By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | A few years ago, The Supreme Court of the United States ruled against having gerrymandering cases, no matter how unfair, brought into the Federal Courts. This decision exacerbates the political fighting at the state level, gutting voting rights and unfairly removing decision making from the voters and transferring it to “those who would manipulate maps for their own political gain.”
Upon the release of the decision, the non-profit Brennan Center correctly predicted that Georgia and three other Southern states controlled by the Republican Party (Texas, North Carolina and Florida) would be the battleground states for gerrymandering. According to them, “the country saw some of the most gerrymandered maps in its history.”
Some states have enacted laws to make the process more equitable. However, this has not happened in Georgia, Texas, Florida and North Carolina. They have been solid red in past years but are becoming bluer, slowly but surely. And that fact scares the GOP leadership on the national, state and local levels.
Georgia, a big state with rapidly changing demographics, is a GOP top gerrymandering priority. And so is voter suppression, aimed at Democrats (especially Latinos and Blacks).
Once upon a time, gerrymandering was a hit-and-miss proposition. But no more. With simple computers, districts can be gerrymandered down to the block level. (The result is often a splitting of normal political and city boundaries.) In most states, including Georgia, any want-to-be candidate can go to the Capitol, where a staff member will assist them in creating various geographic scenarios to help get them elected. In effect, it is the candidate choosing who he wants to vote for him, instead of the people picking who they want to vote for. I’ve personally seen the process in action in Atlanta.
In the above four states, gerrymandering means having very high concentrations of Democrats in a few districts while spreading out the rest of the democratic vote in the remaining districts (the majority of districts) to get more Republicans elected. It subverts the will of the voters by making the impact of each vote unequal.
Existing maps of Georgia House districts illustrate how this plays out, giving the GOP an unfair advantage despite voter preferences. In Georgia, 49 percent of the vote went for Trump, but 64 percent of Georgia representatives are Republican. Democrats have only five Congressional seats out of 14, rather than seven.
In fact, the same is true in the other three states. In Texas, Trump received 52 percent of the 2020 presidential vote. Yet, the GOP has 25 of Texas’ U.S. 38 House seats (66 percent)…rather than 19 (50 percent). And in Florida 51 percent of the vote was for Trump, but 71 percent of their House Reps are Republicans. That’s a major over-balance in all three states!
Only in North Carolina is the number of Representatives proportionate (50 percent of votes went for Trump, 50 percent of Congressmen are Republican). If the number of Congressmen were proportional to the GOP/Democrat vote ratio in the three other key swing states, the Democrats would control the 2023 House rather than the GOP.
That’s the power of gerrymandering; it circumvents a fair vote.
There is only one way to solve the problem of gerrymandering. And that is to put Supreme Court justices in place who will support democracy rather than their right-wing activist ideology. And that means having more Democrats in the U.S. Senate to confirm appointments, along with a Democrat as president to nominate reasonable people rather than ideologues.
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