Organizers perform a skit about rotten eggs cracking to portray key Texas Republicans attempting to gerrymander the state at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater in Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 16.Richard H. Grant/The Associated Press
‘So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
That’s what President Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021. The Republican was in charge of overseeing the federal election in his state, which had been held nearly two months earlier and by then should have been ancient history. But the election had a fatal flaw, at least from Mr. Trump’s perspective: he had lost.
In Georgia, a swing state where three million people had cast ballots, the incumbent had fallen short by 11,780 votes. In a one-hour call, the President asked Mr. Raffensperger to “give me a break,” and “find” the needed votes. The official – raised in Canada and a graduate of the University of Western Ontario – refused. Later that month, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president.
So much for ancient history. This summer, when President Trump asked Texas legislators to find him five more Republican seats in next year’s midterm congressional elections, they hopped right to it. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Texas House passed a partisan gerrymander, which the Governor is expected to sign into law on Friday. If voters vote exactly as they did in 2024, Republicans will move from taking 25 of 38 Texas districts in the U.S. House of Representatives to winning 30 of 38 next fall.
In response, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, aims to redraw his state’s maps to deprive the GOP of five seats. Former president Barack Obama endorsed that approach on Tuesday, at a fundraising event for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Fun fact: Until now, the group’s purpose was to advocate against gerrymandering. California, with a law mandating that its electoral boundaries be drawn by non-partisan and independent commissions, just like Canada, was a model.
Other states, blue and red, are preparing to join the fight. Republican-controlled states will draw maps aimed at ensuring that Mr. Trump retains control of Congress after the midterms; states with Democratic majorities will aim for the opposite. It’s not clear who will win but American democracy is already the loser.
The U.S. Supreme Court decades ago constitutionalized the rule that congressional districts must have equal populations. That’s why Texas Republicans cannot boost their party’s seat total by creating a big Democrat-leaning district with one million voters, and a slew of red rotten boroughs with just 100,000 voters each.
But state legislatures – which draw maps for federal elections, unlike Canadian provinces – can “pack” or “crack” districts held by the other party. Packing Democratic voters into one district creates one safe seat that Democrats will win by a massive margin, while upping the margin of safety for Republican candidates in surrounding districts. The reverse involves cracking up a seat held by one of the parties, and distributing its voters among districts where the other party is strong. Successful gerrymandering often involves a mix of both approaches.
The U.S. has a long history of crazy electoral maps. To take just one example, Texas’s 35th congressional district, a safe Democratic seat created by the Republican legislature, looks like a golf club. The base of the club is a minority-heavy part of the city of San Antonio, while the head is more than 100 kilometres away, in Austin. The two sections are joined by a long, slim section running the length of the highway between them.
In Canada, independent electoral commissions, led by a judge, draw up riding boundaries at the federal level. It’s not perfect but it’s not partisan. Nobody is trying to draw the map in order to maximize or minimize the number of members of any party.
The Canadian system’s major flaw is that, through a combination of political practice and constitutional rules, we’ve moved away from rep-by-pop in the House of Commons. The voters of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta are under-represented, and it’s getting worse; the voters of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the territories and Atlantic Canada are overrepresented. (Quebec is right in the middle.)
Beyond that, however, when it comes to Canadian federal elections, independent bodies draw new maps every decade, based on the census, and then it’s up to voters to pick their politicians.
Gerrymandering is the opposite, with politicians picking their voters. And a lot more American politicians are going to be doing that in the coming months, either in furtherance of Mr. Trump’s goal of retaining control of Congress by any means necessary, or in an attempt to block him. An arms race of election-rigging is coming.
No one can predict what the final result will be. But I wouldn’t put my money on better government.