Nothing is going to get done about the abuses in Congressional redistricting that almost certainly going to take place next year, especially now that the GOP has seized the whip hand in so many states with victories in gubernatorial and state legislature races. As Aaron Blake reported yesterday in The Washington Post, “When the next round of redistricting — the decennial re-drawing of all 435 House districts — occurs next year, Republicans will have complete control over the process in four times as many House districts as Democrats do, districts that comprise nearly half of the entire House.” By the Post’s projections, Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature in at least 17 states, which are projected to contain 196 of the House’s 435 districts next Congress, while Democrats will hold all three redistricting legs in five to 10 states, which could draw as few as 26 districts or as many as 88.
Why is this important? Because the state legislators draw the districts, and they are likely to draw the districts in ways that create large advantages for the party in power. And often these districts are drawn in strange and convoluted ways to bolster and protect that party in power in exaggerated ways. Gerrymandering, it’s called, and it is a force multiplier, and usually it mocks the requirement that a district be contiguous (See maps of, top to bottom, Illinois’ 4th district; North Carolina’s 12th; New York’s 28th, and Pennsylvania’s 18th).
This is not good if you are a Democrat, as I am, but it’s not good if you are a Republican, either. Monopolies are bad for consumers, and safe seats are monopolies. Let’s say that you like Coke, and that you never drink anything else. It is nonetheless entirely to your advantage to have a strong, healthy Pepsi competing with Coke. Pepsi will make sure Coke keeps its prices low, and that Coke works hard to make its product widely available. Pepsi will work hard to come up with new products and promotions, and you can be confident that even if you don’t buy them, Coke will eventually come up with similar products and promotions to please you.
Same deal with politics. When a party is safe, it no longer tries to compete for the other side’s votes. It stagnates. It gets lazy and arrogant and corrupt. And it tends to play to its core constituency, which means that more attention gets paid to the fringes of the party, and much less to the middle.
If you ever wonder why there’s so much partisan sniping in politics today, look at the safe seats created by redistricting.
Now, redistricting is an enormously complicated procedure that is governed by many rules and that has to meet a lot of worthwhile goals and guidelines. But as Chris Wilson reported in Slate this week, mathematicians have been at work trying to make the process less political and more rigorous. (Check out Slate‘s slide show of the most-gerrymanderred congressional districts.) At a recent meeting of Scientists & Engineers for America, various plans for taking the politics out of redistricting were floated. Wilson particularly admired a plan devised by an attorney named Sam Hirsch, who recommends that redistricting plans meet not only the requirements for equal population, continuity, and so forth, but three other metrics as well: County integrity (matching district lines with county lines when possible); Partisan fairness (roughly half the districts should be more Democratic than the state as a whole, while the other have should be more Republican—the system doesn’t include third parties); and Competitiveness (a little more complicated, but recalculating previous election data according to the new districts. Says Wilson, “The advantage of a plan like Hirsch’s, which draws heavily on a lot of the mathematicians’ research, is that it’s quantifiable. Once plans start rolling in, any future proposal would have to score higher on those three metrics to be considered. And it would be fairly easy to 
substitute metrics if a particular state wanted, say, to value district compactness over county integrity.”
In 2011, California will require that districts be drawn by a non-partisan body. One can only hope that it has a successful effort that will inspire other states to change their procedures in time for 2020. In the meantime, a careful scrutiny of the gerrymandering antics of 2011 is the next order of business.
Hirsch is realistic about the odds that many states would adopt his plan wholesale (though his plan includes a sample constitutional amendment just in case), and it would take years for today’s computers even to run the numbers on every possible plan. But the basic idea that districts can be rigorously quantified as to their competitiveness, bizarreness, congruity with media markets, racial enfranchisement—or any number of other metrics—is a potent one. Once plans can be evaluated according to measures that everyone can agree with, at least in principle, one needs only some form of competition to find the one that satisfies all parties reasonably equally. Screw the algorithms: Let the people do the heavy lifting.