Who’s Gerry and Why Is He So Bad at Drawing Maps?

More Perfect

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4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2017

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

“It is an invidious, undemocratic, and unconstitutional practice,” Justice John Paul Stevens said of gerrymandering in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004). Politicians have been manipulating district lines to favor one party over another since the founding of our nation. But with a case starting today, Gill v. Whitford, the Supreme Court may be in a position to crack this historical nut once and for all.

Up until this point, the court didn’t have a standard measure or test of how much one side had unfairly drawn district lines. But “the efficiency gap” could be it. The mathematical formula measures how many votes Democrats and Republicans waste in elections; if either side is way outside the norm, there may be some foul play at hand. According to Loyola law professor Justin Levitt, both the case and the formula arrive at a critical time. “After the census in 2020, all sorts of different bodies will redraw all sorts of different lines and this case will help decide how and where.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation.
0:05.2	Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod, and today, not an entire More Perfect story, just something that you need
0:10.6	to know right now. The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that apparently could turn the
0:15.6	country's legislative maps upside down. More Perfect Sean Rums firm is going to take it from here.
0:24.0	Hello, Chad. Hello, America. So let's start with some context. Republicans controlled
0:29.0	a lot of legislators in 2010, and there was also a census that year, which meant that a whole lot
0:35.0	of Republicans got to redraw a whole lot of legislative maps, and a lot of those maps benefited
0:41.9	Republicans. Democrats do this too, but today's case, Gil V. Whitford is about a Republican maneuver.
0:48.6	A map in Wisconsin, where, for example, in 2012, Democrats got 53% of the vote, but only 39% of the
0:56.9	seats. And Republicans made that happen by packing Democrats into super Democratic districts,
1:02.9	where their votes were essentially wasted, and also by cracking Democrats into mostly Republican
1:09.5	districts, where their votes were essentially wasted. In a move that could have a huge bearing on
1:15.1	the future of American politics, the Supreme Court on Monday agreeing to take up an explosive case,
1:20.4	whether lawmakers in Wisconsin's Republican led legislature went too far in 2011 when they
1:26.1	re-drew the state's electoral map to make it harder for Democrats to win legislative races.
1:31.2	And what makes the Supreme Court case all the bigger a big deal right now is the timing.
1:37.9	This is the first time in more than a decade that it's going to take up the question of drawing
1:42.4	the lines for partisan gains. And this is Justin Levit. He teaches law at Loyola in Los Angeles.
1:48.0	It's going to do that right on the eve of everybody re-drying the lines everywhere.
1:53.9	Local districts, state districts, congressional districts, after the census in 2020,
1:59.1	all sorts of different bodies will redraw all sorts of different lines. And this case will
2:03.9	help decide how and where. And if the court can crack this nut, it'll be solving one of the
	...

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