Redistricting

If you’ve read through the entire sequential set of posts, we hope that you’re now feeling relieved that you understand what’s going on and that the League is ON THE CASE as far as federal Congressional districts go. But then, immediately, you’re thinking: but what about all of the state-level districts??

Now we’re going to examine the state of Alabama and how things stand with our current Congressional districts. Further along in the post we’ll zoom in and examine the situation in Tuscaloosa County that has been divided between two different Congressional districts as you can see on the map (the 4th and the 7th).

Even though the judgment of LWVUS is that our option in Alabama is federal, aren’t there other things we can do? We know that the Permanent Legislative Committee on Reapportionment is tasked with drawing the new maps on the basis of the Census data. Its guidelines below indicate that any individual citizen or organization may submit redistricting plans to the committee which become part of the public record.

LWVUS believes  our best strategy in Alabama to protect voting rights is at the federal level, through legislation (e.g., the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act). The federal focus is due to several factors, including that Alabama does not allow ballot initiatives or referendums.

The good news here, and it involves a case from Alabama, is that RACIAL gerrymandering is not allowed. The case was Gomillion v. Lightfoot in 1960.

Let’s move back in time to 1812 (incidentally, the last time that we had a war with Britain), to Massachusetts, and to a local newspaper making fun of a politician. The politician was Elbridge Gerry (with the G pronounced like the g in “get”), who as governor signed a bill that created safe districts for his party.

If we just think about the numbers in terms of statewide voter preferences, if we have 7 Congressional districts, then 3 of them should have sent a Democrat to Congress, and 4 of them should have sent a Republican. But what do we actually have? Only 1 in 7 (14%) was won by a Democrat. Does this seem fair to you in terms of actual representation of citizens by elected officials? 

In a representative democracy, we citizens elect people to represent us in various governmental bodies. But consider the difference between electing somebody to represent 10 people, versus 10,000 people. In the case of the U.S. Senate, it’s already set: The entire population of a given state elects two senators. For Alabama, that means that each of us is one of about 3.5 million registered voters eligible to cast a vote for each senator (out of a state population of 5 million).

The basis for all redistricting is the data from the U.S. Census.  The first nation in the world to take a regular population census, the United States has been counting its population every 10 years since 1790—as required by the U.S. Constitution.