Gerrymandering is ending free and fair elections

Not peaceful tourists not peacefully visiting a popular scenic site on 1/6/21

The New York Times writes in an article entitled, G.O.P. Cements Hold on Legislatures in Battleground States:

Democrats were once able to count on wave elections to win back key statehouses. Republican gerrymandering is making that all but impossible.

Republicans are locking in newly gerrymandered maps for the legislatures in four battleground states that are set to secure the party’s control in the statehouse chambers over the next decade, fortifying the G.O.P. against even the most sweeping potential Democratic wave elections.

In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.

Although much of the attention on this year’s redistricting process has focused on gerrymandered congressional maps, the new maps being drafted in state legislatures have been just as distorted.

And statehouses have taken on towering importance: With the federal government gridlocked, these legislatures now serve as the country’s policy laboratory, crafting bills on abortion, guns, voting restrictions and other issues that shape the national political debate.

“This is not your founding fathers’ gerrymander,” said Chris Lamar, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center who focuses on redistricting. “This is something more intense and durable and permanent.”

This redistricting cycle, the first one in a decade, builds on a political trend that accelerated in 2011, when Republicans in swing states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan drew highly gerrymandered state legislative maps.

Since those maps were enacted, Republicans have held both houses of state government in all three places for the entire decade. They never lost control of a single chamber, even as Democrats won some of the states’ races for president, governor and Senate.  

Gerrymandering is a tool used by both parties in swing states as well as less competitive ones. Democrats in deep-blue states like Illinois are moving to increase their advantage in legislatures, and Republicans in deep-red states like Utah and Idaho are doing the same.  

As Democratic voters have crowded into cities and commuter suburbs, and voters in rural and exurban areas have grown increasingly Republican, G.O.P. mapmakers say that they risk running afoul of other redistricting criteria if they split up those densely populated Democratic areas across multiple state legislative districts.

“What you see is reflective of the more even distribution of Republican and right-leaning voters across wider geographic areas,” said Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. Trying to draw more competitive legislative districts, he said, would result in “just a lot of squiggly lines.” 

Republicans in the Texas Legislature, however, say that the state’s maps are a fair representation of voters, and that if any districts are unfair, it is largely the result of incumbents on both sides protecting themselves. 

“Incumbents generally get to draw their own maps, so that’s how it’s done — it’s each member being able to draw it for their re-election,” said Briscoe Cain, a Republican state representative from the Houston area. “It’s a big state, we’ve got many regions and cultures. I believe the Texas House reflects those distinctions.”  

In Ohio and North Carolina, however, Republicans are taking a forceful tack. By keeping some districts moderately competitive, they are taking more risks in an attempt to create significant majorities or supermajorities — and in doing so, they are often flouting laws or court decisions.

In Ohio, after Republicans drew themselves supermajorities in both the State House and Senate in 2011, voters approved a ballot initiative creating a bipartisan commission to draw the maps and dictating that “no district plan should be drawn to favor or disfavor a political party.”

But this year, Ohio Republicans ignored the commission, creating a House map that favors roughly 67 percent of G.O.P. seats and a Senate map that gives Republicans an advantage in roughly 69 percent of districts, preserving supermajorities.  

Republicans are “willing to be a bit more aggressive in a state like Ohio and in North Carolina,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re daring the courts to strike them down.”

Yes, Democrats gerrymander too. But not in California. But it appears that nationally, Democrats have lost the battle in the war to save democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. They are losing the war. There is no obvious reason to believe that more than a trivial few, if any, pro-authoritarian voters are going to change their minds in any state, red, blue or whatever.

Republicans argue their advantage and thus moral and political justification lies in larger geographic areas. They have to argue that because they lose in terms of larger populations in smaller areas. They have no choice. For Republicans, power, not population or public opinion counts. That is authoritarianism, not democracy.

The libertarian and Republican brands of authoritarianism hold that property rights, including land area, trump human being rights and well-being. One acre or one million dollar asset gets one vote, but no acres or million dollar assets get ~0.7 vote, or something about like that. Maybe that is the modern equivalent of the old 3/5 vote for slaves back in the bitterly fought and still unresolved fight for a Constitution in the late 1770s. 

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonably fact and reason-based to believe that on the national level the 2022 elections and thereafter will probably (>50% chance) be no longer be a matter of one person one vote, but instead the Republican party and its more than one vote per person will prevail on the national level?

2. Is it plausible to believe that the radical right Republican Supreme Court, which is already hostile to free and fair elections, will intervene to defend the one person, one vote concept?