Partisanship just isn’t avoidable.

[As of transfer to this archive, I’m not as confident in this article as at time of writing, though it makes valid points.]

Gerrymandering is a difficult topic to analyze. We can all see the blaring injustice of districts like the infamous Gerrymander and its yet more ridiculous descendants, the districts that twist and curl the probosci through long miles just to eek out a specific demographic, bearing no resemblance to sanity or common sense. But the more borderline cases are, well, more borderline. Partisan reapportionment is basically unavoidable, so long as men aren’t angels, and the theoretical ‘fair’ apportionment is easy to appeal to but hard to define. What’s the solution?

Unavoidable

So long as we try for an apportionment scheme which respects local boundaries and character (but more on that later), so long as we have to juggle making the districts roughly equal in population, partisan reapportionment will inevitably happen, even just as a consequence of unrecognized bias. Link the districts to county lines? Counties will unaccountably mitose, or their internal divisions will arrange to manipulate the vote. Run it off a grid system and somehow use local voting to determine who gets into which district? Somebody will figure out how to parley that into a gerrymander; in fact, that product of my imagination is ridiculously exploitable, if a party has the money to do so. The matter of fact is, so long as apportionment needs to deal with inconsistent human population density and respect for local character, enough subjectives interfere to give partisans room to operate.

And, of course, even the most nonpartisan apportionment will be called gerrymandering by those disadvantaged by it.

Fair?

So, perhaps we get a computer to do the districting? If our only concern is population numbers and making the districts roughly coherent, geographically, that’s quite doable. But those aren’t our only potential or actual concerns. What is a fair apportionment? No, really, what’s fair?

To know, we need criteria. We need to know what to prioritize. So do we prioritize:

• Industrial interests
• Local government divisions
• Historic ties
• Political history
• Geography
• Ethnicity
• Popular vote matching
• Urban v suburban v rural
• More….

Apportionment has no perfect answer. That means plenty of imperfect answers can be pressed, sometimes by people who are there for the im, not the perfect.

Principles

I don’t have a full answer. Apportionment is complex and abusable, necessarily a system operated by flawed men, factually a system run by politicians, a class selected for and trained in specific types of wrongdoing, primarily corruption and tyranny. But we should pay attention to certain warning signs.

First, if an apportionment lumps together radically different people and its alternative reduces that tendency, be suspicious. The recent Virginia reapportionment is an example of this. Why does it suddenly have a bunch of lengthy district running from the east of the state all through the middle? Looks an awful lot like taking advantage of population density in the east to use its liberal leanings to drown out the locales in the middle.

Second, if the apportionment deviates too much from the popular vote, it’s worth a second look. Is the city being used to drown out rural votes? Is the deviation a result of common sentiment across the state or of cunning partitions? Is this deviation a sudden thing or something endemic to the apportionment for a long time, something which developed slowly, without correlating with reapportionments?

Third, ask if the apportionment respects cultural groupings and geography. People closer together, on average, have more in common, and thus their representatives are more bound to their interests, given their prevalence across the population. But cultural distinctives can be very important too in preventing one local interest from preventing the recognition of another; cities, typically, can drown out a lot of surrounding rural and even suburban interests, making those regions nearly irrelevant to the people who ought to be representing them.

Always, in this process, consider not merely ‘fairness’ as an ideal but the question of whether the apportionment motivates the people’s representatives to actually represent their interests. It’s not an easy task, but it is necessary to our republic, mangled as it is.

God bless.