Gerrymandering

Moiraine said:
Can you summarize? I’m out of NY Times articles.

From what I read I think they’re having the group that decides on maps have #s based on the # of legislators from each party?

The maps should be done via computer in every state. 
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Yeah.

Instead of 5 Dem appointees and 5 GOP appointees on the redistricting board with a state Supreme Court appointee to break ties, this would change it to 13 members with 2 Dem, 2 GOP, 2 each appointed by Senate president & minority leader, the Assembly's speaker & minority leader and the 1 SC pick.

Then this fro the story is what you're talking about:

But the main criticism of New Jersey’s plan centers on setting the benchmark for drawing districts based on statewide election results.

The proposal says that at least 25 percent of legislative districts must be “competitive,” meaning that they must be within five percentage points of the statewide average based on the results for president, senator and governor in the past decade. That formula would likely result in a Democratic statewide advantage of 55 percent, according to a study by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University.
 

In effect, competitive districts could still have Democratic majorities of as much as 60 percent.
 

“The map becomes permanently slanted,’’ said Patrick Murray, the director of polling at Monmouth University. He noted that of the state’s 40 legislative districts, at least 25 would have to be majority Democratic under the redistricting proposal.
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They're planning on voting on this the last day the legislation is in session this year and quickly again in January so they can use an obscure rule about it passing 2 years in a row to get it on the ballot, too.

The one cool part about this is the Democratic governor's response. He's not impressed.

“I have as much a concern about the process as I do even about the substance,” Mr. Murphy said. “I don’t like the substance, but this is classic jam something through, and I got elected to stand up against that and I’m going to.”

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“If they succeed, and I hope they don’t, I will fight it right through to the ballot box, and you should assume that we ain’t giving up this fight,” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m a proud Democrat, let there be no doubt. I want to win stuff fair and square, and this is not.”
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Moiraine said:
I’ll believe it’s actually gonna happen when it actually happens. Usually this stuff seems to get overturned. 
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I figured this would happen:

Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to put on hold lower court rulings that ordered new voting maps in Michigan and Ohio.
The move was widely expected as the justices are currently considering similar cases concerning partisan gerrymandering out of Maryland and North Carolina, and are expected to issue a ruling in those cases by the end of the term in late June.
 
Michigan and Ohio had asked the justices to step in to freeze the lower court orders while the justices consider the other cases. The justices granted the request with no noted dissents.
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/politics/supreme-court-gerrymandering-michigan-ohio/index.html

 
We're already starting to see how inadequate some of the state-level fixes for gerrymandering are, too. In several of these states that passed ballot measures to have redistricting done fairly by independent commissions or third parties, GOP legislatures are already trying to water them down and dilute their power so they can still control the process.

By it sucks that Roberts doesn't believe voting rights are legitimate. Kennedy really hosed us last year and just bailed. Basically at this point states just have to try to elect the least corrupt, most pro-voting rights state reps they can and hope they actually act that way.

 
Republicans can't win elections on their own merits, so they're actively rigging elections.

This is not democracy.

Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question



Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.
The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.
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It gives me some hope that a lot of what's coming to light about all this nonsense is being shared by children whose parents were part of the gig.  Manafort, this cat - maybe the younger generation will indeed save us.

 
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