The courts have been active in striking down congressional maps drawn by Republican legislatures.
In June, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that the Alabama congressional map did not provide sufficient district representation for Black voters. A second Supreme Court ruling in September further strengthened the first ruling. More recently, a federal court ruled in the same manner and with the same reason on Georgia’s congressional map.
These rulings will most certainly lead to more Democratic representatives in more majority-minority districts, where the majority of people in the district are minorities.
Before Democrats celebrate their victories, they must be aware of two tools that facilitate gerrymandering when maps are drawn. These are the weapons used by partisan legislatures when drawing maps, which may limit the impact of the court rulings over time.
Cracking is the process of splitting voters of like mind across multiple districts so that these voters cannot garner a critical mass of support for their preferred representatives.
Packing is the flip side of cracking. It moves voters of like mind into a small number of districts, where they easily gain their preferred representative. The problem here is that their influence in other districts is diluted, giving them no path to gain representation.
Cracking and packing work hand in hand, based on how census blocks are allocated to map out districts.
Good examples of how such tools were used in the recent map-drawing period to gerrymander can be found in the 15th congressional district in Texas and the 13th congressional district in Illinois.
This Texas district had been a Democratic stronghold for decades. But then the Texas legislature redrew the district to crack left-leaning voters out, giving Republicans a win, albeit a slim one. Note that this district is almost 81 percent Hispanic, making it by definition a majority-minority district.
The Illinois district had Republican representation over several recent election cycles. A carefully crafted gerrymander packed together Democratic-leaning downstate micro-urban cities like Champaign, Urbana, Decatur and Springfield and communities around East St. Louis, effectively cracking GOP rural voter influence scattered along the district.
The courts’ rulings are aligned with the Voting Rights Act. Yet as the nation’s demographics change, diversity across the population grows and expands.
Following the 2020 census, 136 of the 435 congressional districts — or 31 percent— were majority-minority. In contrast, almost 59 percent of the U.S. population were white (non-Hispanic or Latino). This suggests that the minority population is being packed in numerous districts, possibly a consequence of the Voting Rights Act or how they are geographically situated in urban areas.
The courts have found an angle to slow the spread of gerrymandering in their recent rulings. But by forcing additional majority-minority districts, they may also be blessing packed minority districts, which, if used nefariously, will crack minority voter influence in majority-majority districts.
The North Carolina Republican majority legislature is circumventing such headwinds and drawing maps that are partisan gerrymandered while standing clear of racial gerrymandering. This allows them to sidestep the recent court rulings while staying within the guardrails already ruled by the Supreme Court.
The takeaway from such efforts is that slowing gerrymandering is a cat and mouse game, with one legal entity acting to slow gerrymandering and another legislative body working to avoid rulings that prohibit their type of gerrymandering.
If gerrymandering is to be curtailed, remapping authority must be shifted from partisan legislative bodies to independent commissions. Then the games being played can be stopped in their tracks, and political maps can be drawn that represent the very people they are designed for.
The long game to curtail and end gerrymandering is proportional representation. An intermediate step is ranked-choice voting, with multiple member districts. Maine, for instance, uses ranked choice to elect their representatives to Congress.
Until such a point is reached, which is highly unlikely in the short term, state legislatures will continue to draw partisan maps that favor their party, and courts will continue to make rulings that fight back against such egregious efforts.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public policy.