UNDEMOCRATIC MAP DRAWINGS

What is the purpose of Congress or, for that matter, of any legislative body such as a state legislature? The legislative body makes the laws. And what is a law in terms of this function? Law is the authoritative policy pronouncement of what the government will do. The legislature decides what the government will do. The executive – the President at the federal level – does what the legislature has decided. Are these legislatures legitimate in fulfilling this function? In our system, the legitimacy of the legislature, be it Congress, state legislature, county commission, or city council, is based on the fact that the members are voted to their positions by us, the citizens of the respective jurisdiction. The members represent us and, by and large, if they want to keep their jobs, they will roughly decide in such a way that reflects the wishes of most of the voters who sent them to their positions. I am probably not conveying anything that you don't already know, but I go over this elementary civics material to draw a context for what follows.

In the voting process, the assumption is that all citizens have equal voice in determining who will be chosen to represent a certain jurisdiction. Let me focus on the House of Representatives at the federal government level, although much of what follows also pertains to state legislatures. Each state is divided into Congressional districts and each district is represented by one representative. On average, there are about 700,000 citizens per district. So each representative represents about 700,000, although this number varies from district to district. The Constitution provides for each state to have at least one representative even if the population of the state is less than 700,000. And, of course, the actual numbers of each district will vary in order to accommodate the demographic realities of the state. Besides, the exact population of any state is not exactly divisible by 700,000, so the math of distributing population among the number of districts a state has will, by necessity, cause the 700K number to vary. Be that as it may, let us assume, for the point I am making in this posting, that each district has 700K. And with that ratio, 1 representative to 700,000 citizens, let us imagine a fictitious situation.

The situation has to do with a made up state that has exactly 2,100,000 people. Simple division tells us the state, therefore, has three Congressional districts with each district having within its boundaries 700,000 citizens. We will call the fictitious state South Huma. With only 2.1 million people, the state is considered small. The only urban center exists in Congressional District One. In the last Congressional election, 2012, District One voted 90% for the Democratic candidate and 10% for the Republican candidate. District Two voted 49% Democratic and 51% Republican. And District Three voted 49% Democratic and 51% Republican. Across the entire state, the Democrats won roughly 62.7% of the vote and the Republicans won 37.3% of the vote, yet the Republicans won 2 seats and the Democrats won only one seat. While my example exaggerates what actually took place, the idea is that if you draw Congressional districts just so – a process known as gerrymandering – a party can lose at the ballot box in terms of actual votes of citizens and win a majority of seats available. In principle, that is why in the last Congressional election, the Democrats received one million more votes nationwide than the Republicans and yet did not gain control (win a majority of the seats) in the House of Representatives.

How are the district lines drawn? Well that task – some might say, “opportunity” – falls to the respective state legislatures and they use primarily the national census figures that are reported every ten years. That is, every ten years, each state legislature goes about figuring out how the Congressional district boundaries should be designated. This is a highly politicized process since where those lines are drawn will determine the fate of individual politicians – will he or she have to run in a district that is favorable to his/her re-election chances? Also, the ability of a political party to advance its policy positions will be dependent on how many members of the respective legislative body belong within its ranks. So, the party in the majority of any given legislature will use its numbers to insure that the boundary lines will be drawn favorably. They will be lines that help insure that their members will be re-elected and, perhaps, be able to defeat members who belong to the opposition party. Both parties, when given the opportunity, have done this. Since the Republicans won big in the 2010 elections, they got to draw the lines that resulted from the 2010 census figures in twenty-seven of the states (a figure that jumped to twenty-eight in 2012 as the process concluded). That is the number of states in which the Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature. Some argue that the practice has become too skewed in favor of the Republicans. They go on to say that districts are so biased, creating such secure Republican districts, that that party does not have to worry about losing control of the House of Representatives. But how does this practice affect the quality of our democracy?

The case of South Huma illustrates a fundamental problem, one that undermines the very democratic nature of the system. After all, when people vote, their votes should be equal and the result should reflect the will of the majority. And yet, the current composition of the House – “the people's House” – does not reflect the majority. A lot of the gridlock in Congress today can be attributed to that fact. Yet there are efforts in various states to address this undemocratic aspect of how we choose our representatives.

In Florida, for example, the state constitution has a provision that drawing of district lines will not reflect political aims and that, specifically, lines should not be drawn in order to insure or protect an individual or party winning a particular seat. The League of Women Voters brought suit against the Florida Legislature claiming that the Republicans violated that provision and they want to question members in court about their actions during the reapportionment process that ended in 2012. The Legislature countered that it is immune from such questioning. Such questioning would place a “chilling” effect on legislators in the performance of their duty and, as such, the courts ordering them to testify would amount to a violation of the separation of powers between the Legislature and the courts. In an opinion just issued, the state's supreme court decided in favor of the League. The Court agreed that forcing members to testify would have a chilling effect, but that that was the very idea of the constitutional provision. Therefore, the members will have to go before a court and, under oath, explain their motivations and actions in drawing the lines as they did.¹ Will this make the process more responsive to the democratic wishes of the people? We will see. As it is, the voice of many urban voters, as illustrated in my fictitious state, are being silenced and rendered as wasted.

When one's vote is rendered useless due to where one happens to live and it is done as a result of a systemic condition, the very constitutional integrity of those voters comes into question. For federalists, constitutional integrity is a central procedural value and, therefore, a civics class that uses the federalist construct to guide its content would be well within its purview to study this current anomaly.

1Farrington, B. (2013). Supreme Court: Lawmakers must testify on new maps. Tallahassee Democrat, December 14, p. 3A.