Pennsylvania’s Legislature adopted a patently unconstitutional electoral district map following the 2010 census. Its rejection by the state Supreme Court resulted in an embarrassing two-year delay in setting new legislative and congressional districts — which remain badly gerrymandered.
Gerrymandering is the practice by which politicians craft voting districts based on political advantage, in effect selecting their own voters to preserve their own power. Lawmakers acted for their own benefit in 2011 even after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against gerrymandering in a Texas case that was decided in 2006. And, since 2011, the Pennsylvania Legislature has maintained the same redistricting system even though the Supreme Court and other federal courts have created a substantial catalog of rulings that favor fair redistricting over gerrymandering.
In the most recent ruling, last November, a federal district court in Wisconsin threw out a gerrymandered redistricting plan.
“We find that the discriminatory effect is not explained by the political geography of Wisconsin nor is it justified by a legitimate state interest,” the majority opinion said. The state government has appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Wisconsin case is particularly significant because it relied partially on a new analytical tool, “the efficiency gap,” to measure the discriminatory effect of gerrymandering.
That deals with two prime means of gerrymandering — packing a district with most a region’s voters of one party or another or one race, or scattering those voters among multiple districts. In either case, the effect is to dilute the impact of a particular group of voters.
For packing, see Northeastern Pennsylvania. A large majority of Democratic voters are concentrated in the 17th Congressional District, a convoluted, meandering district that picks off most urban areas in the region. That, in turn, guarantees substantial Republican majorities in the neighboring 10th and 11th Districts.
Gerrymandering is a major factor in today’s poisonous politics and paralyzed governance.
In this session, the state Legislature should adopt a state constitutional amendment to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission so that it will be in place to handle the job after the 2020 census.