr. Fouberg said that as a political scientist, she would love to take a crack at drawing our Legislative district map. She said she would start with a look at patterns of commerce: where do people buy groceries? That simple economic habit would suggest groupings of South Dakotans into practical communities that could translate into more logical Legislative representation.
Forum host and League of Women Voters president Caitlin Collier said that the professors who have led these LWV forums in other towns have so far to a woman indicated a similar interest in working on such a Legislative map. Stay tuned: we could see the League of Women Voters work on those professors to perform such a public service project in 2021, when we next redistrict. Dr. Fouberg says the software for mapping population is really easy to use (far easier, she said, than the Legislature made it sound back in 2011). Perhaps we’ll get an independent redistricting committee of academics to offer a map against which we can measure the partisan map our legislators make and use that map to pressure our legislators to live up to the Founding Fathers’ intent of offering equal representation to all voters.
I would take issue with the statement that the only constitutionally required criteria for legislative districts are equal population and racial equity. Those are the current criteria, but surely the constitution is violated at some point when gerrymandering reaches some level of absurdity. The Equal Protection clause guards our civil rights. Surely our civil rights are violated if the effect of our vote is purposely diluted by absurdly gerrymandered voting districts.
The Equal Protection clause’s “one person, one vote” principle is also violated if the value of one person’s vote is absurdly distorted for political purposes.
If the only constitutionally protected criteria in forming legislative districts is equal population and racial equity, politicians could form “patchwork” legislative districts that are not contiguous so as to tailor each district by individual voter. If you think we have seen the worst of gerrymandering, we haven’t. As politics have gotten more partisan and strident, gerry mandering has been politically weaponized. It will get worse if courts don’t act. Eventually the courts will have to step in or we will be left with permanent enclaves of partisanship ruled by whatever party happens to be in control of a state at the time of redistricting. That does not serve the ideals of democracy and it’s antithetical to our republic.
In SD, our state constitution would invalidate my example of patchwork districts, but I wonder if all states have such a constitutional protection. Furthermore, our state constitution requires “compact” districts, but that has pretty much been ignored in my view.
It is my understanding that algorithms have already been created that take into account a number of factors and that creating one that works for redistricting is not very difficult. It would factor in race, geography, etc. Then the voters really would get to choose their legislators. Wouldn’t that be nice?
The economic focus makes a great deal of sense. I like the school district idea too.
Nationally, I believe the US Senate must be changed because representation there is much too skewed, far out of proportion. I realize the Senate isn’t intended to be proportional, but when Wyoming and California have the same numbers, that’s really unfair.
I’d like to see the numbers of Senators vary from 1 to 4. No more. The state’s that currently have one or two representatives would have one Senator. The states of California, New York, Texas and a few others would have 4. The rest would have 2-3. I’d like to see the total number of Senators settle at around 225-250.
All elected at large. The proportional House still has the $ control.
ALL elected officials serve districts created via algorithms.
algorithms also do the tests on your blood Ms. Debbo. You know that when you get your blood work done they test more than what your levels are, they also find your genetic footprint. That goes into the data banks as well. Whatever ethnicity you are, the bean counters can tell just about everything about you, including when you might give up the ghost. The powers that be have a pretty good idea about most of the things we do or will do. However, sometimes there are glitches and the votes don’t turn out quite exactly what they should…then you have the Russians.
Debo, the Senate was designed to be the state’s representatives. The 17th amendment muffles that up. It was part of the design of being a “Republic” as opposed to the mad house of a full democracy. If you make the Senate full out based upon population you still have no more than a smaller House. In either case it would take a Constituional Convention to happen and if that happened the people would simply recind the 17th.
Democracy and republic can both produce extremes. Democracy is no more mad than a republic corrupted by crony Republicans who treat the Legislature as their private club, immune to public concerns and solid policy arguments.
Congressional Republicans said on Wednesday that former top FBI lawyer James Baker revealed to congressional investigators that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was conducted in an “abnormal fashion” and was carried out with “political bias.”
Lawmakers were unable to provide many details about what Baker said because of a confidentiality agreement that was put in place. Fox News reports:
However, they indicated in broad terms that Baker was cooperative and forthcoming about the genesis of the Russia case in 2016, and about the surveillance warrant application for Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) called Baker’s closed-door testimony “explosive” in a statement to Fox News, saying, “This witness confirmed that things were done in an abnormal fashion. That’s extremely troubling.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) added: “During the time that the FBI was putting — that DOJ and FBI were putting together the FISA (surveillance warrant) during the time prior to the election — there was another source giving information directly to the FBI, which we found the source to be pretty explosive.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/36673/former-top-fbi-lawyer-testifies-russia-probe-trump-ryan-saavedra
“Abnormal with political bias” would describe the entire Trump administration.
Lawmakers were unable to provide many details about what Baker said because of a confidentiality agreement that was put in place. Fox News reports:
Gosh darn, isn’t this convenient. They get to take cheapshots without having to prove anything. Kinda like releasing info about someone’s sex life without having to prove any of it.
Nothing but typical wingnut/Troll behaviour.