essays
A Gerrymandering Refresher
by Ben Sheehan
December 10, 2018
Ben Sheehan is the founder and Executive Director of OMGWTF.
What’s ‘gerrymandering’?
It’s the process of drawing U.S. House (Congressional) district lines or state legislative (state house or state senate) district lines to favor one political party over another.
Cool. I don’t understand what you wrote.
Remember how your U.S. Representative (Congressperson) represents your interests in the U.S. House, and your state representative represents your interests in your state house (sometimes called a state assembly), and your state senator represents your interests in your state senate?
…yes?
Each has their own ‘district’, or section of your state, for a specific area of residents. Some states have only one U.S. Representative because they’re so small (called ‘at large’).
So what’s gerrymandering then?
It’s the process of drawing district lines so that one party has an advantage (a.k.a. cheating). Every 10 years, your state representatives and state senators (your state legislators) assemble, review the U.S. Census data for your state, and redraw district lines for Congressional and state legislative districts. They do this because people move within the state, or to another state, or die, so by updating these lines every 10 years, the people in your state are fairly represented. Some states use independent, non-partisan redistricting commissions to draw their lines – but in most states, your state legislators draw them. People agree that districts should be drawn so that they’re competitive (where Democrats or Republicans could win).
But gerrymandering is the process of drawing districts to favor one party. For example, in 2012, Ohio Democratic U.S. House candidates and Ohio Republican U.S. House candidates split the vote almost evenly, but Republicans got 75% of U.S. House seats.
How is that possible?
Two ways. Let’s say that a state has 36 Congressional districts, and one part of the state has a lot of Democrats. If you want Republicans to win, you can draw the lines so Democrats are confined to a few districts, called ‘packing’, so the other districts have mostly Republicans. And if a state has 13 Congressional districts, and one area of the state is concentrated with Democrats, you can draw the lines to divide, or ‘crack’, Democrats into different districts so they’re always a numerical minority.
That’s fucked up.
Well, it gets worse. Sometimes when drawing districts, state legislators have been accused of using race to gerrymander. The idea is that because minorities – say Hispanics and African-Americans – usually vote for Democrats, if you draw the lines based on race, it will have a similar effect with minimizing Democratic votes.
Wow.
Also the examples I used? They’re real. Texas has 36 Congressional districts and a Federal Court said that it’s 35th Congressional district was unfairly drawn to ‘pack’ Hispanic voters. And North Carolina has 13 Congressional districts, and it’s 6th Congressional district – which touches Greensboro (which has a large African-American population) – was redrawn to ‘crack’ the area into multiple districts. These lines even run through North Carolina A&T’s campus, which is the largest historically black public university in the country. So, if you’re a student who moves from one side of the campus to the other, you have to re-register to vote.
Are you kidding? How is this legal?!
Some Federal Courts have said it isn’t, but the Supreme Court – on multiple occasions – has sent cases back to the states, refusing to make a federal law banning partisan gerrymandering. Even when lines seem to be drawn with race in mind, the argument is that the lines are disenfranchising Democrats, not minorities…but it’s kinda obvious what’s going on.
That’s insane. It’s Republicans who are doing this?
Republicans control the majority of state legislatures right now, so it’s happening more often in Republican-controlled states. It happens in Democratic states too (e.g. Maryland, Illinois); but currently Republicans are doing it way more. And it’s the Republican-controlled states that have districts accused of being racially gerrymandered. Needless to say, the racial component taps into an ugly history of voter disenfranchisement in this country.
How do we stop this?
Until there’s a federal law outlawing partisan gerrymandering, it’s up to each state to decide how it draws its lines. Some states have independent redistricting commissions drawing the lines (instead of state legislatures). This year in Michigan, voters passed a ballot measure giving line-drawing responsibilities to citizens rather than legislators. Also, in most states the governor can veto the lines, so some checks and balances exist.
But until we outlaw partisan gerrymandering nationally, or establish an independent redistricting commission in every state, or elect people who believe in fair lines, gerrymandering will continue.
What can I do?
In the next two elections (2019 and 2020), you can support state legislative and gubernatorial candidates who believe in fair lines. If there’s a ballot measure that would create an independent redistricting committee in your state, support that measure. Vote for these candidates and measures. Donate money to support them. Make calls, knock on doors, and convince others to do the same.
Because 2020 is your LAST chance to elect people who will draw fair lines in 2021. And remember, these lines won’t get drawn again until 2031.
Thanks, that was helpful (if long).
I feel the same about democracy.
essays
WORLD YOUR WORLD
by Max Moinian
May 31, 2018
Max Moinian is an urban planner from New York, researching climate change and urban design. This work is adapted from the Future Earth Catalog, a project done for her master’s thesis at MIT.
Earlier this year I wondered how the ozone layer was doing. I remembered being terrified as a kid and constantly drenched in sunblock. “This is a completely different Earth you are growing up in,” my mom would say. And she was totally right.
Climate change is the environmental narrative of our time. It occupies the same anxiety as nuclear warfare, the population bomb, and the ozone hole. It ebbs and flows from popular consciousness with big events like the Kyoto Protocol or COP21, and with extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts, and fires.
The problem is the ebb and flow - where does a story start and where does it end?
We hold onto shocks delivered through sensationalist media but we cannot possibly grasp stressors - the slow warming of temperature, melting of glaciers and rise of the sea. When Trump tweets “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice” he reveals a common misconception.
But weather that we can see and feel is not climate. Climate is the history of weather. It exists on an expanded timescale and involves incremental change that cannot be perceived firsthand. Climate is always mediated, and it’s pattern is irregular. Dr. John Holdren says we should call it “global climate disruption” rather than “global warming,” a misleading term which suggests that the phenomenon is uniform around the world, all about temperature, and gradual.
Climate’s official story is mostly told through data by scientists, journalists, and politicians. We listen without realizing we can be storytellers ourselves. Rebecca Solnit wrote about the power of the stories we tell in her book, Hope in the Dark. “Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories.” In the helplessness of climate change, I found agency in challenging the narratives I consume. I can reflect on many stories to tell my own.
Our ability to measure and understand the past seems to be directly proportional to our imaginative capacity for the future. It is hard to be hopeful when you are told to see the world as parts-per-million of CO2. This is a really big problem. Not only are we hyperaware of our past, but we can measure our individual impacts on the future — through efforts to make the world a better place, but also through carbon footprint calculators.
We might need to ‘unlearn’ some of these climate change communication and education logics (individual consumption as parts-per-million of CO2) in order to imagine a different future. Like a process of ‘unlearning’ candy as an adult, because the ingredients are ‘bad for you,’ the current narrative of climate may be bad for our society: an ingredient list full of toxic fear, individual responsibility, and irreversible loss.
Back to my mom, who used to give kids clementines on Halloween. Although I resented her for it, I take much wisdom from it now: we might not have the future that we wanted, but we can have something different that is just as sweet.
As you click through the timeline, choose your own adventure. There is no answer, no ‘aha!’ moment, only fragments I am suggesting to be part of our cultural construction of climate. In a quest for knowledge we struggle to accept that there might not be any to find. Uncertainty is a theme here: the uncertainty of climate models, 1-in-100 year storms, how we got here, and where we are headed. But the uncertainty of our future Earth means it is somewhat up to us. This is where Solnit finds hope: “the future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”
Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. We have always relied on it to explain uncertainty. To bridge the gap between what we observe and what we cannot understand, through myth, fiction, and fantasy. Our cultural construction of climate is a perception that has as much to do with science fiction as the science we call fact.
Fantasies of utopia or apocalyptic doom are powerful narratives. They indulge our senses and give license to world, a verb philosopher Martin Heidegger uses to describe the continuous process of world-building, perception-shifting, and responsiveness to our own realities. To world new worlds in the time of climate change is to break the barriers of our own capacities, whether these barriers be real or perceived.
In Space Colonies, Fabian Reimann writes, “heroism is successful foolishness; and is space travel anything but government-funded foolishness?” Space exploration, in fiction and not-fiction, is hope. We stuck our flag on the moon ten years after Kennedy declared the space race. What can’t we do?
By the way, the hole in the ozone is still there, it’s just growing slower.
A revisionist history for linear thinkers who prefer not to go down cycles and spirals of internet holes uncovering stories and events, and always working backwards. Grounded in the present, rooted in the past, and ready for lift off.