North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally Gerrymandered | Hacker News Reader

North Carolina Congressional Map Ruled Unconstitutionally Gerrymandered

nytimes.com

18 pointsstablemap6 comments

And on the other side of the aisle, this is what Democrats did in Maryland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_congressional_distr...

You're right that this is not solely a Republican issue. But it does have a partisan lean; the GOP set a deliberate target of getting control of state map drawing processes, and have substantially more gerrymanders in their favour than against, as the maps stand.

I'm from the UK, where the idea of letting politicians draw their own boundaries is anathema. We've had a standing Boundary Commission since 1944; it does a very decent job.

have substantially more gerrymanders in their favour than against

I could be wrong, but this seems to be because Republicans control more states than Democrats do.

That's certainly part of it. And part of the reason that Republicans control more states is (as TFA makes clear) that they made a particular effort to win them in order to control the mapmaking process for Congress.

I don't know which party is more likely to gerrymander (or gerrymander more shamelessly) if given the chance, though it should be calculable in principle.

While any comprehensive survey on the topic will likely show your comment to be an example of false equivalence, I cannot help but think this may be the one instance where it actually serves a useful purpose.

If, somehow, it became a common narrative that the Democratic Party was equally blatant in their abuse of the power of redistricting, finding legislative solutions to this cancer on democracy may come within reach.

I'm probably not the first to stumble upon this wisdom, as I seem to recall one of the people responsible for the map in Maryland admitting to similar reasoning along the lines "as long as it is legal, we have to use this tool so as to survive".

All parties in power strive to do this, it's neither a Republican nor a Democratic issue. It's a power issue. Unfortunately so long as humans, with a political persuasion, are tasked with drawing these maps, they will continue to maximize the power of one party over another. In some states it has led to a nearly exclusion of one party over another.

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