MD's AG hopes to bring gerrymandering case to SCOTUS

[BmorePat87]

So Maryland is known for being the home to football champions (both national and Canadian), crab cakes, and great teachers, but we're also the home to some serious gerrymandering in favor of Democrats.

A federal court recently declare one of our districts unconstitutional. Our Republican governor is moving forward to drawing up a new map, which won't get passed, while our AG Brian Frosh has sought to challenge it before the Supreme Court with the stated goal of receiving specific guidance from them as how what their requirements would be for the entire state as a way to ensure that they wouldn't face future challenges (since the Governor's plan is just addressing 1 district).

Some have realized that Frosh understands that, even though the Supreme Court will definitely cause MD to redraw the entire state, giving Republicans 1 or 2 seats, a ruling could have implications across the entire country, damaging GOP gerrymandering as well, with the hopes that there would be a net gain in D districts in the long run.

I have a feeling our governor sees that as well, which is why he is only focused on redrawing 1 district, giving Maryland 1 extra R district and not hurting his friends in other states.

Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

[GMDino]

(11-27-2018, 01:22 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: So Maryland is known for being the home to football champions (both national and Canadian), crab cakes, and great teachers, but we're also the home to some serious gerrymandering in favor of Democrats.

A federal court recently declare one of our districts unconstitutional. Our Republican governor is moving forward to drawing up a new map, which won't get passed, while our AG Brian Frosh has sought to challenge it before the Supreme Court with the stated goal of receiving specific guidance from them as how what their requirements would be for the entire state as a way to ensure that they wouldn't face future challenges (since the Governor's plan is just addressing 1 district).

Some have realized that Frosh understands that, even though the Supreme Court will definitely cause MD to redraw the entire state, giving Republicans 1 or 2 seats, a ruling could have implications across the entire country, damaging GOP gerrymandering as well, with the hopes that there would be a net gain in D districts in the long run.

I have a feeling our governor sees that as well, which is why he is only focused on redrawing 1 district, giving Maryland 1 extra R district and not hurting his friends in other states.

Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

If they refuse to hear or don't act I suppose it will just take longer as each district is contested?

[BmorePat87]

(11-27-2018, 01:32 PM)GMDino Wrote: If they refuse to hear or don't act I suppose it will just take longer as each district is contested?

If they refuse, they'll just have to redraw the 6th and the 8th most likely, and future challenges could be made on the other jacked up districts. 

While the 6th doesn't look the worst, it had 66k GOP voters removed and 24k DEM voters added, the biggest shift in the whole nation during the last round of redistricting. 

[GMDino]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering/engineering-elections-us-top-court-examines-electoral-map-manipulation-idUSKCN1R319D

Quote:Engineering elections? U.S. top court examines electoral map manipulation

7 MIN READ


(Reuters) - Before the Republican-led state legislature divided their city and even their college campus into two different districts in a bid to boost the party’s election chances, students like recent graduate Vashti Smith could vote for the Democratic U.S. congressional candidate and know that person could win.

Thanks to partisan gerrymandering - a practice the Supreme Court will examine on Tuesday in two cases that could impact American politics for decades - that is no longer the case. A U.S. House of Representatives district that once covered heavily Democratic Greensboro was reconfigured in 2016, with the voters in the city of 290,000 people inserted into two other districts spanning rural areas with reliable Republican majorities.

In adopting the electoral map, the legislature partitioned the campus of North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically black public college, into two separate districts.

“We had one person representing us who shared our beliefs. Now we have two people who don’t really represent us,” said Smith, 24, a 2017 graduate who works with voting-rights group Common Cause, which is among the plaintiffs challenging the new districts.

After decades of electing Democrats to the state’s 12th U.S. House district by wide margins, Greensboro now has been represented by two Republicans, in the redrawn 6th and 13th district seats, since 2016.
[/url]
EXPLORE THE INTERACTIVE
Gerrymandering in Greensboro

[url=https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-COURT-GERRYMANDERING/010091701PF/index.html]Republicans and Democrats over the years have engaged in gerrymandering, manipulating electoral boundaries to entrench one party in power. Critics have said the practice has now become far more effective and insidious due to computer technology and precise voter data, warping democracy.

The reworked districts that helped President Donald Trump’s party gain House seats in North Carolina are part of the historic U.S. Supreme Court fight, along with a single Democratic-drawn House district in Maryland that resulted in a Republican seat flipping to a Democrat.

In separate lawsuits, federal courts in Greensboro and Baltimore last year sided with the challengers in North Carolina and Maryland, ruling that the contested districts violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the right to free speech and association, or constitutional provisions governing elections.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, due by the end of June, could profoundly impact American elections by either letting courts curb partisan gerrymandering or not allowing them to stop it.

‘THE SYSTEM WE HAVE’
Some Republicans and conservative advocacy groups have rallied behind the North Carolina legislators, arguing there is no constitutional right for a political party’s seat count to be proportional to its percentage of the statewide vote.
“That isn’t the system we have,” said Edward Greim, an attorney specializing in election law who filed a Supreme Court brief on behalf of a national Republican organization.

Centrist Republicans including former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and current Maryland Governor Larry Hogan are gerrymandering critics, filing a brief to show how the practice “amplifies the voices of partisans and drowns out the voices of moderates.”

In creating the 2016 map, North Carolina’s Republican leaders were open about maintaining a House delegation of 10 Republicans, joking that they would have preferred to make it 11 Republicans if possible in the state’s 13 districts. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” state House Representative David Lewis said at the time.

Using those words as evidence, more than two dozen Democratic voters, the North Carolina Democratic Party and two groups that advocate for fair elections sued.

For Smith, the new line dividing her campus along Laurel Street meant that each time she walked from her apartment to the library she entered a new district. It also meant, she said, that her vote was drowned out by her new district neighbors.
North Carolina A&T political science professor Derick Smith, whose window looks across the district line, said the boundaries were designed to disrupt a community known for its progressive politics, dating back even before the Greensboro sit-ins that were a key moment in the civil rights movement.

“They’re breaking up a community of common interest to create a partisan advantage for the party drawing the maps,” Smith said.

The Supreme Court last year failed to issue decisive rulings on partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland.

Liberal and conservative justices alike have criticized gerrymandering as a form of partisan skullduggery. But for decades the Supreme Court has been uncertain about federal courts’ authority to curb this inherently political act.

North Carolina’s Republican legislators have said judges are not equipped to determine how much politics is too much in line-drawing. The plaintiffs said closing courthouse doors would embolden map-makers to be even more ruthlessly partisan.

PACKING AND CRACKING
Legislative districts across the country are redrawn to reflect population changes determined by the federal census each decade. In most states, redistricting is done by the party in power, though some assign the task to independent commissions in the interest of fairness.

Gerrymandering is carried out by cramming as many like-minded voters as possible into a small number of districts - called “packing” - and spreading the rest in other districts too thinly to form a majority - called “cracking.”

Greensboro has been at the center of several high profile lawsuits since Republicans won control of the state legislature in 2010, ending nearly a century of Democratic-led redistricting that often riled Republicans.

Republicans adopted a new map in 2011 and won nine or 10 of the state’s 13 House seats in every election since, unreflective of an electorate closely divided between the two parties. Seats were more evenly distributed in the past. In 2010, Democrats captured seven seats to six for the Republicans.

Last year, even though Democrats won roughly half the statewide vote, they won only three of the 13 House seats. Officials ordered a new election for one seat after allegations of ballot fraud favoring the Republican candidate.

The North Carolina case focuses on a 2016 map adopted after a court found that Republican legislators unlawfully used race as a factor when redrawing certain U.S. House districts after the 2010 census.

[*michaelsean*]

(03-26-2019, 09:20 AM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering/engineering-elections-us-top-court-examines-electoral-map-manipulation-idUSKCN1R319D

That 2011-2016 one looks a lot more messed up than the 2016-2018..    They should have picked one that looked better.

[GMDino]

I couldn't find the thread about Virginia's case so I'll add this one here:

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/448876-supreme-court-hands-virginia-democrats-a-win-in-gerrymandering-case

Quote:Supreme Court hands Virginia Democrats a win in gerrymandering case
 
 
The Supreme Court has ruled against the Virginia House of Delegates in a racial gerrymandering case that represents a victory for Democrats in the state.


In the 5-4 ruling, the justices found that the House didn't have the standing to appeal a lower court ruling that found that the new district maps must be used ahead of the 2020 elections. Those new maps are already in use.

Democrats claimed that the districts were unlawful because they featured too many black voters, diminishing their power across the state and in other districts.


Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch.


Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.


Virginia Democrats had challenged the 11 districts for the state’s House of Delegates, which were drawn after the 2010 census, and each have a population with at least 55 percent black residents of voting age.


The Supreme Court has previously held that race can’t be the leading factor in the creation of state districts. The justices first took on the case in 2015, but sent it back down to a lower court for reconsideration.


But lawyers for the GOP-held House of Delegates claimed that by making sure that each legislative district had 55 percent black voters, the state was ensuring that their voting power wasn’t diminished.


Virginia House Democrats celebrated the ruling in a statement Monday, calling it "a major win for voting rights and civil rights in our Commonwealth.”


"House Republicans have spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending racial gerrymandering in a protracted legal battle - a battle in which they lacked legal standing," House Democratic Leader Eileen Filler-Corn and Caucus Chairwoman Charniele Herring said in a joint statement.


"Finally, Virginians in the affected districts have the assurance that they will vote in constitutional districts in this year’s election."


The new districts upheld by the justices on Monday were already used in Virginia's state primaries this month.


The case also marked a divide among Virginia officials, as the House pursued it further in court after the state attorney general said he wouldn't appeal the lower court ruling that threw out the districts.


"The House, we hold, lacks authority to displace Virginia's Attorney General as representative of the state," Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. "We further hold that the House, as a single chamber of a bicameral legislature, has no standing to appeal the invalidation of the redistricting plan separately from the state of which it is a part."


The House had argued that it was able to argue in court on behalf of the state's interests. But the majority found that the lawmakers hadn't identified a legal basis for them to do so, and that Virginia law gives the authority and responsibility to represent the state in court "exclusively" to the attorney general.


And Ginsburg's opinion also finds that the House wouldn't be injured by allowing the district maps to stand, as state law says that the entire Virginia General Assembly, not just the House, is elected from the districts that it draws.


However, Alito wrote in the dissenting opinion that "the new districting plan ordered by the lower court will harm the House in a very fundamental way."


And he pushed back against the claim that the districts won't necessarily hurt the House itself because members of the legislature frequently change.

"Really? It seems obvious that any group consisting of members who must work together to achieve the group's aims has a keen interest in the identity of its members, and it follows that the group also has a strong interest in how its members are selected," Alito wrote. "And what is more important to such a group than the content of its work?"

[Belsnickel]

(06-17-2019, 12:16 PM)GMDino Wrote: I couldn't find the thread about Virginia's case so I'll add this one here:

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/448876-supreme-court-hands-virginia-democrats-a-win-in-gerrymandering-case

The most interesting thing about this one was where the 5-4 line fell. Definitely an interesting coalition.

It is important to note that the reason for the dismissal was because of the lack of standing to appeal from the House of Delegates, not anything related to the merits of the case.

[GMDino]

(06-17-2019, 12:23 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: The most interesting thing about this one was where the 5-4 line fell. Definitely an interesting coalition.

It is important to note that the reason for the dismissal was because of the lack of standing to appeal from the House of Delegates, not anything related to the merits of the case.

They will still have to go with the new districts this year though, no?

[SunsetBengal]

A week or so ago, I was listening to a discussion of the proposed redistricting of voting districts, as they pertain to NC, on Capitol Tonight. Capitol Tonight airs on our local Spectrum News Channel. I like Spectrum for local news as they at least try to appear to be unbiased in their presentation of NC news.

Anyway, what I found interesting about the discussion was that they mentioned that redrawing voting districts sometimes presents rather unique challenges, as they are formed by actual physical landmarks, such as rivers and waterways, etc., rather than arbitrary lines as with a political map. As a Surveyor, I found this quite curious as a map for political use is ruled by geographic features, when typically it's geographic features added to political maps to show their spatial relations to one another.

[BmorePat87]

(06-17-2019, 12:16 PM)GMDino Wrote: I couldn't find the thread about Virginia's case so I'll add this one here:

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/448876-supreme-court-hands-virginia-democrats-a-win-in-gerrymandering-case

(06-17-2019, 12:23 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: The most interesting thing about this one was where the 5-4 line fell. Definitely an interesting coalition.

It is important to note that the reason for the dismissal was because of the lack of standing to appeal from the House of Delegates, not anything related to the merits of the case.

A partial win, but not the full necessary win.

[Belsnickel]

(06-17-2019, 12:43 PM)GMDino Wrote: They will still have to go with the new districts this year though, no?

Correct. The redrawn districts must be used.

[Belsnickel]

(06-17-2019, 01:28 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: A week or so ago, I was listening to a discussion of the proposed redistricting of voting districts, as they pertain to NC, on Capitol Tonight. Capitol Tonight airs on our local Spectrum News Channel. I like Spectrum for local news as they at least try to appear to be unbiased in their presentation of NC news.

Anyway, what I found interesting about the discussion was that they mentioned that redrawing voting districts sometimes presents rather unique challenges, as they are formed by actual physical landmarks, such as rivers and waterways, etc., rather than arbitrary lines as with a political map. As a Surveyor, I found this quite curious as a map for political use is ruled by geographic features, when typically it's geographic features added to political maps to show their spatial relations to one another.

Yeah, that seems odd. I mean, there are arbitrary boundaries on political maps, but here on the eastern seaboard especially our political maps utilize geographic boundaries. Now, voting district maps will often use roadways as boundaries which is a bit different than most political maps.

[SunsetBengal]

(06-17-2019, 01:52 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Yeah, that seems odd. I mean, there are arbitrary boundaries on political maps, but here on the eastern seaboard especially our political maps utilize geographic boundaries. Now, voting district maps will often use roadways as boundaries which is a bit different than most political maps.

What happens to the people that live under the bridges?  Where are the homeless, er I mean "migratory citizens" supposed to vote??  Depending on what season of the year it is, they could have an impact in some of the more closely contested districts. 

[Belsnickel]

(06-17-2019, 01:56 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: What happens to the people that live under the bridges?  Where are the homeless, er I mean "migratory citizens" supposed to vote??  Depending on what season of the year it is, they could have an impact in some of the more closely contested districts. 

In all seriousness, the homeless population is a big concern when looking at voting issues. They often lack a permanent address, so they are unable to vote because they can't register, which is often why politicians will give lip service to the issue to satisfy the interest groups but not do anything about it once in office because they aren't a constituency that can vote for them (i.e. what's going on in California right now).

A local homeless man who renamed himself "Quiet T. Please" recently passed away, here. He was most well known in the community for trying to run for Sheriff, and later City Council, back in the '70s but being unable to because of a lack of permanent address.

I know your post was tongue in cheek, but these are the sort of issues that are a concern for many people because the homeless are underrepresented and often outright disenfranchised in this country.