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The furor over the Supreme Court case considering limits on gerrymandering has reminded me of a conference I attended years ago. This was a meeting mostly composed of legal scholars focused on progressive reforms to the American judicial system. Gerrymandering, which is a hot topic today, wasn’t a major focus of the conversation. But we did get one presentation from a distinguished scholar of redistricting matters who explained that redistricting is a particularly hard problem to solve because there are a number of different goals that are mostly incompatible:
- It seems like a system should offer partisan fairness such that control of a legislature is typically in line with the population’s overall preference.
- Districts should align communities of interest and correspond in some sense to real places that we can characterize, like “the South Side of Chicago,” rather than just be arbitrary zones, like “some of the suburbs of San Antonio and some of the suburbs of Austin plus a big disconnected patch of rural Texas.”
- Racial minority groups should get fair representation. A state like Georgia that’s 30 percent black shouldn’t have an all-white congressional delegation.
- There should be fair-fight districts with real electoral competition, not just everyone segregated into safe seats that protect incumbents.
- Districts should be compact and look like a nice checkerboard of squares and triangles, rather than a bunch of crazy squiggles.
Sometimes you can make this all work together, but oftentimes you can’t. Creating majority-minority districts to ensure racial representation can look a lot like “packing” Democratic voters into lopsided seats. Aiming at fair fights sounds nice but will end up violating communities of interest. Aiming for partisan fairness will necessarily involve some odd squiggles, since neighborhood-level partisanship can be very disparate.
So I asked this scholar: “What about proportional representation?”
She said that when she teaches redistricting law, she does proportional representation last because it solves all the problems and the point of the class is for the students to work through the different complexities and legal doctrines governing the American system. That seems smart as a pedagogical approach, but as an agenda for political reform, solving all the problems is a good idea.
