Independent redistricting needed
Published May 26, 2017
Editorial by The Winston-Salem Journal, May 23, 2017.
Here we go again. The U.S. Supreme Court rightly ruled Monday that North Carolina lawmakers relied too heavily on race when drawing two congressional districts in 2011, affirming a lower-court ruling that forced legislators to create new maps last year. But our state’s costly fights over redistricting will never end until our legislature finally approves an independent commission to draw voting districts.
Democrats, who ruled this state for generations, wrote voting maps to favor their party. Now, Republicans, who won control in 2010, are using their own maps to hold onto that control.
They’re winning.
And voters of both parties, as well as unaffiliated voters, are losing.
They’re losing because districts as drawn now greatly reduce competition in elections for both Congress and seats in the N.C. General Assembly. Many races don’t have competitive primaries. And if they do, they often produce hard-right or hard-left candidates who easily win in the General Election.
And we all lose. We lose because that system sends people to Washington and Raleigh who never find the middle, much less how to work in it. They stay on the far left or far right. Gridlock reigns and little productive gets done.
Democrats are rejoicing in Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on the First District in northeastern North Carolina and the 12th District, which snaked all the way from our city to Charlotte before the lower-court ruling last year that had it redrawn.
A Supreme Court decision is a big deal. But the bigger deal we all need is an independent commission to draw our voting maps, ending costly legal fights on this issue, and, ultimately, producing candidates who can give us the good governance we should be demanding.
http://www.journalnow.com/opinion/editorials/our-view-independent-redistricting-needed/article_40daa01a-1404-5726-af57-4664fa350bb1.html
May 26, 2017 at 1:31 pm
Richard L Bunce says:
There are no Independent Commissions. As long as people are involved and/or demographic data is used, there will be gerrymandering.
The solution then is no people or demographic data other than resident address. An open source algorithm only using resident address (by Census Block until the Federal Census bureaucrats gerrymander the Census blocks, if they have not already) to draw districts of equal population takes the gerrymandering out of the process. Here is an example...
http://bdistricting.com/2010/NC_Congress/
This would also require the USSC to clarify decades of rulings on redistricting. The current standard seems to be we will know gerrymandering when we see it... not a way to do the nations business.
