Supreme Court rulings on gerrymandering set to shape elections for the next decade by jonward11
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule this month on two gerrymandering cases that will have a massive impact on the partisan balance of American politics for the next decade.
The big question for most court watchers now is whether it is now ready to overcome its traditional hesitance to weigh in on how state officials draw election maps, which are updated every 10 years after the national census results are in. Gerrymandering is not new to American politics. The name is over 200 years old. In 1812, Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a bill in the state legislature that redrew the map for state senate seats. One of the districts was so bizarrely shaped, in an effort to give his party an advantage by filling it with voters supportive of his party, that critics likened it to a salamander.
“What operatives figured out ahead of 2010 was that it's actually much more cost-efficient to put little bits of money in cheaper state legislative races to flip control of the legislature, and then get control of the redistricting process. Once you have that power, you can draw the congressional maps however you want to advantage yourself. So it's sort of a cheaper way to achieve party domination,” he said.
The other case before the Supreme Court is the map for the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, which covers the western portion of the state. Democrats drew the district map in such a way that a three-judge panel ruled that the map violated the First Amendment because it “meaningfully burdened the targeted Republican voters’ representational rights by substantially diminishing their ability to elect their candidate of choice.
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