States in the U.S. employ many different processes for drawing legislative and congressional districts, required after every 10-year census. To counter the drawing of districts for political advantage, or gerrymandering, several states have established independent commissions to do the remapping, taking it out of the hands of legislators. Arizona voters approved a statewide initiative establishing such a commission in 2000. Last year, however, its Republican-controlled state Legislature sued, claiming the commission violated the U.S. Constitution. On Monday (June 29) the U.S. Supreme Court said otherwise, ruling 5-4 in favor of the commission. Brian Gaines, a political science professor at Illinois, has followed the topic of redistricting since his undergraduate days, when he was employed by the Royal Commission that revised the legislative map for the Canadian province of British Columbia. Since then, he also has done multiple public opinion surveys on redistricting and has written about reform efforts in Illinois. He spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain about the consequences of the court’s decision.
What were the specifics in this decision? Why did the court rule the way it did?
Most directly, Arizona and a few other states that use unelected commissions for redrawing their U.S. House districts can continue to do so. Had the court ruled otherwise, many other electoral regulations passed by voter initiative, mainly in Western states, might also have been struck down.
Note that the right of state voters to transfer redistricting authority from their legislature to some other body for the drawing of state, rather than federal, legislative boundaries was not at issue, as Justice Thomas’s dissent emphasizes. Also, some states use nonpartisan commissions to draw maps that must ultimately be approved by the legislature, and that practice was not challenged here.
The “why,” of course, is harder to answer. Abstractly, the case continues the conservative-liberal split on how to read the Constitution. At risk of oversimplifying, the majority, or the liberal wing, made mostly policy arguments in favor of commissions, stretching or ignoring the most natural understanding of the language in the Constitution empowering “the Legislature” of each state to regulate elections, unless Congress supersedes the states.
We hear about the many safe seats and see the strangely drawn districts resulting from gerrymandering, and may have a sense that this is not democratic or fair. But how should we judge that?
There is no serious dispute that maps are often drawn with express purposes, such as to help all or some incumbents at the expense of challengers, to increase or decrease the number of competitive districts, to increase or decrease the seats won by one party for a given vote share, or to increase or reduce the number of legislators of a given race or ethnicity.
It is far from clear, however, how to identify the fairest-possible map by even one criterion, let alone in all of these regards. Even the fairest process for making a map is disputed. “Gerrymandering” is often an unclear charge, and the effects of any given map are multifaceted. That does not mean that fairness is irrelevant or impossible, only that fairness claims should be very carefully stated.
What’s the evidence that independent commissions and other reforms have made a difference?
Typically, political scientists do not agree. There are important differences in how the “independent” commissions now in place are formed and operate. Certainly, they can be partisan wolves in sheep’s clothing. I suspect that a slight majority of experts would say that the commissions, as a whole, produce fairer maps on average than do bipartisan legislative efforts, and that those maps crafted, effectively, by only one party – whether Democrats or Republicans – are the least fair.
But some scholars strenuously argue that nonpartisan map-makers who are not trying to cheat generally produce worse maps than do bipartisan groups that, rather than ignoring possible partisan advantage, openly do their best to engineer balance.
What might the court’s decisions mean for reform efforts in Illinois, as well as other states?
Those collecting signatures to get a constitutional amendment creating an independent redistricting commission here can breathe a sigh of relief. A different decision might have thrown big roadblocks in their way.
Within the redistricting realm, this case generally represents a populist victory. In his dissent, Thomas is scathing about the majority’s rather inconsistent embrace of direct democracy, and not without cause. The Court has not generally been very deferential to voter referenda, certainly including the justices who constituted the majority in this case. So I would not predict that this case heralds greater deference to the people, as against their representatives or courts themselves, more broadly.