The Troubles of Gerrymandering and Louisiana v. Callais

One of the biggest sources of dysfunction within our democracy lies within the cracks of our voting system. It is, after all, a complicated system with many opportunities for error given the system was designed for 18th century America. We do not vote on policies directly, because the president and legislative branch decide for us. The legislative branch is split up into two subsections, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate has 100 members, with each state electing two senators.

The House is a little bit more complicated. It has 435 members, with each member getting elected by citizens within a certain geographical “district,” with each district roughly equal in population. Some states, like North Dakota, are low enough in population that they only have one district. Some other states are larger, like California, which has 52. Each state draws its districts every 10 years.

Here is where the problem arises. Congress is controlled by two parties, Democrats and Republicans, as people across the country generally vote for one of those two parties. However, people generally do not vote homogeneously. Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas, college towns and majority-minority areas. Republican voters tend to be more concentrated in rural and exurban areas. For example, take a state like Illinois, where the Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in Chicago and the St. Louis suburbs, while the rural areas tend to contain Republican voters.

Now imagine it’s time to redraw districts in Illinois, which happens every 10 years. Democrats and Republicans in the state government are each tasked with drawing voting districts. It is unlikely that either of them is going to draw them fairly. Democrats in the state government are likely to concentrate rural Republican voters together into a few heavily Republican districts, and then split the rest so that they all will contain a safe and reasonable majority of Democratic voters. This self-preserving measure ensures that Democrats send as many of their own members to the U.S. House. 

On the other hand, Republican state legislators will likely draw a district that concentrates Chicago voters together (this is called packing), then evenly dilute the remainder to ensure a majority of districts contain a majority of Republicans (this is called cracking). This reduces the number of “competitive” districts, or districts that could go one way or the other in an election year. 

As Democrats control the Illinois state government, the former scenario was the case. Despite receiving 52.7% of the vote in the Illinois U.S. House elections, Democrats received 82.3% of Illinois’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. This is called partisan gerrymandering, a tactic used by both parties across most of the country to ensure that their state will send as many members of their party as possible to Congress.

Partisan gerrymandering has ramped up in recent years, especially with the ongoing mid-decade redistricting war. But partisan gerrymandering is not the only kind of gerrymandering. While early gerrymandering focused on maximizing the outcome of a political party, Jim-Crow era redistricting in southern states opened up a new exploitation of power. A lot of state government officials in Southern states did not want Black voters to gain political influence. In addition to the poll taxes, so-called “literacy tests” and voter intimidation used to prevent Black people from gaining voter influence, a newer kind of voter suppression popped up: racial gerrymandering.

Racial gerrymandering is exactly as it sounds: partisan gerrymandering, except racial minority groups lose. The aggravators use the same tactics previously mentioned — “packing” and “cracking” — to ensure that Black voters have as little influence as possible. This was a crucial method for Southern states to suppress the Black vote. 

In 1965, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bipartisan Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. This law banned many of the voter suppression tactics used in the South to keep Black voters away from the ballot box. This law also created “majority-minority districts.” Essentially, this worked to solve racial gerrymandering by establishing district-drawing guidelines that ensure racial minority voters do not get diluted with racial gerrymandering. The goal for race-conscious redistricting is to ensure bad-faith actors do not “draw out” minority voters from power.

The existence of majority-minority districts is beneficial as representatives from these districts are often more equipped to handle the struggles of a minority group in a certain area, leading to more informed policy decisions. Additionally, the requirement of majority-minority districts reduces the ability of both Democrats and Republicans to do partisan gerrymandering. 

However, on April 29th, the majority-minority district was gutted when the Supreme Court’s ruling on Louisiana v. Callais determined that intervention in racial vote dilution is necessary only if it is proven that a district was drawn to intentionally disadvantage minority voters. As this is nearly impossible to prove, the VRA is essentially a “dead letter,” as written in a dissent by Court Justice Elena Kagan.

We can expect to see Southern states removing their majority-Black districts in the next redistricting cycle. This will reduce the number of Democratic representatives in Republican-controlled states. As a result, Democratic-controlled states, not bound to the VRA, will be incentivized to ditch their majority-minority districts to maximize the number of Democratic-leaning districts that they can supply to Congress. Caught in the crossfire are racial minority voters, whose power has been significantly diluted, seemingly overnight. 

The only way for districts to be truly neutral is to end gerrymandering, whether it be partisan or racial. It’s time for our Congress to step up and do more to end gerrymandering by passing an anti-gerrymandering redistricting law to ensure that neither party has an advantage in what should be a fair democracy. This is not the cure to our imperfect system, but a step in the right direction.