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V

irginia

C

apitol

C

onnections

, W

inter

2016

12

Gerrymander

By Stephen J. Farnsworth

Following Virginia legislative elections

in which 137 out of 140 state Senate and

House of Delegate districts remained under

the control of the same political party,

Virginians surveyed recently said they

overwhelmingly favored taking authority

to design the districts away from state

lawmakers.

In a November 2015 statewide poll sponsored by the University

of Mary Washington, 72 percent said that an independent board

should draw the district lines. Only 14 percent of those surveyed

said the legislature should retain that authority.

There was no gender gap in the responses to the question, and

there was little difference among whites, African Americans and

Latinos or among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. More

than 65 percent of all those subgroups in the survey said they thought

that the lines should be drawn by an independent panel.

For those not familiar with public opinion research, a 72-14 split

among survey respondents is almost unheard of in public policy

questions during these days of deeply divided politics.

Gerrymandering, the process by which incumbent lawmakers

design their districts to maximize the prospects for their own re-

elections and the fortunes of their party, is a process as old as the

republic. Modern computer technology has made a bad situation

worse, giving the majority party the ability virtually to eliminate

competitive elections in most parts of Virginia (and in nearly every

other state lets lawmakers create their own districts).

In Virginia’s 2015 elections, for example, only 29 of 100 House

of Delegate districts featured both a Republican and a Democrat

on the ballot. In the senate, only 20 of 40 seats had two-party

competition on the ballot.

In practice, though, even most of those elections weren’t close.

Only six of 100 seats in the house had less than a ten percentage

point gap between the top two candidates, and only five of the 40

seats in the senate met that admittedly generous definition of a

competitive election.

High-tech gerrymandering has a number of consequences that

undermine effective representative government. Noncompetitive

elections reduce turnout and discourage participation by quality

candidates from the disadvantaged party. To make matters worse,

gerrymandered districts place the real power for the selection of

elected officials in the hands of the tiny minority of voters, usually

less than 10 percent, who participate in the primaries where the party

nomination is determined.

Politicians who must cater to the most extreme ten percent

of the district’s voters have zero incentive to compromise and

instead legislate from the far left or the far right. When legislative

compromise is nearly impossible, difficult problems fester.

Not only does the public oppose that the lawmakers draw the

line, they also disagree with how they draw the lines.

When asked whether they preferred “a geographically compact

district that keeps nearby communities together” or “a district drawn

to give supporters of one party an advantage over others,” survey

respondents preferred the compact district 84 percent to 4 percent,

with the rest undecided.

Of course the best way to gerrymander is to create long thin

districts that divide people likely to support your opponents into

a number of districts. And Virginia has a lot of those. When you

can’t do that, the best approach is to pack as many members of the

opposite party into a single district, leaving the nearby districts ripe

for the picking by the line-drawing party.

But this time lawmakers may have gone too far, according to

some preliminary court rulings. The lines drawn for congressional

and state legislative districts have faced a number of lawsuits over

whether they are too gerrymandered. The way things look right now,

the courts will be debating the legislative lines inVirginia until 2021,

the year Virginians draw the new lines based on the 2020 US Census.

Stephen J. Farnsworth is professor of political science at the

University of Mary Washington and director of the University’s

Center for Leadership and Media Studies.

The November 2015 Virginia Survey, sponsored by University of

Mary Washington (UMW), obtained telephone interviews with a

representative sample of 1,006 adults living in Virginia. Telephone

interviews were conducted by landline (402) and cell phone (604,

including 303 without a landline phone). The survey was conducted

by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI).

Interviews were done in English by Princeton Data Source from

November 4 to 9, 2015. Statistical results are weighted to correct

known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error

for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3.5 percentage points.

30

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