The Supreme Court is allowing California to use its new congressional map for this year’s midterm election, clearing the way for the state’s gerrymandered districts as Democrats and Republicans continue their fight for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The state’s voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas’ new GOP-friendly map, which President Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.
And in an unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court’s majority denied an emergency request by the California’s Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state’s GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.
Each state has their own rules and laws. I think the bigger problem is that the majority of states are run by republican legislatures so even if democrat run states went tit for tat with each map change the repugnants would have an advantage.
I wonder how much flexibility is possible with Congressional districts? Does a district even have to correlate to a geographic area? Could a state separate its districts, say, by age?
Imagine what that would look like. Each state gets the same number of districts it does otherwise. If a state has five representatives, its population pyramid would be divided into five equal-area chunks. People in each of those chunks would then vote together. So the youngest 20% vote for one representative, the next 20% vote for another, etc. The boundaries would shift automatically. There would be no possibility of an unfair district, as you’re basically just lining up your entire state’s population in a line sorted by age, dividing the line into equal chunks, and asking people in each of those groups to pick a representative. It would cancel out a lot of the effects of differing voting rates by age.