FairVote Feed: Redistricting

FairVote Testimony on Independent Redistricting in Maryland

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:22:08 -0700

Testimony of FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy

Devin McCarthy, Research Fellow and Drew Spencer, Legal Fellow

HB 233

Presented to Rules and Executive Nominations Committee, March 11, 2013

About FairVote

FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy is a non-partisan, non-profit thinktank and advocacy organization working since 1992 on reforms ranging from election administration to electoral systems. Based in Takoma Park, FairVote works locally, statewide and nationally. FairVote has advised non-governmental organizations and policy-makers at all levels on the conduct of elections including U.S. Representative John Tanner on the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act (2005) and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney on the Voters' Choice Act (1999).

Summary

FairVote supports HB 233 and the creation of a Study Commission on the Redistricting Process in Maryland. We believe that the Study Commission should examine use of non-winner-take-all election methods within current districts. Independent redistricting plans can avoid efforts to put partisan interests above the public interest, but inevitably result in conflict among important values such as voter choice, geographic compactness, racial fairness, representation of women, and leadership accountability. If given the authority to implement candidate-based forms of proportional representation in multi-member districts, however, independent redistricting commissions would be able to achieve all of these goals in creating districting plans for Maryland.

Expectations About Legislative Districts

In general, there are four categories of criteria we would like to satisfy when settling on a districting plan. One is aesthetic; how does it look on a map? A district that looks gerrymandered seems intuitively unfair; it looks like, during its construction, some other concern took precedence over having genuine competitions for office. This was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's concern inShaw v. Reno (1993) when she argued that a majority-minority district in North Carolina was "so bizarre" that the map must be held to strict scrutiny. Furthermore, districts preserving local political jurisdiction lines establish a more coherent political experience for voters.

Another set of criteria necessarily leads to the purposeful creation of 'safe' districts. A critically important goal of elections is fair representation of different viewpoints and different communities. It seems intuitively wrong to divide pre-existing communities of interest exhibiting relatively cohesive voting patterns. It is illegal under the Voting Rights Act in certain protected districts to dilute racial minority voting strength by dividing those populations among other districts. It seems unfair to punish a several-term incumbent by eliminating his or her district solely because 'rampant incumbency' is in the public eye. From a more technical perspective, safer districts minimize wasted votes; the more people who vote for winning candidates, the fewer voters walk away from the polls with their ballots not having mattered.

At the same time, it's important to have 'in play' districts, both so that voters have real choices and a reason to vote and so that they can hold their elected leaders accountable. Incumbency rates are very high in Maryland. Some districts are so noncompetitive that challengers have stopped running, and parties have chosen to ignore them in favor of concentrating on districts where resources might be more effectively used to target voters. Overly safe districts, moreover, can mean a lack of accountability; the representative is beholden to no one if he or she has minimal concern about losing the next election. Leaders can act with impunity if they know they are almost impossible to displace from power through elections.

What Independent Redistricting Can Confer

Independent redistricting can be a useful tool for ensuring fairer, more legitimate legislative elections because it takes overt partisanship out of the process. It can prevent the partisan gerrymandering efforts seen in several states in the 2011-2012 redistricting process, which had substantial effects on the partisan composition of the U.S. House of Representatives and several state legislatures.

The intrinsic value of independent redistricting is the public legitimacy it brings to legislatures and legislative elections; voters have the sense that elected officials have not determined election outcomes before elections are even held. Its instrumental value is that it makes redistricting processes capable of giving fair consideration to criteria other than the benefit of the dominant party. Independent commissions can draw safer districts where the Voting Rights Act and historical communities of interest compel them to do so. They can ensure a proportion of in-play districts where voting behavior is somewhat predictable but populations are more heterogeneous. They can endeavor to minimize "bizarre" looking districts.

What Independent Redistricting Cannot Confer

Independent redistricting processes cannot achieve all of the desirable goals listed above for every voter or likely even for most voters while operating under the structure of winner-take-all elections. Each of the criteria may be met by some districts, but few if any districts will meet all the criteria.

A geographically compact district is not necessarily competitive, nor does it preserve a contiguous community of interest or color. A competitive district, by definition, cannot guarantee one group the ability to elect a candidate of choice. A competitive district, by definition, will maximize wasted votes. The ideal competitive district is one that, based on historical voting patterns, is drawn to contain equal numbers of voters from either major party. In any given election, roughly half the voters in that district will have wasted their votes and be effectively without representation. Voters in safe districts, meanwhile, will have little chance to affect election outcomes. Safe districts are the price of maximizing effective votes.

The cases of states that are currently using independent redistricting demonstrate that several of the above qualities are mutually exclusive. Arizona, for instance, had very few competitive elections in the decade after its independent redistricting was established in 2002. When it had more competitive elections in 2012, Democrats won one more congressional seat than Republicans while receiving fewer votes; its representatives were thus not accountable. Despite its use of independent redistricting and the Top Two primary system, California has a high rate of noncompetitive elections, with over 90% of state and federal legislative races decided by a greater than a 5% margin in 2012, and only four of 53 districts with a partisan balance that will lead them to be consistently competitive in the general election.

In Iowa and Arizona, two of the states garnering the most attention for independent redistricting, women have done quite poorly since its adoption. In fact, a woman has never represented Iowa in Congress, and women have only won six of Arizona's 49 House races since the adoption of independent redistricting in the state. While more accurate representation of women may not be a conventional districting criterion, women as a group remain severely under-represented at all levels of government in the United States.

Multi-seat Districts with Fair Voting

Fair voting systems - that is, alternatives to winner-take-all elections based on voting for candidates in multi-seat districts - have a long history of use in municipal and even state legislative elections in the United States. As one example, New York City was one of two dozen American municipalities using such a format to elect its city councils during the Progressive Era. Illinois elected its state legislature in three-seat districts using a fair voting system from 1870 to 1980, with the result that fewer votes were wasted; downtown Chicago districts would elect one Republican and districts in DuPage Country would elect one Democrat.

Under fair voting in a three-seat district, each candidate needs to win just over a quarter of the vote to earn a seat and just over half the votes to win two. By contrast, in a winner-take-all district, a group needs to equal over 50% of the population to be guaranteed the opportunity to win representation. The benefit of fair voting in multi-seat districts is straightforward: it can allow an independent redistricting commission to meet more criteria simultaneously for the same district and the same voters. For example, a geographically compact district can be drawn that ensures a VRA-protected community can elect a candidate of choice while allowing the political minority there to cast a meaningful ballot at the same time. Multi-seat districts-already used to elect the Maryland House of Delegates-encourage the nomination of female candidates because parties are more likely to nominate a gender-diverse slate of candidates when multiple candidates are running in the same geographic area. By eliminating the dichotomy between 'safe' and 'in play,' fair voting systems ease the legal and partisan balancing acts independent commissions can face following a census.

Note that there are different fair voting methods that can be used within multi-seat districts. The Illinois House of Representatives used cumulative voting, a system where voters have as many votes as seats and can choose to allocate more than one of their votes to a single candidate. The Goldmark Commission in New York State in the 1990s recommended the one-vote system for elections to a state constitution convention, which would mean that all voters have one vote each to cast in a multi-seat election. The City of New York used choice voting (also known as single transferable vote) for its five city council elections from 1937 to 1945, and choice voting is used today for national elections in Ireland and Australia as well as some local elections in Minnesota and Massachusetts. All fair voting systems are candidate-based and all can be tailored to accommodate the criteria of a fair and effective redistricting plan that are impossible to balance within single-member districts.

FairVote recommends that any redistricting commission be given the power to consider multi-seat district plans with non-winner-take-all election methods. At the very least, such plans should be strongly considered by a study commission on redistricting. We appreciate that the commission created by HB 233 would include representatives from local organizations like ours with expertise in redistricting issues.

We thank you for your consideration of these ideas and suggestions and would be pleased to provide additional information.

California and the Limits of Independent Redistricting Commissions with Winner-Take-All

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:12:05 -0800

Three months after the 2012 election, independent redistricting continues to gain attention as a panacea for American congressional elections. Making the case from the quantitative flank is Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience at Princeton and founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, whose February 2 op-ed in the New York Times purported to show that the partisan bias in the U.S. House of Representatives could be corrected nearly entirely by implanting independent redistricting nationwide in the form that it is currently used in states like California. Wang later expressed his admiration for the California commission model by tweeting, in response to a National Journal article on the defeat of Congressman Howard Berman, "What independent redistricting looks like: races blown wide open, incumbents ousted."

As FairVote has long argued, independent redistricting is a necessary reform, and we support it wholeheartedly. But proponents are simply wrong to suggest it would be sufficient if left to operate within winner-take-all elections. A perfect illustration of this point is the effect of the independent redistricting commission in California. Election results clearly show that "wide open" races and "ousted incumbents" were not the norm in California in 2012 - and are likely to become even more scarce in the state's future elections.

FairVote co-founder Steven Hill has already written an excellent Sacramento Bee op-ed enumerating the limitations of the combination of independent redistricting and the state's Top Two primary system. Hill found that independent redistricting did not create significantly more competitive races, and the average margin of victory for incumbents was "no different than it has been for the past ten years."

In future congressional elections in California, competition is likely to further decrease and incumbents will settle comfortably into their mostly one-sided districts. The Berman/Sherman race that Wang referred to was an aberration - that is, two long-serving incumbents facing off after being drawn into the same district - and one that is hardly unique to states with redistricting commissions. In elections in single-member districts that don't take place after redistricting, incumbent/incumbent elections will not exist. If Berman/Sherman is "what independent redistricting looks like," it will be 10 years before we see it have an impact again.

But more broadly, California's plan shows just how limited an effect commissions will have when left to work only within winner-take-all elections. Looking to FairVote's partisanship index (our well-tested method of grouping congressional districts into categories of likely competitiveness based on the relative shares of the presidential candidates in districts compared to candidates' national percentages), most California districts remain fundamentally lopsided and only four out of 53 have a partisan balance suggesting a real chance of regular competitiveness.

First, 42 of California's 53 districts are locked down for one party. On one side of the partisan scale, Republicans represent 10 districts with a partisanship of more than 55% Republican, including nine greater than 57.7%. Democrats are highly unlikely to win any of these districts, with none of their candidates in those districts winning even 43% of the vote in 2012.

On the other side of the scale, Democrats represent all 25 districts with a partisanship of at least 61% Democratic - districts in which the "closest" a Republican came to winning was a 28 percentage point defeat. Democrats also represent the seven remaining districts that are at least 56.9% Democratic, with all Republican candidates losing by at least ten percentages points in 2012 in those districts. That's 32 very safely Democratic districts.

Let's turn to the eleven remaining districts that have more of a chance to be competitive.

Two Republicans represent districts with a partisanship that is at least 52.8% Republican - that is, more competitive, but still tough terrain for Democrats given today's partisan voting patterns. Democrats lost by more than nine percentage points in both districts and, nationally, Democrats in 2012 won only three new seats in districts that were at least 52.8% Republican.

There are five districts with a partisanship that is between 53.2% and 56.8% Democratic. Republicans currently hold two of those districts, although both will certainly be top Democratic targets in 2014 and highly vulnerable. One was the anomalous CA-31, where Gary Miller won election because several Democratic candidates split the vote in the June primary and only two Republicans advanced to the general election due to the problematic "Top Two" system.

That leaves us with just four districts with a partisanship of 47.2% to 53.2% -- the real "competitive zone." Democrats today hold three of these seats and Republicans hold one. If more than two party changes occur in California congressional districts this decade, it's highly likely the shifts come from these four seats. If the current incumbents are strong candidates who can develop a substantial incumbency advantage in their districts, however, there may be no additional seat changes aside from the Democratic targets mentioned above.

In short, most of California is locked into one-party representation and most races will settle into perpetual landslides for the rest of the decade. Furthermore, the current plan has under-represented Republicans and, as usual, shut out independents. Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Emken, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012, both won 38% of California's statewide vote, but Republicans won only 28% of California's House seats. One independent congressional candidate, Bill Bloomfield, came surprisingly close to winning, but it is very unlikely that any independents will win in the next decade.

Independent redistricting did some things right, and for that it deserves praise: a few more districts were competitive, the district lines were slightly more compact, incumbents were less favored, and racial minorities did earn chances to elect some preferred candidates, even if most racial minority voters were left in white-majority districts that elected white candidates. But it's illusory to suggest that California's model will create many competitive districts or provide any guarantee of a fair balance of partisan representation.

For electoral reform that actually accomplishes the goals of fair representation and competitive races for all voters, fair voting forms of proportional representation are the answer - using "super districts" that indeed should be drawn by an independent redistricting commission. We hope that Sam Wang and the many pundits that seem to agree with him take a closer look at the nature of the problem and the full array of reform solutions available to policymakers.

It’s Not Just Gerrymandering: Fixing House Elections Demands End of Winner-Take-All Rules

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 15:37:28 -0800

Executive summary: The lack of fairness and accountability in Congressional elections is drawing welcome attention. Democrats in the 2012 elections won only 46% of House seats despite winning more votes than Republicans .More than three out of five races were won by landslide margins of at least 20%, women remain deeply under-represented and the number of centrist and independent legislators declined again.

But most analysts overlook the real problem: the 1967 law mandating that states elect U.S. House Members in single-member district, winner-take-all elections. A lack of voter choice, the distortion between voter intent and outcome, and the reduction of centrist legislators has relatively little to do with the redistricting process of 2011 compared with the very fact of districting itself. The fundamental cause of partisan bias in the House is that Democrats are relatively concentrated in urban areas, and the fundamental cause of the lack of voter choice in most elections is that most areas of the country have a clear partisan lean. Gerrymandering is problematic, but is not the root of our electoral dysfunction.

Confronting the reality that winner-take-all rules are at the heart of the problems with our elections points us to the only reform solution: the adoption of fair voting systems. These American forms of proportional representation are based on voting for candidates in larger districts with more than one representative. By allowing like-minded voters who make up 20% of the vote to elect at least one of five seats, those seats will reliably represent the left, center and right of every district - resulting in a truly representative Congress.

This year's elections put a spotlight on the troubled nature of how we elect the House of Representatives, the alleged "people's house." But some of our smartest election experts don't seem to understand the root of the problems with House elections. More importantly, they fail to communicate that it's simply impossible to address those problems within the straightjacket of single-member district, winner-take-all elections.

As one example, take Attorney General Eric Holder's otherwise laudable speech in Boston on December 11^th on the subject of expanding and upholding the right to vote. Holder said, "We should consider reforms to the redistricting process for state and federal offices - so districts are drawn in a way that's neutral, that promotes fair and effective representation for all, and that can't be abused to protect incumbents and undercut electoral competition."

That sounds wonderful, as does the implication in a December 15th New York Times news story about problems in U.S. House elections that independent redistricting would result in House elections accurately reflecting voter preference. In fact, it's an utter illusion to expect that the adoption of independent redistricting could come close to achieving the seven values that we believe any fair electoral system should promote: accountable leadership, responsive government, electoral competition, geographically coherent districts, fair representation of racial diversity, fair representation of women, and fair opportunities for everyone to cast meaningful votes in every election. In fact, it's unlikely that any redistricting plan can achieve more than two of these seven objectives.

But there is a way to accomplish all seven goals with just one electoral reform: passing statutes to enact fair voting proposals for congressional elections. It's time for analysts to confront the implications of this reality if we want our country move toward a representative democracy fit for the 21^st century.

In this analysis we will focus on the problem of winner-take-all elections through the lens of U.S. House races, but transformative change may come sooner to our state legislatures. They are easier to reform through ballot measures and tend to be even less representative than Congress. Most state legislative chambers are run by one party for decades at a time, if not centuries. Incumbents are often even more cushioned from electoral accountability, with two out of five state legislative races won in uncontested races this year. Such dominance and lack of competition is primarily grounded in winner-take-all elections, not gerrymandering.

Let's start our review of House elections with the simple premise that elections should uphold majority rule. This year, the outcome of the elections defied that principle. Democratic congressional candidates won the most votes in U.S. House races, but Republicans won 33 more House seats. Remarkable examples of distorted outcomes include Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania winning 22 of 31 seats despite losing the popular vote in both states.

Whole regions were dominated by one party. Democrats won all 21 U.S. House races in New England, while Republicans won all 22 congressional districts in the line of states stretching from Arkansas to Idaho. Most congressional races across the country were no-choice landslides, with more than 63% of races won by at least 20% or not contested at all. Women's representation increased by only 1%, leaving men again with more than four in five House seats despite the once-in-a-decade opportunity for winning in new seats triggered by redistricting. The already-shrunken caucus of House moderates saw its numbers sharply reduced yet again to levels far short of its support among voters.

Deeply disturbing as they may be, most of these problems aren't new. Congressional elections have distorted fair representation and marginalized most voters for decades. But the rising dominance of partisanship in governing how people vote has locked down election outcomes more than at any time in the modern era. Structural inequalities have been brought to the fore, including the basic fact of allowing a party to control the House after being defeated at the polls.

The Biased House

Democrats had a very good 2012 election. In the presidential race, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 126 electoral votes and nearly five million popular votes. Republicans won only eight Senate races, the worst performance for a major party in Senate races since the 1950's.

In House races, Democratic candidates won about a million more votes nationwide than Republicans. After controlling for factors like vote inflation for incumbents and uncontested races, the data suggests voters generally preferred Democrats for Congress by a 52% - 48% margin, underscored by the fact that not a single Democrat lost in the 181 most Democratic districts. And despite widespread popular concern about Congress being too polarized, losing incumbents came heavily from the moderate wings of both parties.

Yet Republicans won a comfortable majority of 234 to 201 seats. That disparity in voter preference compared to seats did not result from ticket-splitting; in fact, there were only 24 districts in which one party's nominee carried the presidential vote and the other party's nominee won the congressional race, all but four of which were won by an incumbent. The real problem for Democrats was that in a year in which Barack Obama won a decisive presidential election victory, he apparently has carried only 207 of 435 congressional districts.

The results were so incongruous that many commentators have identified structure as the likely explanation. We welcome attention to structure, given that the centrality of its role is too often overlooked in explaining election outcomes and parties' policy preferences. In this case, however, the great majority of analysts utterly missed the real story. Again and again, they suggested that the problem was the Republican-controlled redistricting process in 2011-2012. By naming the wrong cause of the distorted election results, they miss what is most in need of reform.

Among many examples of this line of thinking, the Daily Kos identified redistricting as the reason for the Republican victory "pure and simple". Mother Jones published a much-shared investigative report that suggested Republicans won because "they drew the lines." Think Progress described Republican gerrymandering as "a simple explanation for how this happened." Slate published an article called "How Ridiculous Gerrymanders Saved the House Republican Majority." The Brennan Center touted the use of independent redistricting as the way to ensure "ordinary citizens [have] their voices heard."

All of those claims are, at best, highly misleading. They're not wrong that partisan gerrymandering is a problem-it is, as FairVote has argued for years-but in suggesting that gerrymandering is sufficient to explain why the Democrats unjustly lost the House this year, why Congress is so dysfunctional and why most Americans live in no-choice congressional districts.

The distortion between voter intent and outcome and the reduction of centrist legislators has relatively little to do with how redistricting was done in 2011 compared with the very fact of districting itself. One of the people to get that part of the story right was Hendrik Herzberg in a must-read commentary in the New Yorker. Hertzberg wrote:

"Gerrymandering routinely gets blamed for such mismatches, but that's only part of the story. Far more important than redistricting is just plain districting: because so many Democrats are city folk, large numbers of Democratic votes pile up redundantly in overwhelmingly one-sided districts."

To be sure, Republicans certainly benefitted from redistricting, as FairVote demonstrated in its analysis this summer. They controlled the redistricting process in many large states, and won several more seats this year than they would have otherwise as a result.

But the Republican victory in the 2012 House elections isn't explained by the relatively few seats they gained through gerrymandering. Although 52% of voters at the polls had an underlying preference for Democrats, Democrats won only 46% of seats. As a result, Republicans won fully 25 more seats than they would have if the outcome had been reflective of voter preference.

Nor can gerrymandering explain the dramatic collapse of congressional moderates, who typically are Members elected in districts leaning toward the other major party. With only 10 members set to represent districts that favor the opposing party by more than 52% to 48%, the nation's substantial bloc of centrist voters will be even more woefully underrepresented than Democrats.

There was another factor at play, almost entirely ignored by most pundits. It is the real root of the representation problem in our country and could be changed by a simple federal statute: winner-take-all elections. That fact may seem inconvenient or disruptive to how people think about our democracy, but it can no longer be seriously disputed. It's time to stop living in a world of delusion about how our elections work.

The Case for a Natural Demographic Structural Bias

The idea that recent Republican gerrymandering alone caused the 25-seat Republican distortion is discredited by a simple look at district partisanship. There are currently 241 districts in which Barack Obama underperformed his national average in 2008. Before redistricting, there were 232 such districts. A report by the Brennan Center similarly showed a gain of 11 districts favoring Republicans compared to 2010. Further quantitative analysis from political science professors writing for the Monkey Cage reached similar conclusions.

Changes in districts alone clearly don't explain the partisan imbalance, although they did exacerbate it. Another partial explanation is the effect of incumbency. Because incumbents usually have the advantages of greater name recognition and greater funds, they tend to get a boost of a few percentage points over challengers - what FairVote calls "the incumbency bump." Since there were more Republican incumbents running than Democrats in 2012, it makes sense that Republicans would win a few more seats than Democrats even in a neutral year with unbiased districts.

But incumbency only goes so far. Take a very recent counterexample: the 2010 elections, in which Democrats had an even greater incumbency advantage than the one enjoyed by Republicans in 2012, as 230 Democratic incumbents ran for re-election in 2010. Needless to say, that advantage did not save the Democrats from losing control of the House by a wide margin.

Looking at this year's elections, our analysis shows that incumbents overall had an edge of about 4.5% of the vote more than what a candidate of their party would have received in an open seat race - with Republican incumbents enjoying about a 2.5% boost (meaning an overall effect on margin of 5%) and Democratic incumbents a 6% boost (increasing their margin by some 12%). The incumbency bump certainly helped Republicans, but probably only by about 5-10 seats.

There were 29 incumbents whose victory margins fell within the 9% margin boost that incumbents enjoyed on average, and thus likely would have lost without it. Given that 58% of incumbents running this year were Republicans, only about five more of those 29 seats would have switched towards Republicans than towards Democrats in an incumbent-neutral setting. Even if we attribute ten of the 25 Republican-distortion seats to gerrymandering and five to incumbency, that still does not account for the two further seats they would have needed to win control of the House and the eight additional seats necessary for Democrats to earn the 226 seats that would have accurately reflected voters' preference in this year's election.

Furthermore, if only gerrymandering and incumbents were to blame for the 2012 Republican victory, there would not be so much compelling evidence of a Republican congressional bias even before the 2000 and 2010 redistrictings. In 2000, for example, George Bush lost the national popular vote by more than a half million votes, but carried 21 more House districts than Al Gore, as detailed in FairVote's 2011 report Fuzzy Math. FairVote's first Monopoly Politics report in 1997 also showed a stark Republican bias in a decade in which Democrats had largely controlled redistricting. Democrats held most state legislatures during the redistricting process that followed the 1990 census, but in 1996 there were 239 districts leaning toward Republicans and only 196 toward Democrats.

Gerrymandering and incumbency are not sufficient to explain the extent of the Republican House victory in 2012. The problem runs deeper for Democrats - and all Americans who believe in the importance of leadership that is electorally accountable to their constituents and risks being booted out if voters perceive that they have failed to do their job. We have that accountability in races for governor and, to a lesser extent due to antiquated rules governing the Electoral College, the presidential race. But it's lacking in elections for Congress and most of our state legislatures.

A Brief History of the Structurally Lopsided House

With most voters responding either positively or negatively to the presidency of Barack Obama in 2010, the congressional elections that year marked a distinct increase in partisan voting behavior, as evidenced by how Republicans' congressional election success was confined nearly entirely to districts leaning toward their party. The election exposed a fundamental partisan bias that has existed, relatively unnoticed, for decades.

The Democratic Party's national and statewide candidates have for decades earned particularly strong support in cites and some suburbs, while the Republican vote is more efficiently distributed in the greater number of districts outside of cities. That imbalance doesn't matter in senatorial and presidential elections that pool together all the votes from a state - as evidenced by the 2012 presidential election, in which Barack Obama had an easy Electoral College win despite carrying only 22% of counties.

But as suggested by Hendrik Herzberg, it's a different story once states are carved into smaller legislative districts. The more concentrated Democratic vote results in very imbalanced outcomes that waste the participation of many urban voters. Winning an urban district with 80% of the vote has no more impact on representation than winning the district with 55% of the vote. When a state is competitive statewide, those extra votes from imbalanced districts can't help Democrats across the state.

Democrats' relative concentration of votes has a more pronounced impact on House elections today primarily because of our heighted partisan climate. Before 1994, Democrats were routinely able to win in Republican-favored districts - especially in the South, where Democrats dominated in white-majority districts. Although diminished by the electoral revolution represented by the 1994 election, this phenomenon continued to a significant degree until 2010, in the form of the "Blue Dog" caucus of Democratic moderates that was a mainstay in Congress.

After the 2008 elections, for example, after two elections in which their party had a national party preference of more than 6%, Democrats held 32 congressional districts in which the partisan lean was more than 54% to 46% advantage for Republicans. After the 2010 election - the first wave election for Republicans since 1994 - that number declined to 13. Despite voters' overall preference for Democratic candidates in the 2012 elections, Democrats in these more Republican districts declined even further to nine.

In contrast to Democratic successes in Republican districts when Democrats had "wave" elections in 2006 and 2008, Republicans did not do especially well in Democratic districts in 2010. That year, they did not gain a single seat in districts with more than a 55% Democratic partisanship and in fact lost their only two seats in such districts. But unlike Democrats, Republicans don't need to win seats in Democratic territory due to their inherent advantage in House districts that is due far more to the natural partisan demography than redistricting.

The Republicans' big House win was grounded almost entirely in districts leaning their way - and the 2012 election reinforced that pattern, as their losses were primarily in Democrat-leaning or only slightly Republicans-leaning districts. When seeking to gain a majority, Democrats have no such luxury, as they can only control the House when dozens of Democrats win in districts that will be carried by a Republican presidential nominee in a nationally competitive year.

The sharp decline in the number of candidates able to win in the other party's turf is also the key reason for the dwindling number of centrist representatives. Members of Congress are much more likely to vote moderately when representing a district favoring the opposing party rather than one favoring their own, even narrowly. In 2012, four Democratic incumbents lost against non-incumbents - all of them in strongly Republican-leaning districts. On the Republican side, nine incumbents lost among the 17 Democratic-leaning districts they held going into the election, but only seven incumbents lost among the 173 districts they had held with a Republican lean.

Democrats still could win a majority in the House under current winner-take-all, single member district rules, but one of two things would have to happen in order for them to regain control. First, they could persuade Republican-leaning voters to start splitting their tickets again. Democrats then would have to sustain that ability to earn the support of Republican-leaning voters even in years like 2010, in which national preference goes against them.

But this option seems implausible in the near future. The 2012 election results kept a Democrat in the White House, which means that any pro-Democrat voter backlash against an incumbent president - the key to the wave elections for Republicans in 1994 and 2010 and for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 - is at least six years away. The 2012 elections also showed little progress for Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning districts, and there is no indication of a pattern of ticket-splitting re-emerging. Such a rise in ticket-splitting likely would require a Republican being elected president in 2016 and then facing a bad midterm election in 2018.

The second hope for Democrats is a major national tide in their favor that endures for several election cycles. Some analysts see the rising number of non-white, Democratic-leaning voters as inevitably putting the party into long-term dominance. While this may happen - and count us as skeptics about its inevitability, as parties usually adapt to new electorates when they must - it has little impact on the immediate future.

This year, the 'tipping point' congressional district -- the district that would have given the Democrats their 218^th seat and a House majority had they won all districts with a lower Republican margin of victory - was won by a Republican by a margin of 6%. That margin suggests that the Democrats needed to add 3% more to their national preference for an overall preference of about 55% of voters and a popular vote margin in actual votes cast of more than seven million votes to win even a slim majority in the House. Such a wave theoretically could happen, but is exceptionally rare in House elections. It's certainly not likely to happen in the 2014 midterm elections, where historical patterns show that the party of a second-term incumbent president at best holds its own.

After the Democrats lost their Blue Dog advantage and ticket-splitting declined, redistricting indeed made things even worse. Because the Republicans were so successful in the 2010 elections for state legislatures and governors, they were able to control most states' redistricting processes in 2011-2012. That control was the death blow to the already-faint Democratic chances of retaking the House. Gerrymandering made it even harder for the remaining Blue Dogs to stay in office and gave just enough of a cushion to Republican incumbents to make them invulnerable absent personal scandal, a return to ticket-splitting, or a historic national Democratic tide.

Independent Redistricting Has Value, but not for Fairness in Representation

Once identifying partisan redistricting as the main problem in House elections, analysts inevitably focus on just one structural solution: converting to more independent redistricting processes along the lines of Iowa's criteria-driven rules or California's independent redistricting commission. Nonpartisan and bipartisan redistricting commissions are already used to some degree in nine states with more than one district, and often represent a positive change for the redistricting process by making it far harder for partisans to help their political friends and hurt their political enemies. But they do little to resolve the partisan bias in House elections, are often not trusted by racial minorities concerned about upholding voting rights, and do little to promote balanced representation of the left, right and center in Congress.

Analysts such as those at Fells Stats have made the assumption that nationwide independent redistricting commissions would produce purely proportional results. That assumption would only hold true if a commission's first and dominant priority was to create districts that accurately represented the partisanship of the state as a whole. In theory, it is possible to draw district lines that would always create a House that accurately reflects the will of the American people, but only through "reverse gerrymanders" that would spread urban voters out into suburban and rural areas. Those maps end up with districts looking like the spokes of a wheel, as in the incredible congressional gerrymander conjured by Democrats in Maryland in 2011.

Independent redistricting committees don't actually operate that way, and few of their adherents envision such gerrymanders as part of the solution, as so much of their rhetoric targets bizarre-looking districts. As an example of how commissions really work, Arizona's independent commission lists the following criteria for drawing its districts, in rough order of priority:

Equal population
Compactness and contiguousness
Compliance with the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act
Respect for communities of interest
Incorporation of visible geographic features, including city, town and county boundaries, as well as undivided census tracts
Creation of competitive districts where there is no significant detriment to other goals

Accurately representing the partisan popular vote of the state is not even listed as a criterion, much less a priority. Nor is it likely to be a key consideration as long as we continue to place importance on values like compactness, contiguousness, and incorporation of city borders and geographic features -- and districts drawn without consideration of these factors would essentially defeat the purpose of having representatives for specific geographic districts in the first place.

The 2012 elections show the futility of relying on independent redistricting committees to provide voter choice and fair representation in the House. There were only 10 candidates of either party in 2012 elected to Congress in districts with a partisanship favoring their opponents by more than 2%. That leaves just 36 districts within the 48% to 52% partisanship band in which voters were likely to have a meaningful choice in who represents them in Congress - only one out of every 12 congressional seats. Outcomes in even relatively balanced districts were largely governed more by voters' views of the parties than the characteristics of individual candidates. You simply can't gerrymander the nation into solely 50-50 districts - and even if you could do so, fair representation would be unlikely.

It's no surprise, then, that independent redistricting commissions prioritize factors other than creating competitive districts when drawing their maps. The prevalence of largely noncompetitive districts and the structural bias against Democrats in the House will persist even if independent commissions are implemented nationwide. The difficulty faced by Democrats - and, more broadly, by urban and suburban voters - is shown clearly by red-blue partisan maps of the nation by county and congressional district based on the 2012 election. They demonstrate that drawing compact districts would leave the Democratic vote under-represented in the House because of its concentration relative to Republicans.

As indicated in the county map, Romney defeated Obama in nearly four of every five counties. Those county successes translate into congressional seat wins for the Republican Party when representation in House elections is determined more by where you live than what you think. Seeing how winner-take-all dominance crosses state lines makes it clear that redistricting tends to only reflect partisan imbalance, not create it. It is the combination of winner-take-all elections, single-member districts, and partisan polarization that is the root cause of our distorted representation and lopsided outcomes in the House.

Romney vs. Obama by county

Republican and Democratic congressional victories in 2012 (Washington Post)

The Only Route to Balancing Congress: Constitutional Forms of Fair Voting

The real problem at the root of the Democratic demographic disadvantage is the statutory decision to elect House Members exclusively through single-seat, winner-take-all elections. Democratic candidates win by huge margins in many urban and suburban districts, while Republicans win by smaller but still very safe margins in many more districts. The differences are stark. Democrats represent 47 districts with a partisanship or more than 70% to 30% in their favor, while Republicans represent only 23 such districts. Of the 16 districts with a partisan split of at least 80%-20%, Democrats represent 15.

The best way to remove the structural unfairness inherent in the current House of Representatives is to get rid of winner-take-all elections. FairVote has a plan to do just that, grounded in our Constitution and American electoral traditions. The first requirement is an act of Congress. The more ambitious plan would be for Congress to prohibit winner-take-all elections in all states that elect more than one House Member. A more modest step would be to repeal the congressional mandate for states to use single-member districts that was established in a 1967 law.

As described and demonstrated for all 50 states in our Fair Voting 2012 report, FairVote's plan would combine existing congressional districts into multi-seat "super districts" of between three and five members, in which members would be elected using fair voting systems - American forms of proportional representation based on voting for candidates.

These voting methods have already proven their effectiveness in our local elections and, in their one sustained use, in state legislative elections in Illinois. Choice voting, our preferred system, has been used in more than two dozen American cities and is currently used for at least one local or national election in Australia, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.

Choice voting is a ranked choice system in which like-minded voters who make up 20% of a district would be sure of electing a candidate to at least one of five seats. It would reliably result in balanced and accurate representation of the left, center and right of every district, as would several other proven voting methods that are consistent with our traditions of voting for candidates rather than for parties.

Switching to fair voting would balance congressional elections between the parties. Under the current system, there are 195 seats that favor Republicans by at least 54% to 46%, but only 166 seats that favor Democrats at that level of safety. Under the fair voting plans for the U.S. House, there would be 195 Republican-leaning seats, 192 Democratic-leaning seats and 42 seats that would regularly swing between the parties . And while the major parties would usually win the seats leaning their way, voters would have credible general election options within their party of preference as well as among third parties and independents.

As a result, fair voting plans for the U.S. Congress would make every "super district" competitive, with all voters able to participate in congressional elections that would not be predetermined by district partisanship. Both Democrats in Republican districts and Republicans in Democratic districts who are now essentially disenfranchised by winner-take-all elections would have real chances to help elect a representative. In fact, every single super district would likely elect at least one Republican and one Democrat in our plan, with a more representative mix of voices elected within the parties as well as between them.

Representation would broaden in other ways as well. Independents and third parties would have a real chance to hold the major parties accountable, better reflecting the rising number of voters who choose to register to vote as independents or outside the two party structure. As we explain in our new Representation 2020 campaign, representation of women would likely soar because of greater incentives for more women running and winning - of the 11 states that use at least some multi-seat districts for electing their state legislatures, 6 are in the top 10 in representation of women. Racial minorities would almost certainly win in far more areas of the nation - our analysis of the six southern states running from North Carolina to Mississippi, for example, shows that the number of African American voters in a position to elect a candidate of choice would more than double in every one of those states under fair voting, and more candidates preferred by African American voters would win seats.

Although congressional Republicans earn a partisan advantage under current rules, it's not necessarily good for their party. Unlike what would be possible in a fair voting system, Republicans can only win in certain areas of the country. As they become more and more reliant on these strongholds, their presidential candidates become less successful in being able to build support in Democratic areas where more voters live.

As a result, the identity of the Republican party at the national level has become more closely associated with positions that today seem to be a minority view among Americans in presidential elections. Since 1988, Republicans have only won the popular vote in a single presidential election, when George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004. It may be no accident that Republicans took over the House in 1994 with an approach that represented a turn to the right for the party's national image. For the party to evolve with the times, it would help them to have the opportunity to contest and win seats everywhere in the country. But that broadening of their tent won't happen easily if we continue to elect Congress with a single-member district, winner-take-all electoral system.

Fair voting and multi-member districts are fully constitutional. For the first half-century of congressional elections, at least one state - and usually many more - elected House members in statewide elections. The movement to single-member districts was ironically driven by the goal of partisan fairness, avoiding distortions from the use of statewide winner-take-all elections. We know today from the experiences of fair voting systems at a local level, in Illinois state legislative elections and in most democracies around the world that fair voting methods provide a far more reliable means of accomplishing that goal.

We should expand that local and state use of fair voting. But we also shouldn't let Congress off the hook: the "people's house" demands an electoral system that truly represents the people. FairVote is launching a new campaign for fair House elections to be in place before the time of the next Census and redistricting in 2020-2021.

Conclusion: Avoiding the "Gerrymandering is the Problem" Trap

Make no mistake-there is one predominant reason why the Democrats lost the House in 2012 and why so many seats are lopsided: winner-take-all elections in single-member districts. Independent redistricting commissions would help mitigate the problem of unfair dominance of congressional elections by one party, but the underlying GOP tilt would remain. Unless winner-take-all is ended, Democrats will continue to suffer from a system that is fundamentally rigged against them. All voters will suffer from voting in noncompetitive districts, not being able to hold their Members or congressional leadership accountable, and not having the ability to earn nuanced political representation beyond the poles of the two parties.

It's time for a real change in American congressional elections - and for that, Democrats and Republicans who want to compete in all corners of the country should join with all underrepresented Americans to identify the true cause of the problems with our House elections. It only stokes the growing partisan divide to take the easy way out and put the blame on the opposing party. The real enemy isn't particular parties or personalities, but our decision to keep winner-take-all rules in place that let 51% of voters determine 100% of the representation.

Winner-take elections divide us rather than bring us together. To get every American on the same side, we need to reject winner-take-all and promote shared representation, competitive choice and more accountable leadership by adopting fair voting systems of proportional representation.

A Representative Congress: Enhancing African American Voting Rights in the South with Choice Voting

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:46:30 -0800

In southern states, racially polarized elections remain an active part of political life. Since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has guaranteed that African Americans in the South cannot be shut out of elections either through direct barriers to voting or through discriminatory districts that prevent the achievement of representation. It transformed suffrage rights and representation in legislatures across the South, with a leading instrument being creation of "majority-minority" districts - ones in which racial minorities gain representation by virtue of making up the majority of the population within some district.

However, relying on winner-take-all elections has inherent limitations. In the belt of southern states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, the use of districting to achieve a fairer level of representation for African Americans has hit a ceiling. While redistricting in 1991 contributed directly to election of seven new African American Members, the total number of African American Members did not change this year.

To push through that ceiling and achieve truly fair representation, FairVote recommends abandoning the single-member district in favor of super districts elected by choice voting. Under choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference by whatever criteria they think important, and those preferences then are used to elect candidates in proportion to their popular support without wasting excess votes for standout candidates guaranteed to win or protest votes for candidates sure to lose. With a long history of use in local elections in the United States, choice voting has resulted in fair representation for political and racial minorities.

Louisiana currently has six House districts and exactly one majority-minority district, with every other district having more than 60% white voters and a Republican Members. However, African Americans make up nearly one third of the voting age population of Louisiana. Under our fair voting plan using choice voting in two districts with three Members each, African Americans in Louisiana would have the opportunity to elect two candidates of choice by being above the quarter of the vote needed to win one of three seats.

Similarly, African Americans in Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina would have enhanced opportunities to elect candidates of choice. Here is a chart contrasting current African American representation in Congress and shares of the voting age population living in district with a clear opportunity to elect preferred candidates with what it would be with adopting of choice voting in super districts of three, four or five districts:

State	Louisiana	Mississippi	Alabama	Georgia	South Carolina	North Carolina
Seats / Superdistricts	6 / 2	4 / 1	7 / 2	14 / 4	7 / 2	13 / 3
Majority-minority Districts (Currently)	1	1	1	4	1	2
Candidates of Choice Under Choice Voting	2	1	2	4	2	3
*African American Voting Strength (Currently)**	32%	43%	35%	40%	30%	19%
*African American Voting Strength Under Choice Voting**	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%

* Measures percentage of African Americans living in district where power to elect a preferred candidate under conditions of racially polarized voting

Note that the number of seats held by African-American preferred candidates would likely increase by four total. More dramatically, the number of African Americans in a direct position to elect preferred candidates would soar from well under half of African American adults to 100% of them - including those African Americans who prefer to vote for Republicans.

This enhanced power can also be true in parts of other states with the same character; for example the eastern edge of Texas is composed of five white-majority districts which, if combined into a single super district using choice voting, would permit the election of a racial minority candidate of choice. In much of this region, African Americans make up a sufficient proportion of the population to earn greater legislative representation, but they are not geographically segregated enough to be drawn into majority-minority districts, making a proportional system the only option for breaking past their current ceiling.

Even in racially polarized states with an insufficient population of racial minorities to gain actual representation, choice voting would guarantee that racial minorities could influence the outcome in a meaningful way. For example, in Arkansas, every congressional district has over 70% white voting population. Given that each representative is elected on a winner-take-all basis, it is therefore not surprising that in 2012 every one of its four districts elected a white Republican. With choice voting, racial minorities still would not compose enough of Arkansas' population to elect a candidate of choice with their votes alone, but choice voting gives you the power to indicate backup choices whom you might help win if your first choice is defeated. African Americans Democrats would have sufficient numbers to influence elections by joining in cross-racial coalitions of voters able to elect at least one candidate more reflective of their policy preferences.

And significantly, choice voting would guarantee that every African American voter - in fact every voter, period - could point to an elected legislator that he or she helped elect. As our table shows, even in states like Georgia, which are currently able to have enough majority-minority districts to elect a fair number of racial minority candidates of choice, most African American voters do not live in those majority-minority districts. Most racial minority voters in the South must currently be satisfied with so-called "virtual representation," in which candidates they favor are only elected in districts they do not themselves reside in. For example, in North Carolina, only 19% of African American adults live in one of the two districts where African Americans have sufficient voting power to elect a candidate of choice. Under choice voting, 100% of African Americans would live in a district with an African American candidate of choice in every state within this southern belt.

In an ideal world, racially polarized voting would not occur and candidates could be defined by their responsiveness to people based on their ideas rather than their identities. But we're not in that world yet, as made plain by such facts as the U.S. Senate not having any African American Members. The first step in that direction requires ensuring that racial minorities cannot be denied a voice. A second step is to encourage voters to think beyond their first choice when indicating backup preferences second and third. The use of majority-minority districts led to much more racial minority representation in legislative bodies, but it has hit an impasse - and has thus far been limited in its reliance on "virtual representation" and acceptance of winner-take-all rules that always deny representation to many people. To continue moving forward requires something new. Choice voting represents a race-neutral and constitutional means of electing a body that fairly represents the population however they may choose to vote.

Texas Congressional Redistricting: Beyond Last Week's Section 5 Ruling

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 10:24:57 -0700

Texas has had problems with redistricting - yet again. Last week's federal court ruling that Texas's 2011 plans for congressional districts and state legislative districts had both the purpose and effect of further reducing the representation of Texas's already underrepresented racial minority populations is just the state's latest salvo in the redistricting wars. Texas has found itself in court every redistricting cycle for the past four decades - and lost every decade.

In refusing to preclear Texas's congressional plan under Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, the federal court's findings are damning. Nearly 90% of the state's population growth in the last decade was due to increases in the population of racial minorities, but none of the four new districts provided clear opportunities for racial minorities to elect candidates of choice.

In Hispanic-opportunity district 23, itself a product of prior Voting Rights Act litigation, mapdrawers testified that they were told to split up active Hispanic voters while keeping the overall Hispanic population the same - with the purpose of exaggerating the Anglo vote without inviting litigation. Three African American-opportunity districts and one Hispanic-opportunity district were redrawn to excise their "economic engines" and put their incumbents' offices outside their own districts.

No such "surgery" was performed on any Anglo-opportunity districts, although some "were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent's grandchildren."

Redistricting has proven to be an ordeal for Texas for decades, with voters repeatedly forced to experience a series of shifting maps. Take the rollercoaster of the last month. In a preliminary order last fall, the federal district court imposed a new set of interim maps after indicating it expected to deny preclearance to the plan. The court's plan, however, was promptly redacted by a reversal from the United States Supreme Court. The parties agreed to a new set of interim maps while awaiting a final decision that were used in the primary and are expected to be used this fall. But those maps will change next year, at least one more time, in the wake of the latest ruling. Texas has gone through four different sets of districting maps in less than a year, and the process is far from over.

Texas's song and dance should come as no surprise to those familiar with the intersection of politics and the legal landscape surrounding districting. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act effectively forbids states from race-based gerrymandering or adopting election methods that prevent racial minorities from having the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act prevents covered jurisdictions, like the state of Texas, from reducing that modicum of opportunities for minority representation once it has been won. At the same time, cases from the U.S. Supreme Court require that each district contain equal population and that states may not allow racial consideration to take precedence over traditional districting methods.

All of these laws do not prevent Texas from pursuing partisan gerrymanders, of course - the Supreme Court has yet to hold that partisan gerrymandering violates either the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act. When the dust has finally settled in the coming years, Texas will likely end up with a map that still has gerrymandered outcomes that over-represent Republicans, under-represent racial minorities and leave most voters without meaningful choices.

As an example, this election's interim congressional plan creates only a single district that FairVote's partisanship analysis indicates as potentially competitive, with fully 33 of 34 incumbents projected to win by landslide margins of at least 20%. Republicans are favored to win 25 of 36 seats in a state where Barack Obama will likely win more than 40% of the vote. Racial minorities do gain opportunities to elect candidates of choice in three districts (far more than in the plan that the court refused to preclear), but still fewer than half of racial minority voters will live in district with the voting power that guarantees them the ability to elect a candidate of their choice.

Such problems associated with representation and voter choice are inherent when jurisdictions use single-seat, winner-take-all districts. Winner-take-all districts make representation of voters in the minority all but impossible when they make up less than 50% of a district. At its extreme, a minority group or other interest that makes up just under 50% of the vote in every district might not win any representation at all. As a result, the power over representation can shift from voters to those in control of redistricting. State legislators gain a tool to help their political friends and hurt their enemies at the expense of voters' choices.

That's why even after Texas finally resolves its maps, with a new plan to be drawn in 2013 after this year's elections, it's all too likely that the state's racial minority voters - and indeed most everyone who isn't a white Republican - are unlikely to get anything resembling proportional representation in the Texas legislature. Even if they did, it would require the creation of mostly non-competitive districts in which voting becomes a formality, not a meaningful way for voters to define their representation.

A far better solution is some form of more proportional representation - what FairVote calls "fair voting" in its new Fair Voting 2012 report for which we have drawn plans for modest, American forms of proportional voting in states across the nation. One example is choice voting, a candidate-based system that has been used in several U.S. cities. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preferences in elections competing for between three and five seats in larger legislative districts. Larger districts would allow for more compactness, and the use of choice voting would allow most voters to help elect a favorite candidate no matter how mapmakers try to engineer outcomes. Fewer districts mean fewer battles over redistricting. Greater opportunities for representation from a diversity of viewpoints means fewer causes for litigation.

Our Fair Voting 2012 reports show exactly how such plans could work for Texas and every other state in the country for U.S. House elections. The Texas plan creates eight large districts. Every single district is competitive, granting everyone the opportunity to get the representation they deserve. Further, overall representation of voters, both in terms of party and racial group, would almost certainly be an accurate reflection of the state's electorate. Fair voting could simplify redistricting and remove the need for judicial intervention into a state's plan - and finally take Texas out of the redistricting wars.

U.S. House Elections as They Are and Will Be

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:02:37 -0700

FairVote has released two new reports about congressional elections and an interactive map summarizing their findings. Monopoly Politics 2012 provides the partisan landscape for all 435 U.S. House districts, with data on recent elections, election projections and how redistricting affected partisan outcomes and racial fairness. Fair Voting 2012 shows how American forms of proportional representation could work in every state with more than one House district.

Our reports come with insightful analysis about partisan outcomes, competitiveness, southern politics and more.

FairVotingUS.Com: FairVote's interactive map that presents reports
Fair Voting 2012: State profiles and analysis about fair voting plans
Monopoly Politics 2012: State profiles and analysis about 2012 House elections
Dedication of reports to William Raspberry and Lindsey Needham

Primaries Spotlight Sharp Decline in U.S. House Moderates

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:41:02 -0700

Left to right: Tim Holden and Jason Altmire

Pennsylvania’s April 24 primary lacked the anticipated fireworks between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in the Republican presidential race, but results on the Democratic side may have a far more lasting impact: they underscore the disappearing center in American politics. Two Blue Dog Democrats*, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, were defeated by more mainstream Democrats. After 20 years of victories in Republican-leaning districts, Holden fell to newcomer Matt Cartwright in a district drawn to be much more Democratic, while Altmire was upset by his colleague Rep. Mark Critz† in a race that, because of redistricting, featured two incumbents battling over one seat.

Both Cartwright and Critz received strong support from unions and other progressive groups, which sought to defeat Holden and Altmire because of their opposition to President Obama’s health care and climate change legislation. In other words, the party’s base organized against Holden and Altmire because their voting records were not sufficiently orthodox. While the Tea Party’s targeting of moderate Republicans in 2010 and 2012 has received the most media attention, the Pennsylvania results indicate a similar (and arguably just as strong) tendency in the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the Democrats’ Blue Dog caucus—a barometer of moderate strength—had its numbers reduced by more than half, from 54 to 26, in the 2010 election, in which Republicans made most of their gains in the Republican-leaning districts that wee disproportionately represented by Blue Dogs. The Washington Post reports that primary defeats and retirements are expected to reduce the caucus by at least eight more members by next year.

Although it is no surprise that a party’s most fervent supporters would desire “faithful” representatives ready to stand up for their core principles, the decline of moderates in Congress is worrisome, with Senate moderates also under attack. Although a minority in both major parties, moderate voters exist in large numbers that deserve representation. Furthermore, the political center is necessary to the health of a democratic system, especially one like ours grounded in checks and balances across branches of government.

Moderates, for instance, can serve as bridges between the two parties, swinging to the majority or away from it in order to develop policy that is more temperate. They also inject civility into a poisonous discourse. But we are in a vicious cycle: the decline of moderates causes each party to become more polarized and isolated, which in turn, only further accelerates the decline of moderates. With the center under attack, moderates face pressure to conform or perish.

Whatever one may think of Holden and Altmire, it is critical for a political system to reflect the wide range of viewpoints; such is the essence of a democratic system. Yet, our current election framework disadvantages moderate candidates and the voters that back them. As manipulated by modern campaign consultants, winner-take-all rules (in which a plurality of votes wins 100% of representation) encourage partisanship, zero-sum thinking, apocalyptic rhetoric, and negative campaigning—since only one side can win in a given congressional district.

As such, winner-take-all creates a political environment inhospitable to compromise, as it forces centrist politicians to fit themselves into narrow ideological boxes. Clearly, we need rules in place that reflect nuances and partisan gradations, rather than the “two-sizes-fit-all” mentality of winner-take-all. The most natural alterative to winner-take-all elections at the U.S. House level is proportional representation, a system in which like-minded voters can elect candidates in proportion to their share of the overall vote.

FairVote advocates for candidate-based, American forms of proportional representation, what we call “fair voting,” in which voters would elect several representatives in larger “super districts” with voting methods in which 51% of votes wins most seats, but not all. The key is that fair voting plans lower the threshold of votes necessary to win a seat and create opportunities for an array of opinions to be represented within a given super-district. This contrasts sharply with winner-take-all, in which the candidate with the most votes wins and his or her voters receive representation while everyone else gets nothing.

By fairly representing the left, right, and center in any given super district, fair voting would liberate moderate candidates from pressures to conform. With the threshold lowered, moderates could focus on targeted appeals to their core constituency, including a mix of centrist independents and more partisan voters. Both Holden and Altmire were targeted by a Democratic base that demanded fealty to party. It is not terribly difficult to imagine the way in which proportionality could have freed them from these pressures—and given voters in these districts a centrist alternative to the traditional partisan-Democrat-versus-partisan-Republican race set for November.

Fair voting would also weaken the power of partisan redistricting. Winner-take-all makes gerrymandering a particularly potent tool; without those underlying “if-you-win-I-lose, if-I-win-you-lose” rules in place, its power is diminished. Both Holden and Altmire faced difficult roads to reelection, in part, because of redistricting. Pennsylvania Republicans controlled redistricting and packed more Democrats into Holden’s district in order to help Republicans in adjoining districts—thereby making the district less hospitable to Holden’s unique brand of moderation and exposing him to a primary challenge. Altmire, meanwhile, was paired in a district with fellow incumbent Critz. Under fair voting, the Republican’s strategic cartography would have been without purpose and Holden, Altmire, and their opponents all would have a chance to win seats. Fair voting allows such shared representation.

It is time for structural election change. Election rules greatly impact the composition of government—who is in it and who is not, as well as how they get there. If Americans are dissatisfied with the latter—and polls consistently indicate they are—then they must examine the former. Clearly winner-take-all amplifies partisanship and polarization in Congress; it is therefore antagonistic toward the goal of achieving a more collaborative and collegial legislature. Blue Dog Democrats like Holden and Altmire are struggling to survive, while most moderate Republicans were long ago pushed out of Congress. To ensure fair representation in Congress, we must act before all bridges between the parties in Congress have been burned.

* The National Journal’s vote rankings of members of Congress places Altmire (187) and Holden (186) as the fourth and fifth most conservative of the 190 Democrats in the U.S. House; only representatives Dan Boren (OK-2), Mike Ross (AR-4), and Jim Matheson (UT-2) posted records that were more moderate. Both Boren and Ross have decided not to seek reelection in 2012.

† Relative to Altmire, Critz is more liberal. The National Journal’s vote rankings of members of Congress places Critz (169) as the 22nd most conservative Democrat in the U.S. House. While this would arguably place Critz among the party’s Blue Dogs, he is not a member of the Blue Dog caucus.

Congressional Redistricting Matters, and It’s Hurting This Country: a Response to Michael Barone

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:20:36 -0700

In many states, the process of congressional redistricting is complete and the new district boundaries that will serve each state for a decade are in place. In other states, the process is still ongoing, with lawmakers either battling over a proposed map or the final plan being left to the courts.

Yet the placement of redistricting in the hands of partisan actors inevitably politicizes the process, as each major party jockeys for its share of the spoils and seeks to advantage its incumbents. As a result, many Americans find themselves thrust into oddly shaped districts, called "gerrymanders," that cut like scars across geographic regions.

Though gerrymanders, with their conspicuous and confounding lines, receive the most attention, all redistricting is inherently undemocratic. There is a far deeper, structural problem: winner-take-all rules, which reduce millions of voters to irrelevancy and distort representation. Redistricting simply makes an already unjust situation worse.

* * *

Recently, pundit Michael Barone argued in The National Review (Redistricting Not a Big Story in 2012) that redistricting in 2011 has turned out to "matter less than we thought," insisting that the process is now unlikely to yield for Republicans the "significant gains" he and others once predicted.

Instead, Barone writes, the GOP's acquisitions will be "modest to nonexistent," primarily due to Democrats drawing "aggressive" maps and Republicans settling on incumbent-bolstering moderation. In other words, the GOP—hoping to protect the lead it won in 2010—played defense, while Democrats played offense in pursuit of new opportunities to retake the House.

He also argues that even where the GOP did attempt new gains, such as the map it designed in North Carolina to target opposing incumbents, Democratic moves canceled out such power plays. Barone cites Illinois, where Democrats pushed through an ambitious map, noting that the net gain between the two maps should be zero.

Barone's first mistake, however, is his assumption that the absence of change to Congress' partisan composition renders redistricting unimportant. Overly focused on redistricting's impact on each major party, he disregards its effect on voters already trapped within a troubling winner-take-all framework.

The question is where our priorities lie. Instead of chronicling lost GOP opportunities or speculating over seats gained or lost, Barone might have lamented the way partisan actors, engaged in a grand political game designed to benefit party elites rather than the people, sacrifice voters like pawns.

Barone's second mistake is his assertion that partisan redistricting has produced "pretty clean lines," in contrast to race-based redistricting protected under the Voting Rights Act, which he accuses of producing the most egregious gerrymanders and the "most grotesque districts in the current cycle."

Barone has long criticized provisions of the VRA that create opportunities for racial minorities to elect preferred candidates. True, many "majority-minority" districts are aesthetically objectionable, but race-based redistricting—though flawed—is a tool the courts justifiably use to protect racial minorities and pursue worthy public objectives within the constraints of winner-take-all voting rules.

Furthermore, Barone is simply wrong to say that partisan redistricting in 2011 has produced "clean" lines, as there are some incredibly unsightly districts out there in which considerations of race played little or no part. In these constituencies, the only driving force was political. Consider the following:

Illinois: Downstate Illinois is heavily white, so race-based redistricting—unlike in the Chicago area—is not an issue. And yet, we see lines that are anything but "clean," squiggling through the state, though far from haphazardly. Democrats calculated every move in order to create partisan opportunities, such as the sprawling IL-13 (83.4% white non-Hispanic VAP), an open seat uniting Democratic portions of Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, and the Madison County suburbs of St. Louis. Furthermore, IL-17 (81.7% white non-Hispanic VAP), with a new pair of snake-like fangs jutting east, was redrawn to favor Democrats, endangering its Republican incumbent.
Ohio: Republicans in Ohio produced one of the most convoluted maps in the 2011 redistricting cycle, with nearly every district looking more gerrymandered than the next. Only OH-11 is defensible as the state's lone majority-minority district (52.4% black non-Hispanic CVAP). What, then, explains the "grotesque" shape of the state's other constituencies? The answer: partisan machinations. Districts, like OH-4, OH-7, and OH-15—with black non-Hispanic CVAPs of 5.7%, 4.3%, and 4.8%, respectively—were crafted to protect Republican incumbents, and are blatant gerrymanders. Another, OH-9 (14.5% black non-Hispanic CVAP), a worm-like oddity wiggling along the Erie coastline, drew two incumbent Democrats together.

Clearly, in just these two states there is ample evidence to contradict Barone's claim. Across the country, state after state and map after map show the continued prevalence of the partisan gerrymander, with perhaps the single ugliest plan produced in FairVote's home state of Maryland, where Democrats drew tortuous lines with the primary objective of increasing their 6-2 majority to 7-1. To dismiss these politically motivated districts as acceptable while criticizing race-based examples is not only intellectually dishonest, it is absurd.

* * *

The truth of the matter is that all redistricting is undesirable, although race-based examples are defensible and even necessary. There are, however, alternative voting systems that would eliminate incentives to gerrymander and render unnecessary the use of redistricting to safeguard minority interests.

Fair voting plans create multi-member districts that employ proportional representation, lowering the threshold for a voting bloc to elect a preferred candidate and providing more reflective, nuanced representation. And the "super-districts" such plans produce appear far less gerrymandered than present single-member constituencies.

Rather than handicap redistricting from the perspective of the major parties or quibble over which gerrymanders look the worst, we should move beyond such an archaic framework and embrace reforms designed to make our political system more democratic and reflective.

No More Gerrymanders: Missouri's Partisan Plan versus the Fair Voting Alternative

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:31:25 -0800

Missouri's new congressional redistricting plan is a classic partisan gerrymander. Republicans are likely to win 75% of House seats even in years when their candidates receive fewer votes statewide than Democrats. Of eight congressional districts, only one is even remotely balanced between the major parties.

Reformers rightly criticize such partisan gerrymandering, but the root of this unfairness is Missouri's use of winner-take-all voting. Changing winner-take-all voting is the only way to ensure that all Missouri voters participate in meaningfully contested elections while also earning fair representation. To showcase a better way to elect representatives, FairVote is drawing a series of congressional plans based on adopting a fair voting alternative to winner-take-all elections. If Missouri adopted our fair voting plan, nearly all of its voters would help elect a preferred candidate in every election. For a more detailed analysis of redistricting in Missouri and our fair voting plan, read our new report No More Gerrymanders: Missouri.

Missouri's 2011 Gerrymander

In May 2011, Missouri approved a congressional redistricting plan in which Republican state legislators sought to help their political friends and hurt their adversaries - just as partisans typically do when in control of redistricting. The result was a collection of highly gerrymandered districts that prioritized politics above preserving communities. In effect, elected officials chose their voters before voters had had a chance to choose them.

Missouri's Congressional Redistricting Map

With Missouri losing one of its U.S. House seats, the Republican plan eliminated the St. Louis-based district of Democrat Russ Carnahan and packed all of St. Louis into the 1^st District of William Lacy Clay, Jr. The Kansas City district represented by Clay's fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Emanuel Cleaver also became more heavily Democratic. That packing of Democratic voters into two districts allowed the legislature to keep all remaining districts heavily Republican. The five returning Republican incumbents all represent districts expected to be won by more than 20 percentage points in a typical year, and the one open seat (vacated by Republican Todd Akin) also has a strong Republican lean.

Unsurprisingly, Democratic Governor Jay Nixon vetoed this map. But Republicans and some African American Democrats in the state legislature joined to override his veto. A lawsuit challenging the lack of geographic compactness is before the state Supreme Court.

The Root of the Problem: Winner-Take-All

Although it is easy to point fingers at the perpetrators of this partisan gerrymander, beneath the surface is a structural problem that enables their behavior. In American elections, no structural rule is more central than "winner-take-all" voting, which allows 50% +1 of voters to win 100% of representation in a district.

In winner-take-all voting, backers of a defeated candidate do not receive any representation - meaning as many as 49.99% of voters can be denied representation. Winner-take-all voting gives those shaping districts great power, particularly because American voters have increasingly rigid preferences when faced with a choice between the major parties.

It doesn't take much to make a district "safe" for the majority - and devoid of competition. A district's tilt makes the results highly predictable once outside of a range of 45% to 55%, just as presidential states can be divided into "battlegrounds" and "swing states." More than two-thirds of congressional districts fall outside that partisan range, and political activity in those districts has little chance to change the outcome.

In the 2010 elections, for example, only a single Republican won nationally in the 155 U.S. House districts with a Democratic lean of more than 54%. Only five Democrats won in one of the 149 House districts with a Republican lean of more than 56%. One of those heavily Republican districts was that of Ike Skelton, Missouri's long-serving Democratic incumbent who finally succumbed in 2010 to the power of partisanship in the modern era. His three fellow Missouri Democrats held on because they represented much more Democratic districts.

The partisan tilt to most districts is only occasionally attributable to blatant gerrymandering. Because most Members of Congress represent regions of a state that have an inherent advantage for one party, a state that drew perfectly compact districts would usually end up with mostly noncompetitive elections. National maps color-coded to illustrate the partisan control of U.S. House districts (Republicans in red and Democrats in blue) underscore this point. Most areas of the country are dominated by one party, reducing the nuanced views of many voters to a simplistic "Republican red" or "Democratic blue."

To be sure, allowing legislators to draw their own district makes an already unjust situation worse. But winner-take-all voting is inherently undemocratic in its effect no matter what the intent. When only one side can win, no district can accurately reflect its actual partisan composition, and most districts will not be competitive.

The Solution: Replace Winner-Take-All

FairVote advocates replacing winner-take-all voting rules that make gerrymandering so tempting. Our report, No More Gerrymanders: Missouri, is the latest in an ongoing series in which we demonstrate-state by state-how only a modest change in federal and state laws would have a dramatic impact on voter choice and political representation.

Fair Voting with Super Districts Map

Our fair voting system combines Missouri's eight single-seat districts into two multi-seat "super-districts," one with five representatives and the other with three. Within these multi-seat districts, voters select representatives to the U.S. House using a form of proportional representation, several of which are already used in local elections in the United States and in national elections in other nations. In the five-seat district, about 17% of voters could win one of five seats. In the three seat district, it would take just over a quarter of the vote to win representation.

Although we were limited to combining the heavily gerrymandered districts created by the state legislature, our plan shows how Missouri can achieve genuine competition, voter choice, and reflective representation. Under our plan, Republicans and Democrats each would be well positioned to win three seats in every election. Republicans would be favored to win the two remaining "toss-ups," one in each super-district, but Democrats could win depending on quality of candidates and the national partisan tide.

Unlike the gerrymandered map, the resulting partisan balance is reflective of the state's political divide. Republicans and Democrats would be certain to win in both super-districts, meaning each would have shared representation, all voters would participate in a meaningful election and most would elect a preferred candidate. The districts also would allow for new opportunities for independents, third parties, women and "innovative" thinkers within the major parties -- winners would likely reflect differences within the parties, not just between them.

Permitted by the U.S. Constitution, fair voting could be implemented by states once Congress repeals a 1967 federal law mandating single-seat districts. Many states have already used multi-seat districts in the past, including two states (Hawaii and New Mexico) that were doing so at the time of the 1967 law.

Our democracy is severely constricted through winner-take-all voting rules that reward partisan tactics. Until these rules are replaced by fair voting, we will have mostly meaningless, uncompetitive elections and distorted representation. Fair voting would bring millions of voters-long sidelined by winner-take-all-back into an electoral process they should control rather than politicians. By adopting fair voting, we can invigorate our electoral system and finally have truly representative democracy.

Happy 200th Birthday to the “Gerry-mander”

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:20:26 -0800

On February 11, 1812, former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry --- using the same hand that in 1776 had put his name on the Declaration of Independence --- signed into law a redistricting plan for the state senate designed to boost his Democratic-Republican Party. Although political parties had long before drawn maps for their own benefit, the practice now had a name: "Gerry-mandering." The term was coined by the Boston-Gazette which combined the governor's name with the word salamander, aptly describing one of the newly created districts.

Every ten years, congressional districts are redrawn to reflect new census information. This balancing of the number of seats in each state in proportion to population is required by Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Although some states in their early years had statewide congressional elections, since 1967, all states have used single-member districts.

Although Congress has the power to establish redistricting standards, state legislatures usually are in charge of redrawing the boundaries. Since these actors are partisan, whichever party is in control will often resort to gerrymandering to secure political advantage. Essentially, they try to help their friends and hurt their enemies, whether that be one of the major political parties, the states' incumbents, or certain individual legislators.

Two hundred years since Gerry signed his map, gerrymandering is a bigger problem than ever in redistricting plans. Advanced computer technology and more available data allow politicians to gerrymander down to actual neighborhoods and streets. For example, the Maryland 2nd Congressional district wraps around Baltimore, connected together by I-95. The California 23rd Congressional district hugs the Pacific Coastline and is said to "disappear at high tide." The Massachusetts 4th Congressional district stretches from the suburbs of Boston south towards New Bedford and Buzzards Bay, snaking around other districts along its way. Each of these districts marginalizes voters for the benefit of the party in power.

With recent 2010 Census data in hand, states all across the country have begun drafting legislative and congressional maps, and ---- not surprisingly ---- the process in many has been rife with controversy and beset by partisan jockeying. In Texas, maps redrawn by the state legislature have been caught up in an ongoing dispute relating to the Voting Rights Act that likely will result in a delay in its primary ---- the Supreme Court even weighed in. Civic groups in New York are decrying maps that suppress minority voters. Pick a state, and you're bound to find partisan finger pointing over new district lines.

Many critics of the redistricting process advocate for a more independent process that is criteria-driven, with partisan politics removed as a consideration. Ten states have adopted variations of this process, including California where the Citizens Redistricting Commission was tasked with putting public interest values over the incredible levels of incumbent protection found in the previously gerrymandered districts.

Many of these panels, however, require political appointment, allowing state politicians to maintain an influence over the process with appointees of their choice. And no matter how mapmakers are chosen, they can be subjects of suspicion if given discretion in how lines are drawn. When partisans don't like the projected impact of the new redistricting plans, they can cry foul ---- going to court (as was done in several states in the 2000's), seeking to overturn the plan via a referendum (as is the case right now with the state senate plan in California), or even attempting to fire those on the panel (as happened recently in Arizona).

FairVote advocates that states adopt "fair voting" plans, which combine a number of single-member districts into a larger constituency, called a "super district." Multiple candidates can be elected to a super district through the use of a proportional representation voting system rather than winner-take-all. "Proportional voting distributes seats in a way that is reflective of the vote, allowing far more voters to come out winners," says Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote.

We urge you to explore the super district plans created on our website ---- with plans to come for every state this spring. Doing so will eliminate gerrymandering ---- whether intended by partisans or unintentionally by commissions ---- by putting voters in control of their representation.

So while wishing a wry happy 200th birthday to the gerrymander, let's take action to make it a memory, not an ugly sore plaguing our politics.