A Primer on Gerrymandering

Rahul Mahajan
May 23, 2017

Gerrymandering has been endemic to American politics at least since Elbridge Gerrys time. Although it
has skewed representation at times, the advantage has swung back and forth between the two major
parties; indeed, gerrymandering has sometimes been used simply to support incumbents of either party
against challengers. In the past 15 years, however, that has radically changed, with the rise of extremely
partisan redistricting plans rammed through against all concerns by Republican state legislatures around
the country. In the 2012 elections, Pennsylvania Democrats received 50.5 of the two-party congressional
vote and got 28% of the seats, while in North Carolina they got 31% of the seats on 51% of the vote
(Wang 2015). Results like these are becoming almost normal.

Although many redistricting plans have been subject to court challenges, which are often successful, it
has traditionally been difficult to articulate criteria for judging whether these plans are excessively
gerrymandered. Some states have applied spatial criteria like contiguity (you can walk from one point in
a district to any other without crossing a line) and compactness, as well as political criteria like
preservation of communities of interest (see e.g. Levitt 2017). Unfortunately, since what matters for
equity in political representation is people, not land, it is entirely possible for the strange-looking
districts that proliferate in most accounts of gerrymandering to provide more equity than nice
rectangular districts. Preservation of communities is not always applicable as a criterion, especially
where definitions of shared interest become themselves politically contested.

Fortunately, several more useful criteria have been adapted from the academic literature for use in
court battles. The simplest are the mean-median difference and the efficiency gap. Before explaining
them, its useful to go through the basic principles of equity in electoral outcomes.

In normal winner-take-all elections, where the winner wins the seat even if she only got 50.1% of the
vote and the loser gets nothing even if he got 49.9%, the match between votes and electoral outcomes
is often poor; its rare that getting x percent of the vote leads getting x percent of elected officials. In
fact, suppose that Republicans were 40% of the population, evenly spread so that each (lets say)
congressional district had the same composition, and that Republicans always voted for the Republican
nominee and Democrats for the Democratic; then, with a consistent 40% of the vote Republicans would
get no seats in Congress.

The same logic applies to racial minorities. Even after the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, white-
dominated state legislatures often drew electoral districts in such a way that electing black political
candidates was difficult or impossible. In 1986, in Thornburg v. Gingles, the Supreme Court struck down
a North Carolina law that diluted minority representation, effectively compelling creation of districts in
which racial minorities, particularly African-Americans, could elect minority candidates. As a result,
today there are 46 African-Americans in the House of Representatives, 10.6% of the total number of
representatives, while African-Americans make 13.2% of the population (they do much worse relative to
population in the Senate and elsewhere).

While accepting the need for racial minorities to be represented among elected officials, Republican-
dominated state legislatures have often tried to minimize representation, through packing, where
lines are drawn so that districts arent just 50% nonwhite but 70 0or 80 or 90%, and through cracking,
where minority pockets large enough to influence elections1 are split apart by redistricting into smaller
and less consequential groups.

In recent years, gerrymandering by Republicans, while still often primarily racial in nature, has been
specifically directed at altering partisan outcomes, rather than racial ones. After the controversial 2003
Texas redistricting (the second in less than a decade), Texass congressional delegation was majority
Republican for the first time since Reconstruction21-11, almost 2-1 although the Congressional vote
was 58% Republican to 39% Democratic, which is about 1.5-1. The 2011 redistricting, which split Austin,
a liberal bastion, across multiple districts that extend over hundreds of miles in different directions to
include enough conservative voters to counterbalance the ones from Austin, had to be redrawn by a
court in 2013; even the amended plan has made the current congressional delegation 25-11 Republican
on a 57% to 37% vote disparity. A panel of the federal court for the Western District of Texas recently
ruled that some boundaries in the original 2011 plan violated the Thornburg ruling by intentionally
diluting minority votes (Diaz and Ward 2017).

The Supreme Court recently struck down parts of North Carolinas redistricting for racial violations,
adding to its earlier vacation of lower court rulings upholding racially-biased redistricting in Virginia and
Alabama (Barnes 2017). The defense tried to preserve North Carolinas plan by arguing that it was based
purely on partisan gerrymandering concerns, with no explicit reference to race, an argument that was
found to be inaccurate. In general, while gerrymandering to minimize minority representation is
generally considered illegitimate by the courts, there has been no such consensus on partisan
gerrymandering.

Wisconsins 2011 redistricting (Act 43) was a blatantly partisan redrawing of the map, which has led,
among other things, to Republicans getting 5 out of 8 (62.5%) of seats in the House even though they
won less than half (49%) of the congressional vote, and a 64-35 advantage in the State Assembly even
though a majority of Assembly votes were Democratic. Given that Wisconsins population is 87% white,
little of the effect, especially in the Assembly, can be due to racial gerrymandering.

In 2015, UW-Madison professor William Whitford joined 11 other Wisconsin voters in challenging Act 43
on the grounds that its partisan effects violated the 14th Amendments guarantee of equal protection
(the case was originally Whitford v. Nichol, but it has been renamed Whitford v. Gill). The criterion they
used to judge the redistricting plan was the efficiency gap, a new idea first floated in the University of
Chicago Law Review (Stephanopoulos and McGhee 2015). It compares wasted votes across the
partisan divide: for the loser of an election, all votes are counted as wasted, while for the winner only

1
Since voting is never strictly along racial lines, a concentration of 30% racial minorities is often be enough to
enable election of minority candidates
those votes above 50% are wasted. So, if the election is 60% Republican to 40% Democrat, the winner
has a wasted vote count of 10% and the loser 40%. The gap between the two is +30 in the Democratic
direction. Given a districting plan, add up all the gaps (with signs), then divide by the number of districts.
According to the analysis done by Stephanopoulos and McGhee of a number of state election results, a
resulting efficiency gap of over 8% suggests that the plan is illegitimately partisan.

The first partisan gerrymandering case to go to federal trial in 30 years, in 2016, Whitford v. Gill saw a
three-judge panel of the federal court for the Western District of Wisconsin give the plaintiffs a
favorable ruling, striking down Act 43 and later, in January 2017, sending the plan back to the legislature
to be redone. The decisions have been appealed to the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide whether
it will hear the case.

An academic study of Wisconsins redistricting (Krasno et al. 2016) used 10,000 simulations of assembly
maps drawn based on census blocks without using any information about party demographics and
concluded that the plan was illegitimate based on considering the mean-median difference.2 If you take
all of the districts and rank them in order by (say) the Democratic vote percentage, look at the
percentage in the district thats in the middle of the list (if there are an even number of districts, take
the average of the percentage for the middle two districts). That is the median Democratic vote under
the plan. The mean is just the average of the Democratic votes over all the districts. If the mean is
greater than the median, it means the distribution of votes is skewed at the high end, which is to say
that Democrats have been subjected to packing. If its much greater than the median, the packing is
excessive.3 The mean-median difference isnt nearly as good at detecting cracking.

Krasno et al. also found that

under the current boundaries, the Democrats would have to do almost as well as Obama did in 2008,
likely winning about 55 or 56% of the statewide vote for the party to have a chance to carry the median
district and win control of the State Assembly. Conversely, the Republicans need to win only about 44 or
45% of the statewide vote to maintain their control of the Assembly. (op. cit.:17)

Disentangling the effect of natural gerrymandering based on differences in population distributions

and deliberate gerrymandering, they conclude that most likely only half of the effect is natural:

The Assembly map in use in Wisconsin essentially costs Democratic voters 2-3 percentage points of the
vote vis--vis the goal of winning a majority of seats, above and beyond the effect of residential patterns
in the state. (ibid.)

Normally, in elections, things swing back and forth so that different parties take their turn at getting the
short end of the stick with regard to the relation between vote share and representation. Thats part of
democracy and, as long as things balance out over several election cycles, its not a big problem. The

2
They also found on the basis of their neutral maps that the efficiency gap is a problematic measure of
gerrymandering.
3
The party that wins the median district is the party that controls that house of the legislature.
new plans, however, indicate a focused intent to build a massive, permanent skew that is all in favor of
one party.

There are two kinds of remedies, those which deal with processlike what kind of body decides on
redistricting plansand those which deal with criteria for judging a plan, like mean-median difference
and efficiency gap. There are also two principles that need to be upheldracial equity and partisan
equity, which, although they are strongly correlated, are not the same thing.

In its ruling on Whitford v. Gill, the federal panel declined to find for the plaintiffs recommendation that
judges rather than the state legislature be responsible for coming up with a new redistricting plan. While
the judiciary is likely not the ideal place for plans to be drawn up, increasingly partisan state legislatures
are certainly not. There are other options: Iowa has a three-person nonpartisan commission do its
redistricting plan after the census, making no reference to politics and only considering seemingly
neutral criteria like contiguity and compactness (Jan 2013). If Iowa can do it, so can Wisconsin.
Wisconsin needs its redistricting done by a neutral, nonpartisan commission that includes political
science experts on gerrymandering, and its plans then need to be judged retroactively based on
evaluating election results according to efficiency gap, mean-median difference, and possibly more
mathematically-sophisticated measures; if the plan doesnt measure up on partisan or racial lines, then
it needs to be redone before the next election.

The proliferation of extreme partisan redistricting plans undermines the fundamental basis of
democracy. Voters should choose their legislators; legislators should not be able to choose their voters.

References

Barnes, Robert. 2017. Supreme Court Rules Race Improperly Dominated N.C. Redistricting Efforts.
Washington Post. Accessed May 23.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-rules-race-improperly-
dominated-nc-redistricting-efforts/2017/05/22/c159fc70-3efa-11e7-8c25-
44d09ff5a4a8_story.html.
Diaz, Kevin, and Mike Ward. 2017. Ruling Bolsters Democrats Redistricting Fight. Houston Chronicle,
March 11. http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Ruling-
bolsters-Democrats-redistricting-fight-10995521.php.
Jan, Tracy. 2013. Iowa Redistricting Takes Partisanship out of Mapmaking. BostonGlobe.com,
December 8. https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/12/08/iowa-redistricting-
takes-partisanship-out-mapmaking/efehCnJvNtLMIAFSQ8gp7I/story.html.
Krasno, Jonathan S., Daniel Magleby, Michael D. McDonald, Shawn Donahue, and Robin E. Best. 2016.
Can Gerrymanders Be Measured? An Examination of Wisconsins State Assembly. SSRN
Scholarly Paper ID 2783144. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2783144.
Levitt, Justin. 2017. All About Redistricting -- Where the Lines Are Drawn. Loyola Law School. Accessed
May 23. http://redistricting.lls.edu/where-state.php.
Stephanopoulos, Nicholas O., and Eric M. McGhee. 2015. Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency
Gap. The University of Chicago Law Review 82 (2): 831900.
Wang, Sam. 2015. Let Math Save Our Democracy. The New York Times, December 5.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/opinion/sunday/let-math-save-our-democracy.html.