Let Voters Choose Politicians, not Vice-Versa...Just Ask Abe

Digging into the detail a bit, let's use Pennsylvania's 2012 Congressional races as an example. Democrats running for Congress won 51% of the vote in Pennsylvania, but won less than one-third of the state's 18 Congressional districts.

If you're wondering how things like this can happen in a democracy, you wouldn't be alone, but the politicians sure know. It's due to something known as gerrymandering, where every 10 years the politicians get to choose their voters. Not in every state, but in almost forty of them, which makes you wonder whether those guys and gals actually believe in democracy.

Here's how gerrymandering works: every 10 years, after the U.S. census is completed, each state gets to re-draw their congressional district boundaries and the boundaries for their state legislative districts. In most cases, it's the state legislature itself, comprised of elected politicians, who get to draw those district boundaries. And lo and behold, what do you think frequently happens? The politicians in charge end up drawing the new boundaries to maximize their own chances of getting re-elected!

That's what happened after the Republicans won big in 2010. In at least 6-8 big states, including Pennsylvania, they re-drew boundaries to lump all the Democrats into just a few districts, so the rest of the districts (the majority of them) had a small but secure Republican majority. Hence, the Dems may have won more total votes, but they ended up winning only a minority of the Congressional seats.

The graph below displays a simple example of how clever politicians could gerrymander four districts in which voters are split evenly 50-50, and end up with four districts where one party will always come out ahead:

(image from robertchaen.wordpress)

And for some real life examples, here are a few actual gerrymandered districts from across the country. You can see it took some pretty imaginative and partisan thinking to come up with the lengths and shapes of these districts:

(image from washingtonpost.com)

Personally, we think this kind of behavior on the part of our elected officials is unconstitutional on a number of levels. Primarily, you're basically disenfranchising voters who don't belong to the majority party within a given district. They could nominate the most qualified, middle-of-the-road candidate imaginable in their primary and never be able to get them elected in the general election.

A related and additionally disastrous outcome in these kinds of districts is that you frequently get extremists being nominated by the majority party in the primaries. Voters in that party know they're going to win the general election, so they don't have to nominate someone who is more moderate and can attract voters from the other party. The result is gridlock when too many of these types get to Congress or into the state legislatures.

Which brings us to our story about Abraham Lincoln. In 1858 the relatively unknown Lincoln was running for the Senate in Illinois against nationally-known incumbent and likely Presidential candidate Stephen Douglas. They engaged in the most famous series of political debates in our country's history, which you all know as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln not only held his own against the great orator, Douglas, but most people felt Lincoln actually got the better of Douglas in most of those seven debates.

(Root painting fm NIU.edu)

Now hang on a moment while we give you a bit of history: prior to 1913, when the 17th Amendment became effective, each state's legislature was responsible for choosing the two U.S. Senators that would represent their state; i.e., prior to 1913, U.S. Senators were not elected by a direct vote of the people.

Well, in 1858 the state of Illinois' state legislative districts had been gerrymandered by the conservatives (who belonged to the Democratic Party at that time) so it was no surprise that the conservative Democrats won control of the Illinois legislature. It followed, of course, that they chose one of their own, Stephen Douglas, to be the U.S. Senator from Illinois.

A few years ago, though, historian Allen C. Guelzo delved into the 1858 votes and guess what he found: even though the conservatives in the Democratic Party had won more seats in the Illinois legislature, more total votes were cast for Lincoln's Republican Party candidates. Sounds a lot like the 2012 results, but with the parties flipped, doesn't it? Since the Democrats had won the state house because of their gerrymandering in previous years, Lincoln did not win the Senate seat even though you could argue he got a majority of the popular vote.

Back to today now. Fortunately, a lot of people are starting to push back on the unconstitutional practice of gerrymandering and, for once, the Supreme Court may be on our side. Here are some recent victories we've seen on this issue:

Ohio - 2014 - By a vote of 71% to 29%, Ohio voters approved Proposal 1, an amendment to the state Constitution, which should eliminate the gerrymandering of districts for the state legislature. Going forward, the Ohio Constitution now will make it illegal to draw legislative district boundaries for the benefit or harm of a political party. It also seeks to minimize the splitting of counties, municipalities, or townships into multiple districts. This amendment does not address Congressional districts, but efforts are underway in the legislature to eliminate the gerrymandering of those districts as well.

Arizona - 2015 - In 2000, the Citizens of Arizona voted to take re-districting out of the hands of the politicians by establishing an independent commission to draw the state's Congressional districts. Conservatives in the state legislature, who wanted to put themselves back in charge of the state's re-districting, challenged the will of the people in court. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, agreed with the people and ruled that an independent commission is constitutional. Eleven other states also use an independent commission in the re-districting process.

{UPDATE: Pennsylvania - 2018 - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the 2010 drawing of the state's Congressional districts by the GOP-controlled state legislature (which we used above as a good example of unconstitutional gerrymandering) clearly, plainly and palpably violated the state Constitution due to its extreme partisanship. The Court ordered that the districts be re-drawn in time for the 2018 fall elections. Republicans immediately appealed this decision but the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed with the GOP position and refused to block the state Court's order.}

Other states are considering ballot proposals similar to that which passed overwhelmingly in Ohio and a number of Citizens in other states have filed legal action to challenge the politicians who have gerrymandered themselves into "safe" districts to guarantee their re-election. We're encouraged by all of these developments and would like to think that somewhere Abe Lincoln also is smiling.