I have been volunteering on voter protection issues for a very long time. One of the key provisions of the Manchin proposal is the elimination of partisan gerrymandering. I have testified before the Texas state house and Senate committees a while back on the Texas redistricting plans and had fun following the Texas redistricting case. MALDEF used part of my testimony to contest the state house maps in my county which were heavily gerrymandered, but the court was unable to do anything due to the SCOTUS ruing set forth below. I first heard of the efficiency gap theory a while back from a presentation by Chad Dunn (the lawyer who won the Texas voter id/voter suppression case) and this concept is in effect a major part of the Manchin proposal
Racial gerrymandering has been illegal for a while but the SCOTUS has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not covered by the Voting Rights Act https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/731847977/supreme-court-rules-partisan-gerrymandering-is-beyond-the-reach-of-federal-court
In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.
The ruling puts the onus on the legislative branch, and on individual states, to police redistricting efforts.
"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."
Trump Threatens Census Delay After Supreme Court Leaves Citizenship Question Blocked
Roberts noted that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution.
Partisan gerrymanding is a method where districts are drawn so that Democratic voters are packed into districts with large majorities while republican districts are drawn so to maximize the number of seats won by GOP candidates
Republicans managed to both maximize their advantage and minimize Democratic power by drawing district lines to pack as many Democrats as possible into three districts, and then cracking other potentially Democratic districts in half or thirds, diluting the Democratic vote to create safe Republican districts.
The League of Women Voters, one of the challengers in the case, pointed out that the GOP had even split predominantly Democratic Greensboro so that half of the dorms at historically black North Carolina A&T State University were put in one Republican district, and half in another.
You can combat partisan gerrymandering with a concept called the efficiency gap where one attempts to draw districts so that GOP and Democratic voters are in effect spread more equitably. Here is a brief explanation of this concept by the Brennan Center
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work/How_the_Efficiency_Gap_Standard_Works.pdf
The efficiency gap is a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering that is currently at the heart
of the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Whitford v. Nichol.
Developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and
Eric McGhee, Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, the efficiency gap counts
the number of votes each party wastes in an election to determine whether either party enjoyed a
systematic advantage in turning votes into seats.2 Any vote cast for a losing candidate is considered
wasted, as are all the votes cast for a winning candidate in excess of the number needed to win.
Here is another explanation of this concept
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/03/upshot/how-the-new-math-of-gerrymandering-works-supreme-court.html
The Supreme Court is considering a gerrymandering case in Wisconsin. At the core of the debate is a new way to measure gerrymandering. Here’s the simple math behind it. RELATED ARTICLE
Ever since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy left the door open to a “workable standard” to limit partisan gerrymandering, political scientists have sought to construct a measure to satisfy him. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will test whether they’ve pulled it off.
At the center of the case is the “efficiency gap,” a relatively new measure of partisan gerrymandering. A federal court in Wisconsin ruled in November that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature had discriminated against Democratic voters, and it partly relied on the efficiency gap to find that the Wisconsin State Assembly map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
Whether it’s persuasive to Justice Kennedy — expected to be the key swing vote in the case — is another matter. The efficiency gap is not a perfect measure. But it would probably address many of gerrymandering’s problems, with few downsides.
The Manchin proposal on getting rid of partisan gerrymanding is a major deal. This one proposal would make a major difference in the real world
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