There’s a Simple Way to End the Gerrymander Wars |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
There’s a Simple Way to End the Gerrymander Wars
The image from above appearing in a news article by Elkanah Tisdale in 1813 – Public Domain
On April 21, a majority of Virginia voters said “yes” to a ballot measure allowing the state’s US House districts to be redrawn for the benefit of the Democratic Party.
The next day, a judge banned certification of the election results, calling the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and asserting that state legislators didn’t follow relevant rules in putting the measure on the ballot.
Virginia is the latest battleground in a centuries-long war to “gerrymander” legislative districts such that the party in power at the moment retains an advantage in future elections by drawing those districts to minimize the number of seats its opposing party can plausibly win.
This year, the war escalated from decades of World War 1 style “dig in, the line moves a few yards this way or that every decade” to dual blitzkriegs. Texas Republicans decided to re-gerrymander their House delegation, California Democrats followed suit, and we’ve seen a nationwide domino effect as the two “major” American political parties duel for advantage in the upcoming midterms.
Normally, redistricting occur every ten years, in years ending in “1,” for the perfectly good reason that seats are apportioned to states by the US Census, which........