By Donald Gilpin

“Redistricting: It’s Not Just for Political Junkies Anymore!” read the words on the screen at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Princeton Monday night, as Princeton University Neurobiology Professor Sam Wang and Queens College City University of New York Political Science Professor Keena Lipsitz explained how gerrymandering is undermining our democratic system.

Founder of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and the Princeton Election Consortium, Wang discussed “pitched battles over partisan gerrymandering,” which makes it possible by the drawing of district lines for “50 percent of the votes in a state to elect as many as 75 percent of the representatives.”

With the Supreme Court’s recent
hearings on Gill v. Whitford, gerrymandering has been in the news. Democratic voters sued the state of Wisconsin after Republican state lawmakers redistricted the state and Republicans were able to win 60 out of 99 state legislative seats in the next election despite earning a minority of votes. “It was an impressive distortion of democracy,” Wang said.

In the presentation sponsored by Indivisible Princeton, Wang described the Gill v. Whitford hearings that he attended three weeks ago. “Election law is quite difficult to navigate,” he said. He questioned, “Will the Supreme Court get involved to put guard rails in place to prevent the worst offenses of gerrymandering from occurring? Is election law an impregnable fortress?”

Wang explained that his focus was on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who, Wang believes, will cast the decisive vote (5-4) in the case. The justices’ oral arguments, according to Wang, indicate how they are leaning, and he thinks that Kennedy will probably vote on the Whitford side, “to put guardrails on gerrymandering.”

Kennedy, Wang said, “is likely to rule that partisan gerrymandering is an offense under the first amendment, that voters should not be penalized based on affiliation with a particular political party.”

Wang noted that there’s room for improvement in the equity of districting in New Jersey, but that states like New Jersey and California that have bipartisan commissions are likely to be more equitably apportioned than states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, which should “create commissions to achieve lasting reforms so that one party doesn’t control the whole process.”

Wang argued that the past few years have seen the most partisan gerrymandering ever, and he cited three reasons: means, with technology providing the power to explore unlimited redistricting possibilities; motives, with partisanship growing more and more bitter; and opportunity, with single parties increasingly gaining control of redistricting.

“To slay the partisan gerrymander,” Wang said, requires either court action or other reform initiatives like petitions and campaigns that individual citizens can participate in.

In response to a question about the wider impact of gerrymandering in discouraging voting and undermining democratic government, Wang described a “declining trust in institutions of all sorts. The democratic process is distorted in front of us.”

He added, “Of the members of the Supreme Court, the person who is most concerned about this is Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” who questioned “whether it meant anything to have the right to vote in the face of partisan gerrymandering.”

Continuing on a more positive note, Lipsitz noted that there have been large turnouts in recent elections, and Wang concluded, “Even in the face of widespread gerrymandering, as distorted as the system is, there is a reasonable shot for the Democrats to regain the majority in the House next year.”