A truce to end the redistricting wars

Unfortunately, these new House maps have come at the expense of voters in these states, who might now find themselves in a House district that makes little geographical sense. In Texas, for instance, the new Congressional map was designed to elect more Republicans by drawing long, tendril-shaped districts that combine the state’s cities with distant rural areas. The redistricting wars over the last year have produced contorted maps that violate the basic idea of representation in the House: that districts should be drawn to represent distinct areas of a state with common legislative interests.

The recent Supreme Court decision Louisiana v. Callais has compounded the problem by taking away a crucial guardrail that had restrained some of the worst excesses of gerrymandering. By weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has allowed states to weaken the political power of voters of color. Already, in the brief time since the decision, multiple states in the South have passed new House maps that deliberately divide minority communities, making it much harder for voters in these communities to have a voice in Congress.

Democratic-led states have already responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by threatening to redraw their own House maps with additional districts that would elect Democrats. However, this would require large cities to be divided across more House districts, meaning that blue states would be following the same playbook of vote dilution in order to offset the maps that southern states have drawn. In doing so, they would be reducing the opportunity for those districts to elect racial minorities.

As hard as it might be to envision a truce in the redistricting wars, I think the moment calls for imagining a new guardrail that both parties could live with. One potential solution would be a national rule limiting how many times a state’s House map could split a county.

Specifically, Congress could write legislation stating that counties could only be split one time beyond what is mathematically needed. Compared to other potential remedies, this one would be straightforward, difficult for states to circumvent, and unlikely to be struck down by courts.

House districts generally contain about 750,000 people, so this rule would mean that any county with a population under that threshold (the exact figure varies from state by state, and can be found by dividing a state’s total population by its number of House districts) could only be split once. As one example, under a national county rule such as the one I am proposing, Mercer County in New Jersey, which is home to roughly 400,000 people, could only be split once, meaning that it could contain two House districts at most.

A national law limiting county splits would prevent both Democrats and Republicans from engaging in the worst forms of gerrymandering. Because counties are fixed geographical units that almost never change boundaries (and the law could stipulate that 2020 county boundaries be used, to discourage states from changing them), both parties would find drawing maps to their political advantage much more difficult. Fortuitously, several major cities in America, such as Baltimore, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia, coincide with county boundaries, meaning that a national rule against excessive county splitting would protect these and other cities from being needlessly divided in Congressional maps.

New Jersey offers an especially interesting example of how a national law could help protect counties from being unduly split. We only have 21 counties, with just three (Bergen, Essex, and Middlesex) that are populous enough to be split twice. Every other county in the state could only be split once, which would make gerrymandering the Garden State much more difficult.

In the hypothetical House map below, which I drew using a program known as Dave’s Redistricting, I have divided New Jersey into 12 districts that I think represent distinct areas of the state, while meeting the requirements of my proposed national rule against excessive county splits. I used our present congressional map as a starting point, though I had to make major changes in certain places, such as in Monmouth and Union counties (both of which are currently split more than would be permissible under my proposal).

Even though a national rule limiting county splits might be tough to apply in a state with as few counties as New Jersey, it would still allow for a reasonable House map to be drawn. The map I drew demonstrates that increasing minority representation is still possible even with constraints on county splitting. Not only would my 8th, 9th, and 10th districts likely elect members of color to Congress, but in my map, I’ve made the 3rd a majority-minority district (which it is not currently), and I’ve also redrawn the 12th district so as to avoid dividing the Asian-American community of central New Jersey, as the current map does.

With the midterms approaching this fall, and the possibility of both the House and Senate switching party control, it is imperative to find a way to prevent any further escalation of the redistricting wars. Much damage has already been done to representative democracy in just the last year, but it is not impossible to devise a new guardrail that both parties could tolerate. The status quo of free-for-all gerrymandering simply cannot become the new norm.

Brad Van Arnum is a resident of West Windsor who closely follows redistricting. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from The College of New Jersey and a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers University.