12 July 2006
U.S. Supreme Court Allows States To Redraw Election Boundaries
Ruling unlikely to affect U.S. midterm elections in November, experts say
Washington – A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows state lawmakers to rearrange boundaries of their voting districts but whether they will do so in the near future is unclear, experts tell the Washington File in a series of interviews.
A voting district is a geographic area represented by an individual member of the U.S. House of Representatives. How the boundaries for those areas are drawn can affect significantly the outcome of both local and national elections.
When the U.S. Supreme Court's June 28 ruling left Texas’ 2003 congressional redistricting plan essentially intact, it opened the door for other states to redraw district lines before the 2006 midterm elections, according to Bernard Grofman, political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.
“But they won’t,” said Chuck Todd, contributing editor to the National Journal, a weekly magazine on politics and government. The Supreme Court’s decision comes too late to affect the 2006 midterm elections in Texas, Todd said. “It would take someone with a politically charged vendetta to redraw a district” just because the Supreme Court said it was okay to do so midcensus, he added.
The Supreme Court said one of the Texas districts in question violated the rights of Hispanics under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and will need to be redrawn, said Paul S. Herrnson, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, College Park. In his view, this will have a ripple effect on surrounding districts. But Herrnson said the Supreme Court found that the midcensus Texas redistricting plan, which opponents said was oddly shaped to protect Republican seats, was not unconstitutional.
The U.S. Constitution requires that states apply the results of the every 10-year census conducted by the federal government and redraw as necessary any congressional districts so that they comprise a roughly equal number of residents. Each state is represented by two senators, but the number of representatives each state sends to the U.S. House of Representatives depends on the state’s population. There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, but Congress can increase that number if necessary. Each state gets at least one representative. (See related article.)
After the 2000 census, the average population per district was 646,952. (See related article.)
What the Supreme Court is telling states now, Grofman said, is that states must address their population numbers at least every 10 years and can do so more frequently if state lawmakers feel they need to.
Redrawing becomes a political issue when “gerrymandering” occurs. It happens, Todd said, when a particular group of voters – either political party members or members of specific religious or ethnic groups – is “packed” into one oddly shaped district. This has the effect of concentrating the group’s power behind a particular candidate or political party but also diluting the electoral strength of that group in other parts of the state. The term “gerrymandering” was coined after Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts governor, and the “salamander” shape of the district he created in 1812.
State legislatures are required to work with governors to redraw congressional districts appropriately; where they cannot agree, the courts tell states what to do. That is what happened in Texas, Grofman said. After the 2000 census, the state legislature and the governor could not agree on a plan, so a Texas court drew the redistricting map. Then, Texas lawmakers came up with a plan they liked better and put it into place. Opponents of the plan said it diluted the voting strength of Hispanics in three districts.
Pennsylvania and Michigan, analysts say, likely are the only states in which political control of the state legislature might change after the 2006 elections and thus the only states in which gerrymandering might occur for the 2008 election. Currently, those legislatures have Republican majorities; a switch to Democratic control could prompt a redrawing of congressional districts in preparation for the 2008 election, Todd said.
According to Todd, the impact of gerrymandering is overrated. “The fact is, if you really looked at the map nationally, the country is divided up pretty evenly by congressional districts if you overlaid how these districts voted during the [2004] presidential election,” he said.
Democracies with a single nationwide voting district, such as in the Netherlands and Israel, are not susceptible to gerrymandering. Countries that require nonpartisan organizations to draw district lines, including the United Kingdom and Canada, avoid the potential for gerrymandering.
For more information about past U.S. elections, see Elections.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
