Walter Olson
Number thirteen in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy:
As I’ve written many times, Congress could use its Article I, Section 4 authority to curb most of the evils of US House gerrymandering, and in a relatively party-neutral way, too, with prescribed compactness formulas (subject to a variance margin) as a good start. Such reforms could include restraints on mid-decade redistricting when not ordered by a court. So why does nothing ever happen? In recent years, Republicans were flatly against reform, figuring they’d do better (forever?) with a free hand at drawing districts. Democrats, meanwhile, pushed complicated bills reflecting academic priorities and attempting to harmonize the demands of interest group constituents. At Election Law Blog, Richard Pildes quotes pointed observations from David Shor about how internal Democratic politics in 2021 led to a vast overemphasis on purported “suppression” issues, which tended to unite the party even if their impact would be minor in practice, as opposed to gerrymandering reform, a bigger-yield reform that “large sections of the Democratic caucus were quietly against.”
I believe fair districting is first and foremost a manifestation of state lawmakers’ duty to their own states’ citizens, which is why I don’t buy the “just war” rationalization for gerrymandering as a countermeasure against politicians in other states who are intent on doing it. Speaking of which, in states like California, New York, and Maryland, there are distinct legal and sometimes state-constitutional impediments to House gerrymanders, retaliatory or otherwise. By contrast, the very bad proposed Texas Jigsaw Massacre, which bids to move an epic number of Texans into new districts, falls in the awful-but-lawful category given the Lone Star State’s total lack of legal curbs on gerrymandering, aside from the federal population-equality and Voting Rights Act constraints. [Sam Wang]
Officials in Colorado’s Fremont and Weld counties say a man who spoke of White House connections “made a specific request: Would they give a third party access to their election equipment? “Both declined. “‘Not only is that a hard no, I mean, you’re not even going to breathe on my equipment,’ [Carly] Koppes said.” [Fredreka Schouten, CNN]
Listen to Cato’s panel from last week on lessons of the NYC Democratic mayoral primary for ranked choice voting and other election reforms. Panelists included Megan McArdle, John Ketcham, and David Daley (follow links to read writings from each). Adam Theo in Arlington wrote a recap.
Georgia’s state election board ruled that Lyft’s promotion of discounted rides on Election Day improperly rewarded the act of voting. The story gets even weirder from there: the board rejected a challenge to a “free rideshare to the polls” program that did have indications of partisan intent. [Stephen Richer]
Trump’s scheme to redo the census minus illegal aliens, whose unconstitutionality, given the 14th Amendment, we noted last month, would not actually redistribute many House seats from blue to red states, David Bier found in this Cato piece last year. Its bigger political impact, if for some reason the courts were to uphold it, would probably consist in redistributing representation from some areas to others within given states.