A Centrist’s Platform — Redistricting and Gerrymandering

(This is one of a weekly series of posts entitled “A Centrist’s Platform”. The complete collection of Centrist’s Platform posts is available on a single page, or via a special RSS feed.)

With primary season all but over, attention will soon be turning towards the November general elections — not just the Presidential race, but also those few down-ticket races that are actually expected to be competitive.

We’re heading into the time of year that armchair pundits like me like to vent our frustrations with the entrenched duopoly in the U.S. political arena.

I can accept that a two-party political system is probably a necessary artifact of how our government is set up — that a system where the chief executive and individual legislators are determined individually on a winner-take-all basis would likely stabilize with two approximately-equally-influential parties…since the “approximately-equally-influential” criterion would likely be difficult to achieve with more political parties.

Having only a few political parties of significance is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly when you compare against the wackiness that can arise from having a large number of parties.   However, having only a few parties opens the door to stagnation, I think, especially if the freshness of the political climate deteriorates to the point where many (most?) elected officials only seek to acquire and maintain power, rather than to serve the best interests of their constituents.

Gerrymandering is one way that elected officials can pursue a power-driven agenda.   If you can pick your voters, you potentially maximize your reelection chances, and therefore can, within some limits, act as you wish, rather than to the benefit of your constituents and the country as a whole

If our politicians wish to do more than just pay lip-service to the notion of “change”, I’d like to see them address one of the fundamentals — ending gerrymandering.

I’ve seen many different schemes addressing how district boundaries should be drawn.  My personal favorite (perhaps because it just popped into my head several years ago) is a simple one: legislative district boundaries should be drawn in such a way as to minimize boundary lengths while maintaining approximately equal populations.

Such a system will tend to create circular, bulls-eye shaped districts, and will tend to keep communities in the same districts (subject to the limitations imposed by the “equal population” requirement).  It’d end the practice of drawing long, irregularly shaped districts drawn primarily to maximize the strength of one particular party, or to divide a population supporting an opposing party.

Unfortunately, it would also end the practice of drawing districts to optimize minority representation in legislative bodies.  However, considering that practice has often been abused for political gain, perhaps that is a tolerable casualty.

Of course, there are likely better ways to ensure a diversity of opinion and representation in a legislative body.  I’ll explore that in next week’s installment.