John Hood: Good Riddance to Racial Gerrymandering
RALEIGH — When the U.S. Supreme Court announced its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, placing stringent limitations on the use of race in drawing electoral districts, some friends and acquaintances of mine were shocked and outraged. The court has essentially repealed the 1964 Voting Rights Act, they alleged, forecasting grave consequences for non-white candidates running for future office.
I think they are wholly mistaken. For virtually my entire career as a political commentator, I have consistently and passionately opposed race-based redistricting. While perhaps justified in the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow to remedy state discrimination — a purpose explicitly upheld by the court in Louisiana v. Callais — the practice had by the late 1980s already devolved into a squalid and counterproductive system of political apartheid.
Yes, I used the word squalid. While white Democrats in states such as North Carolina had previously rigged the system to keep black candidates from winning party nominations, an alliance of black Democrats and white Republicans now began to use race-based districts to advance their own personal and partisan interests.
The entirely predictable results included a spider-like district in northeastern North Carolina, a snake-like district along the I-85 corridor, and similar outrages in other states.
Over three decades of subsequent litigation, state and federal courts upheld some racial gerrymanders and struck down others, their rulings exhibiting no constitutionally justifiable pattern. Democratic litigants typically made a “Goldilocks” argument that the Voting Rights Act required just enough packing of minority voters to ensure Democrats won the seat in question and forbade so much packing of minority voters that Republicans would be likely to win all the surrounding districts. “Puss in Boots” Republicans, in turn, condemned racial gerrymanders in some cases but embraced them in others, using whichever argument they deemed most expedient.
I enjoy playacting more than most but prefer to see it on theatrical stages, not political ones. Thank goodness the nation’s highest court has basically put an end to racial gerrymandering. Indeed, an underappreciated consequence of the decision is that it will make it easier for reformers to constrain partisan gerrymandering, too.
Voters dislike it. So do I. But when readers ask why we can’t just use computer algorithms to draw electoral maps, I have in the past observed that so long as courts interpreted the Voting Rights Act to require race-conscious districts, numerical formulas wouldn’t suffice, at least not in states such as North Carolina with sizable and not especially compact populations of non-white voters. If line-drawers first have to draw “VRA districts” before they can apply neutral criteria such as compactness, the resulting maps will inevitably feature weird shapes, confusing jurisdictions, and judgment calls that open the door to partisan favoritism.
In our current Louisiana v. Callais world, however, the case for formulaic redistricting just got a lot stronger. As my John Locke Foundation colleague Andy Jackson has argued, North Carolinians should be empowered to amendment their constitution to require that electoral districts be “as reasonably compact as practicable” and forbid any use of “voter registration, past election results, the location of incumbents’ residences, and any other data which could identify with reasonable certainty the voting tendencies of any group of citizens.”
Who should draw these lines — or, more to the point, employ computer algorithms to generate the most-compliant maps? Some states entrust commissions with full authority. I doubt Republican lawmakers in Raleigh (or their Democratic counterparts, should one or both houses of the General Assembly change hands over the next couple of election cycles) will agree to send such a constitutional amendment to the voters.
What I do believe is feasible is something like the Iowa model. Have staffers produce the maps, establish a balanced commission to resolve any disputes in applying the criteria, and then give lawmakers the final say in an up-or-down vote without any power to amend the maps.
I will advocate this reform before the next mandatory redistricting in 2031. I may be wrong — but at least I’m consistent!
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
