| Popis: |
For most of US history, the federal government let states conduct congressional elections with only minimal interference. This changed with Congress’s passage of the Voting Rights Act (1964) and the Supreme Court’s one-man-one-vote (“OMOV”) decision in Carr (1965). Yet even then the Supreme Court stopped short of overruling gerrymandered congressional districts. Fifteen years ago, Justice Kennedy acknowledged that workable approaches still did not exist, but challenged litigants to do better. The Supreme Court’s devastating opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) marks the end of this experiment. The question remains whether some fresh departure can satisfy the Court’s objections. This paper investigates the leading candidates. The most conservative possibility is to tighten traditional visual criteria like “contiguity” and “compactness” to make them binding. We present detailed numerical arguments showing that such rules would have to be so stringent as to deprive legislators of practically all discretion in drawing lines. This, however, would split communities at random. We argue that this (a) violates OMOV just as a deliberate gerrymander would, and (b) disrupts grassroots networks that voters rely on to educate themselves, making votes less valuable to those who cast them. It follows that OMOV is always improved by replacing random districting with determinate rules that track communities. Our second candidate implements this strategy. Remarkably, recent social science research shows (a) that education and social pressure across voters play an important role in shaping community opinion, and (b) that the probability of such interactions between voters can be reliably estimated from an inverse square law. We describe a new open source software program that uses these insights to track community and test it against county-level population data from Texas. We show that the resulting maps are visually similar to those produced by legislatures; are fully determinate; efficiently balance OMOV constraints against respect for community; and are robust against manipulation. The chief downside is that some districts are discontinuous, although this is rare and could be mitigated even further. In the meantime, our algorithm provides a valuable safe harbor for States hoping to avoid future court challenges, an attractive model for reform legislation, and a transparent benchmark for exposing gerrymanders to public scrutiny. |
