Gerrymandering: How to Stifle Democracy

dude jokes. Sure, sure, because I think our senses of humor decline, we get less funny. Look at Jim gaff again, but we think we're funnier, right, hot pockets. Actually, I tease Jim, I I love your work. Oh are your pals? No? Okay, no, but I do of his work. I'm just a fan. Yeah. Um, like, like absolutely zero, there's zero not to like about Jim gaff Agan. Um, you know my buddy Jim. I say he's um, he's sort of pals with him. He says he's a good guy. I like, there's no way he's not.

You know, like, you just you can't you can't, you can't make up that level of like coolness and niceness and approachability, affability, even maybe gaffability. He just went, that's genius. I'm gonna trade Marty totally as if he listens to this show. So here we're diving into politics, which we keep saying, like, let's not do that because it's political.

But this is very newsy and not everyone understands jerrymandering, and I think it's this file this under p s a because it's a big deal and it stinks and it's been going on for a long time. Yeah, it was. I'm definitely one of those people who didn't understand it. Like I knew, yeah, I had to do with drawing maps and you could draw them so that they're unfair, and I never thought, well, how do you do that? And I found out thanks to researching this episode, and

apparently it's gotten way way worse in recent years. So to understand gerrymandering, though, you have to understand a little bit about the House of Representatives. One of the two

houses of Congress, one's the Senate. One is the House of Representatives, and Webster's defines right, Yeah, so the deal of the House is is that the founding fathers um invented the House or established let's say the House to be a much more sort of of the moment reactive, fair, ultra democratic group of uh governing body, and that it's

only every two years. And the idea was to have a lot of turnover and have them really uh you know, because there's four five of them, have them really uh really tied to their constituents, right, So it's just a super fair way for things that really matter to you on a smaller level are heard as opposed to the Senate, which is you know, far far fewer, right. And there are a couple of ways that they did this. One,

like you said, elections are held every two years. All Congress people are up for re election every two years, and they're they're elected directly by the people they represent. And when they started, I think there was sixty five seats in the House of Representatives, and by twelve I think it was up to four d and thirty five.

And they added seats because they established the House of Representatives to to represent a set proportion of um population population, So each congress person represents one chunk of America from their state, right. So the larger and large America grew the more and more congress people you needed, and then finally in nineteen twelve, they said, uh, we can't do the same more. We're just gonna if you have too many congress people, they're going to Um, you're not gonna

be able to do anything. It's just going to be too many. Right, So they kept it at four and

thirty five. And that does something. It's it it means that if you have a state that keeps growing, because it's not like America stopped growing in population in nineteen twelve, So as your population keeps growing, that means that as one state keeps growing proportionately speaking, that means another state is smaller, whether people move from that state to the other larger state or the other larger state just by

contrast attractive more people. That means that the smaller state or the one that didn't grow as much, is going to actually lose congressional seats, and that the bigger seats or the bigger state, the one that's growing, will actually gain congressional seats. Because again, a congress person represents a set amount of American public from their home state, and right now it's about seven I think the average is seven hundred and eleven thousand people is how many people

a congress person represents in the US today. Yeah, and they did this through what's called the Reapportionment Act, of which basically set up all right, here's an automatic system. Now every ten years, we do a census, and they will just redistribute and allocate seats according to that census every ten years. And like you said, if you're growing, we're gonna nip some away from the places that aren't

growing or shrinking. And it was, you know, it seemed like a pretty fair way to redistribute and allocate these uh, these seats. It is. It's extremely fair. And so as a result, you've got like Montana that the whole state has one congressional district that represents about a million people, whereas New York State has, which is a third of the size of Montana, has twenty seven congress congressional districts and hence seats in Congress. Right, it's a very fair system.

Here's the problem when the Census Bureau figures out all these figures and they say, well, this state actually should get two new congress people, and you know, this state should lose one and another state loses one. Um, they have to redraw the maps of the state to show what these new districts are because population is shifted every over the ten years since the last census, so you have to update the maps to make sure that they each congress person is representing roughly the same number of

people and so everybody is accounted for. Again makes sense, right, Yeah, But the problem came in when they were very vague as far as the rules for drawing these boundaries. Uh. It says something like geographically can geographically contiguous, compact in shape,

roughly equal in population. All these things are subjective, so when partisan politics become involved, the people that redraw these maps, it seems, can't help themselves but be like, hey, if we move over ten blocks this way, and like a couple of miles that way, and shape it like this, which looks really weird, but hey, that's okay because these rules are vague, then we you know, even though there may be a majority of one party, we could still

win if we draw this thing the right way, right. Like. The big problem with this whole process for apportioning the House of Representative seats is that they left in each state the dominant political party who happened to be in power at the time when the maps need to be redrawn, it was left up to them. There's no federal oversight, there's no there's no oversight whatsoever. And the whole premise of it was, well, okay, um, the voters will see

what they're doing and will vote those guys out. The problem is, if you control the congressional maps, you can draw them in such a way that even the voters can't vote you out. And this is jerrymandering. And this is the current state of politics right now and has been for a very long time. Actually, we've been jerrymandering for a while, but again, like I said, supposedly it's gotten way worse in the last decade. Yeah, all right, I'm a little worked up already. Yep, you've got a Interestingly,

you're crying blood. I'm trying not to, but it's not helping. So we're gonna take a little break and maybe let's jump back and talk history, if that's right with you. I would love that, Chuck, and then we will go back forward in time to study the current mess that we're in right after this. Sorry, huh, all right, we're in the way back machine. Yeah, it's Virginia ratifies. It's

ratifies the Constitution of the US. And former Governor Patrick Henry convinces his state legislators to redraw the fifth Congressional District to force his foe, James Madison, to run against James Monroe, because he figured he could easily win. It backfired on him. Madison came out on top. But this kind of kick started at the onset of our founding in our country in the Constitution, the process of jerrymandering, even though at that point it wasn't quite known as

jerrymandering yet, No, it wasn't. It was known as jerrymandering after I think eight the eighteen twenties, I believe, and the governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Jerry eighteen twelve, Um Elbridge Jerry, who was he was the governor of Massachusetts, right correct? He um came up with a map that he drew to help keep his party, the Democrat Republicans, I think, which is beyond confusing, right but Um, he drew a

map that was just abhorrent. It was just so clearly partisan and drawn just to keep his his party in power in Massachusetts. But I think the Boston Gazette published a picture of this map and proclaimed that it looked like a salamander, and so they said, this isn't a salamander, this is a jerrymander, which is a million times worse because it's politically toxic and a lizard. I love that

little tidbit, but that's where the name came from. Yeah, it had never had any idea, but that's where jerrymandering came from. Not a pretty word, but it definitely rolls off the tongue like a um oil. So it grew to be a very common practice and very blatant, and Congress at one point early on in two tried to get it under control with that Apportionment Act that I talked about um and that said, you know those vague things like let's draw these thing as contiguous and compact

as possible. But it just apparently no one, I guess. The rules were so vague and outlined in such a nebulous manner that there was no way to enforce it, such that at one point they carved out two separate states North and South Dakota. Uh the Republican can controlled Congress so they could get more seats in the Senate Yeah, at the time, if you were a state, you had three electoral College votes, don't matter your size or anything

like that. And the Dakota territories were Republican leaning, so the Republicans said, hey, you guys, welcome to the Union. And by the way, we're going to carve you into two states. So now we have six electoral votes rather than just the three if you were one big state. Yeah, pretty clever, pretty sky says. So. Um. One thing that this article, I think this is a Patrick Kiger article, I think it's smart to point out is that this

is not just a Republican technique. This has been done throughout history by both the parties UM, both the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans apparently also the Democratic Republicans and UM two to the same effect, which is, we're drawing these maps to make sure that you guys don't have a fighting chance in the next congressional elections. Right.

I did some digging though, because I was curious about these days, like who, um It's interesting because you can say who is worse with jerry mandering, or more correctly, maybe who was better at jerry mandering as far as getting it pushed through more, and every political science and mathematician will tell you that, uh, across the board sort of Republicans are are either better at it or doing it way more or that the the recent elections over the last I think like three or so have have

favored the GOP in ways that they ended up with something like twenty extra seats that they wouldn't have otherwise had had the maps not been jerrymandered. Yeah. And then in some of these I think Maryland was one case where even though it was at Maryland where the Democrats held like a majority, yet they the maps are drawn in such a way that they would have to get like an eight to ten point Oh I'm sorry this Wisconsin. Yeah, Wisconsin an eight to ten point victory in order to

overcome those jerrymandering maps. Yeah, which is it's just not going to happen because Wisconsin is pretty close to being um down the middle. And that's actually a really good example of the modern jerrymandering that's going on. Like Patrick Group points out, when you think of jerryman doing this kind of thing, you think of like guys like in a back room smoking cigars and like like poking each other in the chest say and this this is my district, and you can have this one that kind of thing.

But this is actually like they're very specialized political consultants who go around the country after each census and help states draw their maps. Um, and they're there. They do so with like really sophisticated software that has like block level census data, so like just like by the block, the people who live on a block, they can carve it out like that so that they can more accurately create these maps. And then when they create these maps,

they can create dozens as many as you want. And when they when they use them as a model, they can feed them into their their computers and run a simulation of future elections based on this map. It's and then they can this is why it's gotten so bad. And then they can and um, just take this block out. What happens if we take this blackout and put this one in instead, And now all of a sudden, oh well, we'll win for the next ten years. And they have

this this map. And the reason that I started talking about this apparently Wisconsin has a map that's in effect right now that is so well done that even if the the Democrats get fifty of the vote statewide, the Republicans would still control sixty seats in the in the state Assembly, that they would not lose any seats whatsoever

even if the Democrats got the vote. Yeah. And um, the one kind of um, the one thing where it kind of stings them, even though there haven't been any real repercussions yet, is that one political scientist said, it's getting so sophisticated though, and they're drawing these maps in such a weird way that you can then go back and look and say, this is clearly an outlier because this thing looks like a uh, sidewinder rattlesnake across the

state and that is neither contiguous or compact. And it's just so obvious what's going on, because you're using these computer programs to just distort these maps to your favor. Uh. And this is where I just get so burned up on both sides because it's it just completely subverts the process in place, which is you were supposed to be able to vote for the person that represents you in that vote count. I'm glad you said that, man, because it's absolutely true. This is not like lip service, like

both sides to it. So we're mad about it now like this is this is genuinely like neither side of this should be doing this. This is a inherent flaw in the political system that back in the day, when things were different, we could get along with it. It

was a stumbling block. It was kind of kind of hamstrung the democratic process some Now with a couple of things, Uh, it has gone into hyperdrive, like so many things have, like like normal political weirdness put through certain filters, like incredibly powerful computer programs that just hyper tailor things like this. That's a big problem. The other problem is the the polarization of politics to a degree that it hasn't been

for well over a century or so. That has made jerrymandering all the worse because before you could jerrymander all you want, and but there were such things as moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans and if it was a reasonable piece of legislation, they would cross the aisle to vote for it. They would break ranks. That does not exist anymore. If you're a moderate ten within the last ten years,

wealthy interests basically carved you out. They created um, they created upstart political parties to run against you in the primaries, so you would lose your seat or your national convention would collude with their favorite candidate against you. There's no middle any longer. So the fact that they're the current political power, whoever is in charge of that state can jerrymander makes it all the worse because it just makes those divisions even deeper because the parties get what they

want one way or the other. There's no middle ground anymore. So jerrymandering has become a real real problem in the century. Well, yeah, and it's just the other thing that burns me up is is it's just a a smack in the face of the average citizen. Yeah, it's done behind closed doors with zero thought to geez, what is this country supposed to be about? And it's just it just really burns me up. There was a report last year by the Brennan Center for Justice, and this just really kind of

shows exactly what's going on. It's not like we needed this proof, but almost all jerrymander districts in this country are in seven states Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Texas, in Virginia and Texas aside, what are those other states have in common? With one another. I don't know. They're the swing states. Oh yeah, yeah, so the swing states have been lost as a result of jerrymandering. Huh yeah. Those those those seven states are where these jerryman did

jerrymander districts are happening, and they're all swing states. It's just like it's little. It's literally they're going in and targeting. How can we rig this thing as much as possible? Right, It's just it's disgusting. Plus also, the next time you hear a politician um talk about the founding fathers and what they wanted in their view of everything like this, this runs so far afoul of what the framers of the Constitution we're looking for when they found when they

established the House of Representatives. It's it's mind boggling, like they're probably generating usable energy through the spinning in their graves that's going on right now. Because they created the House of Representative Representatives so that there would be, like you said, Chuck, turnover every couple of years that they were the pulse of the people there. They were elected directly by the people. They were meant to be the

voice of the people at any given time. And the fact that jerrymandering has has been allowed to go on like this has means that there are safe seats now states where you can reasonably expect the party and maybe even a single politician to hold onto for a decade or more, which is not how it was supposed to be in the House. No, and I saw that these days in the US and in UM congressional races, maybe a hundred of the four hundred and thirty five seats

are actually competitive races. The rest have been so firmly made safe through jerrymandering over the years that they're not even competitive anymore, either that one candidate or there one party is going to control that that district. Alright, I see another trick of blood coming out of your eye this one. So let's take another break and we're gonna get come back and start up with the two main mayor jerrymandering techniques right after this. See good shock. Al Right,

So I promised talk of techniques. Um, you hear jerrymandering and redrawing maps. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. Uh, They're called cracking and packing. Cracking is when you when you scatter the political supporters across a lot of different districts so that they just never get a majority in any of them. Like, let me just snake it this way for a mile, then back down here, and we pretty much know that they're not going to get a majority and we're gonna win.

The other one's called packing, and that's when they jam everyone into just a few districts and essentially just say, fine, we're gonna lose those districts, but we're gonna win overwhelmingly everywhere else the majority of the other districts, so we're gonna be fine. Right, And cracking and packing to sound like a political consultant came up with those to explain it to legislators, and they probably thought it was like the most clever you know, get it, it rhymes even, right.

So here's the thing with that, right, you can you can use those techniques in a couple of different ways.

But but with the advent of those same computer programs that that can crack people or pack people more efficiently into all different maps or whatever, you can use the same ones to kind of expose that kind of thing, right, And so you can actually with those same computers, I think you were saying, you can use to to suppose this kind of stuff and that that political scientists you mentioned, um,

not George Nicholas Stephanopolis. I looked, I don't think they're related. Well, believe it or not, um, but the but Nicholas Stephanopolis came up with that efficiency um percentage. And so what you do, Chuck, is you let's say that we have and here's the part where I confuse everybody. You're ready, Yeah, I was waiting on this. Okay, good. So let's say that you have five districts, and you have ten people in a district, and there's just two parties. I'm already lost.

So I know I've got, I've got I'm gonna start over. I just scratched out the old stuff starting a new. When you pack a district, meaning you take basically a huge chunk of the other party supporters and put them into one or two districts, what you're doing is, like you said, you're giving up those districts. You know you're

gonna lose them. But as long as there's only a couple in the larger scheme of things, as far as Congress is concerned, you're actually coming out on top because you're going to win more because you've packed all of the opposition into just a couple of districts, right, So in any one of those districts, you have some wasted votes.

You have your people's wasted votes, because you're gonna have some people who live in that district and their votes cannot possibly change the outcome of those districts elections, so their votes are literally what they call wasted votes. You also have some of that the oppositions people's votes, because all they need is the majority of the vote or the most votes and they're gonna win. But whatever goes over that, that's wasted votes too. So there's a bunch

of wasted votes in there. And then similarly with cracking, when you dilute the other parties voters and you pack them in with your people, but you have way more people they're us are wasted, and you've got some people

whose votes are wasted either. So if you take all the wasted votes in a state and you put them together, subtract them from one another, and then divide that by a hundred, you've got what's called this efficiency percentage, and it's actually a usable number that when you look at it shows you very clearly which party is favorite, it's a negative or a positive percentage, and it will show

you whose favorite. And they're they're trying to come up with a rule of thumb now that says that anything over a seven percent efficiency percentage is is basically undemocratic and should be outlawed. That wasn't too confusing, was it okay? Not at all? Here's something that isn't confusing at all. Prison jerrymandering. This is mind blowing that this is allowed. Uh, certain states have counted prison populations as part of these

efforts to redraw these districts. Even though prisoners cannot vote, they're not eligible to vote. So there's a ward in Iowa that has fourteen hundred residents, hundred of whom are prisoners, and that counts. And only a few a few states so far have have ruled this unconstitutional. The rest are just playing ball, right, And by doing that, you give those hundred that can vote a way more power because you're actually their their vote is the opposite diluted. It's

concentrated by the addition of the non voting block. Yeah, and again, all this is happening because from the beginning, political political parties are in charge of doing this and The only thing that's going to stop this is uh, because I would think any sensible, reasonably intelligent American would say this is bad for democracy, no matter which party is doing it. And the only way to possibly break this up is to have nonpartisan commissions in charge of

redrawing these maps. Yeah, and supposedly they tried that in Canada. I guess they had rampant jerry wandering and in the sixties they said, we're done. Your political parties can't be trusted with this anywhere, because Chuck, it's as simple as that. There's no reason to put it any other way. Neither of the political parties can be trusted with this very very important task. It's just that's they've just proved it,

both of them, over and over again. And in Canada in the sixties they finally just came out and said it and put their foot down and they created a nonpartisan unelected commission who's in charge of drawing all the maps for all the districts in the whole country. Yeah, and they've tried it, uh. So far in six states California, Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Jersey, and Hawaii have passed over control h two commissions uh, and these these maps don't even need approval, final approval

from governors or state legislators. But apparently even they're like these people are appointed by somebody, so it's it's even hard to clean it up then, And they've shown that so far, like in California, I mean, it hasn't swung any elections, it has made some of them closer, So maybe it's working a little bit. It sounds like it that I think that point is worth making. Yeah, what

did the elections that historically we're not closer closer? Yeah, like like Darryl Lisa used to get like sixtent of the vote, that's what he got in two thousand ten, and once they instituted these nonpartisan commission maps in two sixteen, he got just he got he got a margin of less than one percent, so like he had a twelve percent drop in votes once they change these maps. That's significant to me. Yeah, So maybe it hasn't swung an election in California yet, but that could be a sign

that if we continue to do this, it could work. Right, But you would think chuck, Okay, so if this is just such obvious like anti constitutional, anti democracy skull dug ree of course the super fream court is going to have something to say about this, right. Yeah. That's that's where it's gotten really weird this year, is that there's a case gil versus Whitford, uh that I believe was that didn't the Supreme Court just say they're not even

gonna hear it? Yeah? They actually kicked it back down to the lower courts on a technicality, saying that the people involved hadn't shown that they have standing because they hadn't been directly harmed by it. And they said, you go prove that your vote was actually wasted because of a jerrymandered map, which actually wouldn't be that hard to do these days. Um, and and let another lower coote rule on it, and maybe we'll we'll hear it next time. But they've been punting on it. Yeah, I mean, and

that's the way our political system works. I'm not saying subvert that, but it seems like at some point we as a nation that should be able to come together and say, hey, kind of like money and dark money and stuff like, can we just clean this up? But here's the thing, Chuck, if you got jerrymander maps, even

if everybody turns against the dominant political party. You have to have like six of the vote, a massive votered voter turnout with like six of the vote voting against you to actually overwhelm the jerrymandering that that that these these maps producer, that the um the political tenacity that these jerrymandered maps produced, and you just don't have that, and what you could do it with that. But it's it's it's just as as the current political reality is,

it's just not gonna happen. And so as long as they're allowed to to keep these maps, whoever's in power whenever they redraw the maps actually gets to hang onto it. Yeah, And this is just another example of like feeling powerless because the stuff is being decided among very few people in these U closed door sessions and they I'm sure they all think they're very clever and how they're uh taking advantage of the system, like right in front of our stupid faces. And then and the Supreme Court to

not swinging in. On the one hand, it's like come on, But on the other hand, a lot of times we don't really want necessarily activist justices. It depends on the topic probably or the issue and how you feel about it, but there there. They have a long history of saying that's political, that's not constitutional. You guys, go handle it yourself.

But one thing I saw as an explanation for why the Supreme Court is yet to get involved is because there's no UH standard for what constitutes a a congressional or a state district map. There's no standard that the Supreme Court can look at and say this is the standard. This doesn't live up to that standard. Therefore we're going to rule this way. So that's why they haven't done that. But they tend more often than not to uphold maps.

Very very infrequently do they overrule them. And there was like a whole space of maps from Texas, North Carolina, Maryland, and Wisconsin that they basically said, yep, they're fine whatever. And Texas they demonstrated that these jerrymandered maps had been used to dilute the voting power of Hispanics who live in Texas and are the majority of Texas. Now they the maps have been drawn specifically with the purpose of of diluting their voting power, which goes in against the

Voting Rights Act of nine. That's one thing they say, like, you can't mess with minorities voting rights, and for a long time they said, well that includes jerrymandering. Well, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas are both um starting the I guess. Uh. In this most recent one from I think Texas, they added on their own opinions saying, we don't think the Voting Right at Rights Act actually prohibits that. And I think racial jerrymandering is totally fine under the law, which

is a big problem. Yeah, and then go back and and then that act. Yeah, you could do that, but then again you have to overcome the jerrymander right exactly. Man, it's a what do eat? What's the snake that eats and stale? What's that called? The Burrows District of Maryland probably is what you call. It's what it looks like. Oh it's depressing. Huh. Yeah. There's there's one more thing too.

This has been used actually to the opposite effect. Who I think during the first Bush administration they were really big on drawing maps that um that were called affirmative gerrymandering, which made sure that majority minority, meaning that areas where most of the people who lived there were minorities, uh, that they had very very strong voting power that it was. They went out of their way to reflect it, and they actually overreached in that way too, and and sometimes

the courts would throw those out. But um, it's it's gone both ways for sure throughout history. But it just needs to stop entirely because people aren't able to actually vote or be represented in Congress like they should be. You got anything else? Now? I see the blood has crusted up nicely from my eyes near. You settled down, worked up in this one too, you were, And I was glad. I was glad. Everybody should be worked up

about this one. Everybody. Yep. Uh. If you want to know more about jerrymandering, we'll look up this article on how stuff works. It's pretty good. Since I said it's pretty good, it's time for listener, mate, I'm gonna call this. Uh. This is a very sad one, but I'm trying to get the word out to a to a listener. Here for a listener, Um, guys. After a six year battle, my father passed away last week from a m l acute my Lloyd leukemia at only sixty five years old.

In the middle of his struggle, however, he was able to achieve about two years of remission through the help of a bone marrow stem cell treatment. While the treatment ultimately failed, his remission gave him two more years would be relatively healthy life where he was able to meet the absolute apple of his I and my new baby daughter.

Uh sorsha, Oh congratulations, love that name. She will be one year old July one, which is kind of right around when this is coming out, probably Uh, and spend time with my other two kids, Gavin and Grayson doing one of the things he loved most in the world,

which is being a grandfather. Hoping maybe you guys can give a shout out to the be The Match Bone Marrow Registry only takes a few minutes to register and they send you a little cheek swab kit that you send back in and boom, you are now eligible to get the call to possibly give someone more time with their friends and family or possibly even save their life. You can go to www dot b the match dot org and check it out. Uh, and that is from

Chris and uh row back to Chris. Very sorry to hear about his father and uh definitely definitely a worthy organization to check out. Yeah, thanks for telling everybody, Chris that's a that's a good one. I'm going to check that out myself. Yep, me too. If you want to let us know about something that we and everybody who listens to this podcast can do to make the world a better place, we really really want to know about it. You can tweet to us. You can join us on Instagram,

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