qm_winter_2016

12 / 32

Virginia C apitol C onnections, Winter 2016
12
Gerrymander
By Stephen J. Farnsworth
Following Virginia legislative elections
in which 137 out of 140 state Senate and
House of Delegate districts remained under
the control of the same political party,
Virginians surveyed recently said they
overwhelmingly favored taking authority
to design the districts away from state
lawmakers.
In a November 2015 statewide poll sponsored by the University
of Mary Washington, 72 percent said that an independent board
should draw the district lines. Only 14 percent of those surveyed
said the legislature should retain that authority.
There was no gender gap in the responses to the question, and
there was little difference among whites, African Americans and
Latinos or among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. More
than 65 percent of all those subgroups in the survey said they thought
that the lines should be drawn by an independent panel.
For those not familiar with public opinion research, a 72-14 split
among survey respondents is almost unheard of in public policy
questions during these days of deeply divided politics.
Gerrymandering, the process by which incumbent lawmakers
design their districts to maximize the prospects for their own re-
elections and the fortunes of their party, is a process as old as the
republic. Modern computer technology has made a bad situation
worse, giving the majority party the ability virtually to eliminate
competitive elections in most parts of Virginia (and in nearly every
other state lets lawmakers create their own districts).
In Virginia’s 2015 elections, for example, only 29 of 100 House
of Delegate districts featured both a Republican and a Democrat
on the ballot. In the senate, only 20 of 40 seats had two-party
competition on the ballot.
In practice, though, even most of those elections weren’t close.
Only six of 100 seats in the house had less than a ten percentage
point gap between the top two candidates, and only five of the 40
seats in the senate met that admittedly generous definition of a
competitive election.
High-tech gerrymandering has a number of consequences that
undermine effective representative government. Noncompetitive
elections reduce turnout and discourage participation by quality
candidates from the disadvantaged party. To make matters worse,
gerrymandered districts place the real power for the selection of
elected officials in the hands of the tiny minority of voters, usually
less than 10 percent, who participate in the primaries where the party
nomination is determined.
Politicians who must cater to the most extreme ten percent
of the district’s voters have zero incentive to compromise and
instead legislate from the far left or the far right. When legislative
compromise is nearly impossible, difficult problems fester.
Not only does the public oppose that the lawmakers draw the
line, they also disagree with how they draw the lines.
When asked whether they preferred “a geographically compact
district that keeps nearby communities together” or “a district drawn
to give supporters of one party an advantage over others,” survey
respondents preferred the compact district 84 percent to 4 percent,
with the rest undecided.
Of course the best way to gerrymander is to create long thin
districts that divide people likely to support your opponents into
a number of districts. And Virginia has a lot of those. When you
can’t do that, the best approach is to pack as many members of the
opposite party into a single district, leaving the nearby districts ripe
for the picking by the line-drawing party.
But this time lawmakers may have gone too far, according to
some preliminary court rulings. The lines drawn for congressional
and state legislative districts have faced a number of lawsuits over
whether they are too gerrymandered. The way things look right now,
the courts will be debating the legislative lines inVirginia until 2021,
the year Virginians draw the new lines based on the 2020 US Census.
Stephen J. Farnsworth is professor of political science at the
University of Mary Washington and director of the University’s
Center for Leadership and Media Studies.
The November 2015 Virginia Survey, sponsored by University of
Mary Washington (UMW), obtained telephone interviews with a
representative sample of 1,006 adults living in Virginia. Telephone
interviews were conducted by landline (402) and cell phone (604,
including 303 without a landline phone). The survey was conducted
by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI).
Interviews were done in English by Princeton Data Source from
November 4 to 9, 2015. Statistical results are weighted to correct
known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error
for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3.5 percentage points.
30YEARS
2016
Complimentary copy of
2016 Redbook
with a year's
subscription to Virginia
Capitol Connections
Quarterly Magazine at
only $20!
Copies of the 30th
anniversary Redbook
are available for
$5.25 each.
Order online:
publications
V