What's the Difference Between Redistricting and Gerrymandering?

Redrawing voting district lines in your favor is an accepted (and legal) political play -- in some cases. Learn the differences between redistricting and gerrymandering (and how minority voters figure in) in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/redistricting-gerrymandering.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Boba bam here. A representative democracy can
be a beautiful thing, but the process of drawing the
lines for congressional and state legislative districts can get ugly.
The Constitution is vague on how voting districts should be drawn,

(00:24):
saying only that they should be updated every ten years
and be roughly equal in population. Over the centuries. Since
the constitution's writing, American politicians have seized on the once
a decade redistricting process to redraw voting maps to their advantage.
While partisan redistricting is an accepted, if bemoaned practice, the
courts have found it unacceptable to redraw voting districts for

(00:47):
the express purpose of suppressing the voting power of black
voters and other minority groups. Gerrymandering is defined as the
manipulation of voting districts for hyperpartist in or racist reasons,
but the line between legit redistricting and unethical jerrymandering is
blurry at best. It's ultimately up to judges to decide

(01:10):
whether a redistricting plan is kosher or not. Every ten years,
the United States conducts a census. The constitutional purpose of
the census is apportionment, that is, the process of determining
how many seats each state should have in the House
of Representatives. While the Constitution automatically a lots to senators
for every state, the apportionment of representatives in the four

(01:33):
hundred and thirty five seat House is based on population,
with populous states like California getting fifty two representatives as
of the census and sparsely populated states like Wyoming and
South Dakota only getting one seat. Each. Members of the
House are voted into office by the voters in their
congressional district back home, and according to the Constitution, those

(01:56):
districts should be approximately the same size, meaning that each
of the four thirty five House members represent roughly the
same number of people. The average congressional district now holds
a little over seven d s people. But who draws
the district maps. A handful of states appoint independent commissions

(02:16):
who draw their district lines, but those are the outliers
right now. State legislatures in thirty nine states draw their
own congressional districts, though that includes the six states that
only have one congressional district. If the state legislature is
firmly in the hands of one political party or the other,
as it is in more than half of all states,

(02:37):
then that party exercises a lot of control over the
redistricting process. By tweaking the size and shape of voting districts,
they can boost the voting power of their party and
increase the odds of winning congressional seats. The district drawings
and power struggles in each individual states legislature works similarly,
but we're concentrating on the national government today. Okay, So

(03:01):
when does partisan redistricting cross the line and become illegal gerrymandering.
When state legislators sit down to redraw their voting district maps,
even in solidly Republican or democratic states, they're expected to
play by some basic rules. Districts have to be of
roughly equal population, though a deviation of a few percentage

(03:22):
points is okay. Districts have to be contiguous, meaning they
have to be contained by one boundary. And districts should
be compact, not long and snakelike. Of those three characteristics,
the compactness or non compactness of a district is usually
the one that triggers accusations of gerrymandering. For the article

(03:43):
this episode is based on, Has to Work, spoke with
Doug Spencer, a law professor and election law scholar at
the University of Colorado, Boulder. He explained, if you see
a bizarrely shaped district that raises your intent a that
it may not have been drawn neutral ly, but in
a way that favors some group, political group, a racial group,
or something else. After all, it was the freakest shape

(04:05):
of a Massachusetts congressional district that helped coin the term
Jerrymander in eighteen twelve. The long and snaking district was
approved by Governor Elbridge Jerry and delivered a powerful electoral
advantage to his party, the Democratic Republicans. A newspaper cartoonist
noted the alamander like shape of the district and labeled
it the Jerrymander after its partisan creator. According to Spencer,

(04:29):
the courts have recognized that partisanship and the redistricting process
is an accepted outcome of state elections. If voters put
control of the state legislature in the hands of one party,
then there's an expectation that party officials will make redistricting
decisions that benefit their party. Spencer said, the question becomes
how much partisanship is too much. That's the line that's

(04:51):
hard to distinguish. Some state legislatures are blatantly honest, but
what they're trying to accomplish. In North Carolina, for example,
the Republican chair of the state's redistricting committee said in sixteen,
I propose we draw the maps to give an advantage
to ten Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not
believe it's possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans

(05:12):
and two Democrats. And in Maryland, the Democratic governor testified
that a new district was drawn to quote create a
district where the people would be more likely to elect
a Democrat than Republican. Yes, this was clearly my intent.
But do such statements go too far? For its part,
the Supreme Court is keeping out of the controversy. In

(05:34):
twenty nineteen, the justices ruled five to four that the
nation's highest court would not get involved in challenges to
state plans on strictly political grounds. They left those challenges
to state lawmakers and state courts. Racially motivated jerrymandering is
unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under

(05:54):
the law. But before the nineteen sixty four Voting Rights
Act was passed, state legislatures a special in the Jim
Crow era South used a pair of gerrymandering tactics to
strip black voters of equal electoral power. They're called packing
and cracking. If black voters were concentrated in a certain
geographic area of a state, then the legislators would pack

(06:16):
them into one or two districts. Even if that created
strong black voting blocks in those districts, their vote would
be outweighed by all of the majority white districts. If
black voters were more geographically dispersed, then the districts were
drawn in order to crack or dilute the black vote
by assigning small numbers of black voters to several different districts,

(06:37):
and that way their voices were still guaranteed to be
drowned out by the white majority. This was supposed to
change with the Voting Rights Act, which included a provision
that six Southern states had to receive federal approval for
their districting plans. Those six states, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi,
South Carolina, and Virginia were flagged for this extra scrutiny

(06:59):
because of a story of race based jerrymandering. In the
nineteen sixties, three more states were added, Alaska, Arizona, and Texas,
but in a landmark case, the Supreme Court bailed out
those nine states from having to seek congressional pre approval
for their plans, and stoking fears of a new wave
of racially motivated jerrymandering, mainly in Republican controlled Southern legislatures.

(07:25):
The reality is that racial jerrymandering is still unlawful and
can be challenged in both state and federal courts. A
lawsuit intended to block a state's redistricting plan on racial
grounds must be filed by a voter living in the district,
says Spencer, not an outside political organization. It's then up
to a judge or judges to determine if there's enough evidence,

(07:45):
like testimony or emails or texts between lawmakers to conclude
that the district lines were in fact drawn to disenfranchise
minority voters. And these challenges do happen. Two high profile
Supreme Court cases within the past gade effectively blocked districting
plans in North Carolina and Virginia on grounds of racial jerrymandering.

(08:07):
A part of what makes the line between redistricting and
jerrymandering so blurry is that the electorate has become increasingly
polarized along racial lines. In presidential election, for example, of
black voters shows the Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Meanwhile, white
voters continued to skew Republican particularly non college educated white

(08:29):
voters of whom voted for Donald Trump. What that means
for Republican held legislatures, especially in the South, is that
any attempt to crack or pack districts to prevent the
election of Democrats risks targeting black voters and running a
foul of the law. Today's episode is based on the

(08:52):
article what's the difference between redistricting and jerrymandering? On House
to works dot com, written by Dave Rouse. Brain Stuff
is production of iHeart Radio and partner ship with how
stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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