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SPEAKER_16: Hey Roman, thanks for having me. So this might seem like an obvious question, but just lay it out for us. What is gerrymandering?
SPEAKER_03: Gerrymandering at its most basic is drawing district lines to achieve a specific goal.
SPEAKER_16: I think the most common form of gerrymandering that people are familiar with is partisan gerrymandering, which would be drawing lines in a way that advantage one party over another. But you could also draw lines to protect incumbents, or you could racially gerrymander to dilute minorities' voting power. So there's more than one kind of gerrymandering, but at its core, it's just manipulating lines with a goal in mind. So implicit in the idea that a gerrymander district is manipulated is that there's some natural way that a district should be drawn.
SPEAKER_03: And that doesn't seem like that's—I mean, how do you really determine what the natural state of a district is?
SPEAKER_16: Yes, you're right. There is no redistricting plan that is blessed by the grace of God. You know, there are not rivers, streams, mountains, and redistricting plans. Oftentimes, people will just refer to something as gerrymandered when they don't like the result or if it looks funny.
SPEAKER_03: And who decides how districts get drawn, generally? For the most part, state legislators come up with maps that are then approved by state governors.
SPEAKER_16: And in some cases, states have overhauled the process to give the power to an independent commission, but for the most part, it's state governments. And the way that the party in control can achieve an advantage over the party out of control is by packing and cracking their voters, which would mean, in some instances, putting a lot of that party's voters in one district so as to make them waste a bunch of their votes, because theoretically, any vote over 51 percent would be a wasted vote. It's not helping to elect anybody. And then on the other hand, you have cracking, which would be dividing up that party's voters so that they can't reach 51 percent in any one district, forcing them to waste votes in another way.
SPEAKER_03: So in the FiveThirtyEight series, Galen looked at four different states that are either currently dealing with or have recently dealt with the question of gerrymandering. And we're going to hear tape and talk a little bit about each of those states. We'll start with Wisconsin. So just a little background. In 2010, Wisconsin Republicans won unified control of the state government. This was a particularly big deal because it happened to be a redistricting year. It was the first time in decades that a single party had had total control of the state government as the state redrew its political maps. And the Republicans took full advantage. They drew maps that Democrats allege are very favorable to Republican candidates. This obviously didn't sit well with the Democrats, and they filed suit. Now, for a long time, anti-gerrymandering activists have been trying to find cases that they could bring before the Supreme Court to try to get a ruling that this kind of political manipulation is unconstitutional, that it violates either the First Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment. And one civil rights lawyer, in particular, a man named Peter Earl, started digging into the Wisconsin case and uncovering details. He found out that Republicans had drawn these maps in a secret office, and that Republican lawmakers had signed secrecy agreements not to discuss the shape of the new districts. But Earl didn't know the extent to which Republicans had gone to secure a partisan advantage. We'll let Galen take it from here.
SPEAKER_16: Earl and his partner still didn't have a full picture of how the maps were drawn, a detail that would be key to their case. So they continued to dig deeper, and they noticed that email records from some people didn't match the email records from the people they were communicating with. And that raised suspicions, and we began to demand more and more information.
SPEAKER_04: And the court finally ordered them to turn over the hard drives so we can forensically look at them.
SPEAKER_16: So the attorneys hired a forensic examiner. He was able to determine that hundreds of thousands of documents had been deleted with a wiping software prior to the hard drives being turned over to us.
SPEAKER_04: But they were able to uncover the deleted documents, including a number of spreadsheets.
SPEAKER_04: And those spreadsheets are what really told the story. We were able to see every iteration of the map as they went from the baseline to the map that they finally adopted. The map drawers used years of partisan voting data to design maps that strongly favored Republicans.
SPEAKER_16: We found out that there was a professor by the name of Keith Gaddy from the University of Oklahoma who had been hired by the Republicans to develop a very sophisticated multivariate regression analysis of partisan performance based on votes in the assembly districts from 2006, 2008, 2010.
SPEAKER_04: And they actually downloaded this proxy into the software that they were using to draw the maps.
SPEAKER_16: So when the map drawers moved the lines in the software, they could see how it affected the partisan lean of the districts in real time. The three Republicans who were responsible for drawing these maps declined to be interviewed on the record. And then they kept upping the ante in terms of how many Republican seats they were guaranteed.
SPEAKER_16: The map they ultimately came up with was designed to elect Republicans to 59 of the 99 assembly seats with just 49 percent of the vote, a strong majority with a minority of the statewide vote.
SPEAKER_04: They had accounted for, in effect, the largest swings between Democratic turnout and Republican turnout during the preceding decade.
SPEAKER_16: The plaintiffs are now presenting those spreadsheets to the Supreme Court as evidence that the Republicans set out to disadvantage Democrats.
SPEAKER_04: The moment that we realized this was like a Eureka moment and the rage, the anger that I felt, the outrage that these people would commit this level of a crime against the Democratic process was just astounding. At that point, we decided we were going to do something about this.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this sounds just completely pernicious and horrible. So what is the defense against this? Like, what is the actual argument that can be made? Is this a smoking gun?
SPEAKER_16: So the most blunt argument that Wisconsin Republicans will make is that partisan gerrymandering isn't illegal. State legislators have been drawing maps that advantage one party over another for like over 100 years. And so they're basically saying, this is a bit hypocritical. You know, why are Democrats all of a sudden outraged about partisan gerrymandering after they've been doing it for years themselves? Democrats in the case will respond and say, you know, this is a civil rights issue and it's gotten so far out of hand that the Supreme Court does finally need to step in. And then the Republicans will say, OK, if the Supreme Court is going to step in, then you have to have a very clear standard of what is and is not fair in drawing maps. And ultimately, that's a really, really difficult line to draw.
SPEAKER_03: Right. Because the judicial branch doesn't really want to get involved with drawing every line on a map. I mean, you could see why they'd be reticent to do this, that this is up to the legislature.
SPEAKER_16: For sure. I mean, so for conservatives on the court who strongly believe that judicial overreach is a threat to, you know, our governmental system. Yes, that's that would be terrible if courts around the country were basically drawing maps that were supposed to be drawn by the state legislature. So if they are going to wade into this issue, they want to be able to have like a very clear standard for what is and is not fair and then get themselves back out of the process so that state legislatures can follow those guidelines. Anthony Kennedy has made it clear in the past that he does not like partisan gerrymandering. He's reticent, however, of wading into this for that exact reason. He doesn't want courts across the country repeatedly getting involved in this issue and drawing maps that the legislature should be drawing.
SPEAKER_03: And so where does the Wisconsin situation currently stand?
SPEAKER_16: We are waiting for a decision. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last fall, and we will have a decision in this case by June. And, you know, the decision in this case could be a pretty big deal. If the Supreme Court sides with the Wisconsin Democrats, that could mean that there's a whole lot more court cases following the same model saying that the maps in those states are illegal and need to be redrawn.
SPEAKER_03: So Wisconsin is a pretty obvious example of partisan gerrymandering. But now we're going to turn to North Carolina, where legislators have drawn lines with race in mind. The Voting Rights Act has been interpreted over the years to mean that states need to draw maps that don't dilute minority voters and allow minority communities to elect candidates of their choice. In North Carolina, that meant in the early 1990s, maps were drawn so that certain districts would favor African-American candidates. It worked. North Carolina elected black representatives to the U.S. House for the first time since Reconstruction. This was a huge success for the African-American community. But it was also good for another group, North Carolina Republicans. To understand why, consider this. Black North Carolinians overwhelmingly vote Democratic by packing these voters into a small number of districts where black candidates will likely win. The legislature also diminished black voting power in other districts around the state, allowing Republicans to dominate the overall political landscape of the state. Different people in North Carolina have very different opinions about this. And we're going to play some tape now from the North Carolina episode of the Gerrymandering Project that illustrates the super complicated dynamic. I have never personally been one to think that increasing the numbers of the Black Caucus and Congress, for example, necessarily equated to a plus for the African-American community.
SPEAKER_01: Derek Smith, a political action chair for the state NAACP.
SPEAKER_16: They can ensure that African-Americans get sent to legislative bodies and that looks good on Election Day when they can stand up and say, look, look at what we did for you all. We helped get Eva Clayton and Mel Watt into Congress in the 1990s.
SPEAKER_01: But on the whole, the effect was that that was when the state began to shift towards a Republican dominated caucus. And that happened all throughout the South. He's in favor of African-American voters influencing various districts.
SPEAKER_16: I've always thought that African-American voices that are numerous and loud enough and active in many different places lend to the likelihood that policy decisions will consider African-Americans more than they do.
SPEAKER_16: And white and black Democrats can form coalitions to elect minority candidates more easily than they were once able to in North Carolina. Smith points to a famous example. President Obama is a classic example of that. If we confuse together on common interests which affect the governance for the good of all, then it doesn't matter your race.
SPEAKER_16: Reggie Weaver of Common Cause tends to agree.
SPEAKER_18: An argument has been made that yes, in justification of racially packed districts, that minority candidates would not be elected any other way. There may be some truth to that. I don't know. To me then, the answer isn't to pack districts and weaken the minority voice in other areas.
SPEAKER_16: He says that that won't get at the root of the problem. What I personally am more interested in is, you know, why is it that I as an African-American am going to have a weaker chance in a purely competitive district just along partisan lines?
SPEAKER_18: Why is it? And I think that that gets to deeper questions that we are yet to resolve as a country about race.
SPEAKER_16: But the idea that less emphasis should be put on race when drawing districts is not a universal one. Again, here's Pam Stubbs, who worked in Greensboro's 12th district office when it was first won by Mel Watt in 1993. Until the playing ground is level in America, then we will always need our minority districts. And so far, the playing ground is not level.
SPEAKER_09: Stubbs is unsure that African-American lawmakers will maintain their ranks if these districts are dismantled.
SPEAKER_16: And academic research suggests that that could cause some ripple effects. The presence of minority lawmakers can boost voter turnout among minorities. It can also increase their trust and engagement with politicians. One study, done after Democrats began drawing down the black populations in minority districts in the 2000s, showed that minority members of Congress are more likely to advocate for their communities' priorities than white members of the same party. You have to realize most of those minority districts were created after the 1990 census,
SPEAKER_09: when there was hardly any minority representation across the country in Congress. So even though they're safe now, you have to understand why they were created.
SPEAKER_16: Case in point. Visit the Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro. My name is Cassandra Williams, and I would like to personally welcome you to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
SPEAKER_16: When you arrive at the Voting Rights Act section of the museum, there's a striking installment.
SPEAKER_08: Now, when we look at this list on the wall here, you see African-Americans elected to federal or statewide constitutional offices. It's a floor-to-ceiling list showing the date African-American lawmakers were elected from each state.
SPEAKER_16: Let's look at North Carolina. In the years right after the Civil War, during Reconstruction,
SPEAKER_08: we see that there were four black men elected to represent the state of North Carolina in the House of Representatives. But then we see about a hundred-year gap before Mrs. Eva Clayton was elected to represent North Carolina.
SPEAKER_16: In state after state across the South, that 100-year gap persisted.
SPEAKER_08: We see that same gap in South Carolina. We see it in Alabama, Florida. We see 1871, and then another hundred-year gap is there. We can see it in Georgia, in Louisiana, from 1875, and then not until 1991. In many states, that gap only ends in the early 1990s, when states were forced to draw majority black districts.
SPEAKER_16: So it's easy to understand why the conversation about majority-minority districts can be so contentious and emotional. If the law favors unpacking minority districts, it could become more difficult to ensure that African-Americans are elected at the same rates that they have been. For example, North Carolina's state legislative map is currently being redrawn to unpack the majority-minority districts. The chair of the legislative Black Caucus, Angela Bryant, is likely to lose her seat in the redraw.
SPEAKER_07: I surely regret losing my district and the coalition that had been formed in that district. I regret that. At the same time, the gerrymandering was a burden. She says it's for the best.
SPEAKER_16: I'm convinced that even if people like me lose out to have a firm foundation upon which we are doing this redistricting, we will be better off over time.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this was the episode that most broke my brain, I think. I don't know what it was like for you putting it together, but there were so many interests that have to be balanced and so many interests that I really support and want to have happen. You know, it's crazy how many values you have to juggle to draw these lines. Yeah. And I mean, this is really even just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the interests that you have to consider in drawing a district map.
SPEAKER_16: This is a really difficult conversation, especially for Democrats to have, because on one hand, you know, they want to have the best shot at winning majorities that they can. On the other hand, if we are going to no longer have majority-minority districts, that might involve amending the Voting Rights Act. And that's a really difficult conversation for Democrats to have because as a platform, Democrats, you know, support enhancing the voting power of minorities.
SPEAKER_03: So we've talked about this value of competitiveness, and that brings us to the state of Arizona. And in 2011, they tried to give power to draw maps over to an independent commission, and a big part of the goal was to increase competitiveness in elections. Can you describe what the thinking was and why they created a commission to preference this particular value? Yes. If you ask Americans, they love competitive elections.
SPEAKER_16: You know, of course, from there, it gets a little more complicated, but in general, competition is a thing that Americans value. Like, what's more American than competition? In 2000, Arizona, through a ballot initiative, meaning that just Arizonans all across the state, voted on this, you know, single item saying, do you want to create an independent commission to draw the state maps, take the power away from the state legislature? And Arizonans voted yes. And so for the first time in 2001, an independent commission drew the maps, and then for a second time in 2011, an independent commission also drew the maps. And in doing this, you know, the drafters of this ballot initiative had to basically say, these are the criteria for drawing the maps that this independent commission has to follow. And uniquely in Arizona, one of those criteria was competitiveness. In fact, it's the only state in the country that requires an independent commission or, you know, even lawmakers for that matter, to try to make districts competitive. And by competitive, you mean that depending on the candidate, it's maybe, I don't know, equally likely that a Democrat or a Republican can be elected?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, how do you define competitiveness?
SPEAKER_16: I mean, in the kind of wonky world of 538, we define competitiveness as within five points of the national average in a presidential election. So basically a district where you would expect a close race. Right. And so this got very controversial very fast. Can you tell us what happened?
SPEAKER_16: So at the time, in 2011, Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislature and, you know, they were not all that interested in enhancing competition because enhancing competition would mean probably a better chance that Democrats would take some of those seats away from them. Then on the other hand, of course, Democrats wanted competition. At the heart of this was one woman who was the independent chair of the commission. So the commission is five people, two Republicans, two Democrats and one independent chair who ends up being the tiebreaker. And if you listen to the episode, you can decide for yourself whether or not that's a good system for creating an independent commission. Ultimately, this independent chair, Colleen Mathis, became the focal point of all of this disagreement between the two parties over how the district should be drawn. And things actually got kind of scary for her, to be honest. OK, so we're going to play a little bit of the Arizona episode of the gerrymandering project, which deals with these maps that were drawn to increase competitiveness.
SPEAKER_03: And this scene starts in a public hearing about the map drawing company that the independent commission chose. Let's all rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.
SPEAKER_10: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
SPEAKER_03: I want to say right now, forgive me, I'm not going to use niceties because I am so upset over this situation.
SPEAKER_10: The best way to describe it, I think, is it was like a beehive. All kinds of people were there and the way they were looking at me, I could just tell they weren't happy with me. That's Colleen Mathis. It was June 30th, 2011, and she was chairing a public hearing of Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission.
SPEAKER_16: The group of citizens tasked with redrawing Arizona's political boundaries. It was a packed room. It was standing room only. My husband actually was there and he went and stood in a doorway.
SPEAKER_10: He was concerned, frankly, for the safety of all of us because it just seemed like a heightened level of intensity.
SPEAKER_16: The commission had just decided which mapping company should draw Arizona's new district lines, which are the boundaries that help determine who you vote for. And Republicans weren't happy. So slanted have your votes been against Republicans that there is no question what the goal of this commission is.
SPEAKER_05: But what can we expect when the independent is not really an independent? She's married to an activist Democrat. One after another, each of the people who filled out the request to speak forms came up and pretty much berated me mostly.
SPEAKER_10: There are many mapping companies out there. Sorry, I am so upset that you could have picked that are non-political. Why didn't you?
SPEAKER_06: The mapping company had done work for Democratic campaigns, and Republicans blamed Mathis for choosing a biased company.
SPEAKER_16: After attending the last two meetings, my feelings are that this is a predetermined process with one agenda.
SPEAKER_15: Remap Arizona to improve Democratic representation. What you saw after the mapping consultant was appointed was a lot of pitchforks and torches here in Arizona, because I think the public really knew at that point that the mapping wasn't going to be fair.
SPEAKER_13: You know, I thought this commission was supposed to be non-partisan. Damn it, you can't get any more partisan than this.
SPEAKER_06: It was scary, frankly. A few weeks after the mapping consultant decision, a sitting state senator had suggested, and it got reported in the press, that there was a target on me. And that was scary.
SPEAKER_16: He said, quote, According to the Yellow Sheet report, a political newsletter in Arizona, Antinori told the press at the time that he uses military analogies because he was in the military and that he wasn't targeting anyone. When people talk about targets and guns, it's not something to mess with.
SPEAKER_10: Only six months earlier, Mathis's congressional representative had been shot through the head at point-blank range.
SPEAKER_10: I was in Tucson when it happened, and anybody who was in Tucson remembers that day very well because it was a dark day. During a constituent meeting at a grocery store in Tucson, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and 18 other people were shot. Six died.
SPEAKER_16: That unfortunate awfulness occurred in January of 2011, and I was sworn in March of 2011, and so this was that summer after that.
SPEAKER_10: And it's just, it's hard to talk about it.
SPEAKER_16: Mathis says she and her husband bought plywood at Home Depot and boarded up their bedroom windows.
SPEAKER_10: We got a call from the Department of Justice, and just ended up kind of making our bedroom at least a safe zone because we just felt kind of like it'd be nice to be able to sleep at night and not worry that somebody was looking in the windows or going to do anything.
SPEAKER_16: They also went to the Department of Justice in Washington.
SPEAKER_10: We talked to some folks at DOJ, and they had an FBI person sit in.
SPEAKER_16: Their safety concerns would continue for years to come. In 2012, with litigation still ongoing, their house was broken into. A year after that, the commission's office was broken into, and the computers of all the commissioners were stolen.
SPEAKER_10: We don't know if it was related to redistricting, but that did occur.
SPEAKER_16: Mathis says her mother told her to quit.
SPEAKER_10: But I never was going to quit. I just knew that if you quit, you're giving in to, that's exactly what they want you to do.
SPEAKER_03: Whoa, that is really intense. So what happened with these new competitive maps that were drawn in Arizona?
SPEAKER_16: You know, the story, it ends up being the most intense, I think, redistricting process probably the country has ever seen. The governor and legislature impeach Mathis, then she gets reinstated. Ultimately, they pass the maps. And they did end up enhancing competition in Arizona. During the 2016 election, there was one district in Arizona that voted for Hillary Clinton for president and voted for a Republican in the House. And there was another district that voted for Trump as president and voted for a Democrat in the House. That's pretty rare in the United States these days where we have a very polarized political environment, and generally Democrats and Republicans don't live together. So it's very rare that we see those kinds of voting patterns. So yes, the districts that they set out to create as competitive districts do function as competitive districts. But of course, the path to getting there was a very acrimonious one. And so, I mean, when you went there and did this story, I mean, what did you think of competitiveness as a value when it comes to drawing maps?
SPEAKER_16: So it's a complicated one when we look at American politics because, you know, we say we want competitive elections. And in theory, competitive elections make lawmakers more accountable, right? If you're basically guaranteed to win your primary, win your general election, then you're not that accountable. And if voters don't have options, then do you really live in a representative democracy? At the same time, patterns in the ways that American voters have clustered make competitive districts really hard to achieve. Republicans and Democrats don't live in similar areas, and less and less American voters switch back and forth between parties from one election to the next. And so you really have to kind of work at creating competitive districts. Okay, so the last date you covered in the gerrymandering project is California.
SPEAKER_03: Like Arizona, they also started an independent commission to redraw districts, but they did it for a slightly different reason. Here's a clip from that episode.
SPEAKER_16: What caused California to create its commission did not have to do with the same old partisan type of gerrymandering. It has much more to do with protecting the incumbents.
SPEAKER_14: The way they draw the district lines is to protect the incumbents. That's, well, I'll let him introduce himself.
SPEAKER_16: I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I was governor of the state of California from 2003 to 2011.
SPEAKER_16: He backed redistricting reform as governor, and has since continued to advocate for it. I'm a big believer that we must terminate gerrymandering in America.
SPEAKER_14: When you look at the district lines, the way they're drawn, they make absolutely no sense to anyone. But it is all designed to keep Democrats separate from Republicans.
SPEAKER_16: This strategy for drawing maps created an environment in which lawmakers felt entitled to groups of voters they saw as beneficial to them, without much regard for existing communities or geography. In Los Angeles, for instance, Koreatown was split into three or four districts.
SPEAKER_17: The Filipino-American community was split in two.
SPEAKER_16: Kathy Feng is the national redistricting director of the nonpartisan group Common Cause. She's also its executive director in California. During the 2001 round of redistricting, she testified to the legislature about how the line should be drawn to keep Asian communities whole. As we traveled up and down the state, we were hearing these stories about people feeling, for the first time, the importance of talking about their communities.
SPEAKER_17: Feng says during the process, she got a call from a Democratic assemblyperson.
SPEAKER_16: I had received a phone call from a legislator from San Francisco.
SPEAKER_17: And it was my first time talking to, you know, an assemblyperson or a senator. And as a young attorney, it was quite exciting to receive this phone call. And this person called me to essentially tell me, Kathy, you're not going to put another f***ing Asian in my district.
SPEAKER_16: I asked her to identify the lawmaker.
SPEAKER_17: Carol Migdon. She's out of office now, so I guess I can say her name. It brought me to tears because it was a realization that we still have a lot of racism in this country. Even in a very blue state like California, people come to power with a sense of entitlement that allows them to make decisions about excluding people based on race in order to protect their own seats. When reached for comment, Carol Migdon said she did not recall the conversation.
SPEAKER_16: In the end, it was clear that the legislature was not interested in considering public testimony like Feng's. What we found out was that after four months of public hearings, the legislature went behind closed doors and drew the lines that they had always intended to.
SPEAKER_17: The California Senate passed the maps on September 12, 2001, and the assembly passed them a day later.
SPEAKER_16: While the rest of the nation was rocking from this terrorist attack that had happened, and there was essentially a media blackout,
SPEAKER_17: quite honestly, there was a real moment of reflection about whether or not our democracy is functioning. Their incumbent protection plan was overwhelmingly successful.
SPEAKER_16: The deal that was passed in 2001 made California's map almost impervious to change.
SPEAKER_02: Only one incumbent lost reelection in a general election between 2002 and 2010. California had insulated itself from the political volatility facing the rest of the country. Few of the races were even close.
SPEAKER_02: You had 265 U.S. House races in California. Only 14 of them were decided by less than 10 points. Just 5% of California's congressional elections were competitive.
SPEAKER_16: I always said, you know, that the Soviet Politburo had more changeover than our system here in California.
SPEAKER_14: So what happened in California? How did they combat this problem of incumbency bias?
SPEAKER_03: Californians in the period from the early 2000s to 2010, as you may remember, in California were very, very upset with the state legislature.
SPEAKER_16: I mean, at a certain point, I think their approval rating was at 10%, and so you had Governor Schwarzenegger and activists really agitating against the legislature. And so between Common Cause, the organization that Kathy Fang works with, and other nonpartisan and partisan groups, as well as the governor, they kind of got together and backed, again, a ballot initiative like in Arizona to take the power of drawing these district maps away from the state legislature and to give it to an independent commission.
SPEAKER_03: And so what is the basis that the independent commission drew their maps? So whereas in Arizona, we had one of the criteria was competitiveness, that was not the case in California.
SPEAKER_16: One of the main criteria in California was to respect and empower communities of interest. And that relates to Kathy Fang's experience with the Asian American community in California, and the way that she saw them basically being disregarded in favor of incumbents' own electoral priorities. And so what the independent commission did in California was it traveled around the state and listened to members of communities basically say, basically define their own communities of interest. And that could range anywhere from Koreatown to, you know, one example is, you know, a group of people who has horses in L.A., or, you know, one example was even like the soundproofing community around LAX, the LAX airport in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_03: That's interesting. And so how successful were they? What did these maps end up resulting in? Yeah. So one of the complications with this way of mapping is that it's hard to tell whether or not people are being sincere about what they consider as their communities of interest.
SPEAKER_16: Like political consultants came in and basically organized people around communities that may have been disingenuous in an attempt to influence the map drawing process for partisan reasons. And so there is good reason to believe that they were successful in some cases. Ultimately, though, I think California was pretty successful at appeasing both sides of the aisle and getting a relatively fair map. I mean, if you look at different statistical analyses of the vote percentage compared with the seat share, California's maps are pretty fair to Democrats and Republicans.
SPEAKER_03: And so what are your takeaways from all this reporting? You were steeped in this for months and months and months. What did you come away with?
SPEAKER_16: Indeed, I was. So if we look at the four different examples that we've just discussed, first, what you'll realize is that all of these different priorities. One being fairness between the two parties, two being fairness in representing minorities, three being competitiveness in elections, and four being respectful of communities as they exist on a map. You'll start to understand that these things do contradict each other. There are situations in which enhancing the opportunity for a minority candidate to get elected could put Republicans at an advantage electorally. So ultimately, the people who draw maps have to make difficult value choices. Oftentimes, the people who draw maps only care about partisan advantage, right? And so, you know, that's basically the way that maps have been drawn for a long time. But if we're going to reform the process, you still have to be awfully thoughtful about the values that you want to prioritize amongst those four things. And which of these four states do you think is doing the best job of this?
SPEAKER_03: If you look at California, that is the place where you will talk to both Republicans and Democrats who say that the mapping process overall was fair.
SPEAKER_16: And, you know, there are obviously Democrats and Republicans who will disagree with that, but it was a rare example in the months that I spent reporting on this that you did come to some bipartisan agreement about the success of the results. And is this a function of it being drawn by an independent commission? Is this what the success really points to?
SPEAKER_03: You know, I think that's part. Oftentimes, Americans distrust partisan legislators to put aside their partisanship in order to do what is, quote, unquote, fair.
SPEAKER_16: Obviously, the people who wrote the ballot initiative in California looked at some of these examples in other states. They, you know, there had already been a round of redistricting in Arizona. They had other states to look at as well and think about where other states may have gone wrong and try to correct for that. You know, you said that the American states are laboratories for democracy. And a result of different states getting to try out, litigate, vote for, you know, draw maps how they want to is that we get to see the results of a whole bunch of different efforts. And I do think that the people in California were very thoughtful about the way that they wrote the law that guided this process.
SPEAKER_03: So what do you expect will come out of the Wisconsin case?
SPEAKER_16: The million dollar question. Honestly, I have no idea. But what I can tell you is this. If Wisconsin Democrats win this case, you will read in plenty of newspapers, Supreme Court ends gerrymandering. And I can tell you right now that that will basically be a lie because if the Wisconsin Democrats win, what it will actually do is start a very long process of determining what ultimately is fair when it comes to partisan advantage in drawing maps. Right? I mean, unless the Supreme Court says, you know, you have to use this statistical model and it has to be within this percentage or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which I have no reason to believe that they would do. Then it's going to start a process of a lot of different lawsuits that litigate this in different ways that ultimately try to land on what is fair. And you know what? It could be that we never really land on anything. I mean, that's what's happening with the Voting Rights Act right now is that we don't have a strong conception of what is fair in how much to cluster minority voters together. Right. That could end up happening with partisan gerrymandering. And you could say that's all worth it. And we need to have that debate. And, you know, you know, we're happy for all the lawyers that are that are going to be employed for the coming decades off of all of these lawsuits. But it's a conversation we need to have. But, you know, even if the Wisconsin Democrats don't win, I don't think that the conversation about gerrymandering goes away because as we're seeing even now in Pennsylvania, there are a lot of different avenues to litigate this. And so no matter what the decision is in the Wisconsin Supreme Court case, I can promise you that this is going to be a conversation for years to come. So why don't we just have computers draw district lines? Well, Galen has an answer for that after this.
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SPEAKER_16: In some ways you could. You just write new laws saying that we want an algorithm to draw nice, neat shapes on a map. Probably the area where you run into the most trouble is the Voting Rights Act, which specifically requires that minorities not have their votes diluted. And so sometimes just drawing maps randomly according to shape could potentially violate the Voting Rights Act. On top of that, whether or not we're talking about a minority community, oftentimes people want their community in one district, right? If you're going to have a representative, you want them to represent something. And so if you have an algorithm that draws the map randomly, people might not feel like they've been grouped together with their community.
SPEAKER_03: An algorithm cannot hold a hundred different community meetings and listen to people talk about where their community is.
SPEAKER_16: So if you look at California's independent commission website, one of the commonly asked questions, you know, why doesn't an algorithm do this? And that's what they'll say. You know, an algorithm can't listen to community priorities.
SPEAKER_03: Galen is not against using algorithms in redistricting, but he says they don't change the fact that drawing lines on a map forces you to make difficult choices. You still have to program the algorithm to prioritize certain values the same way that you would have to instruct a legislative body or an independent commission to do that.
SPEAKER_16: So, you know, in the program, you have to say, we want districts to be compact, or we want districts to respect existing municipal boundaries, or we want you algorithm to make the districts competitive. I mean, still, it's just like algorithms have value.
SPEAKER_03: So I don't understand how it would solve it at all. All it really seems to potentially solve is calling Mathis doesn't get death threats.
SPEAKER_16: Right. I think there are plenty of people who will tell you that algorithms have a place in this process. And yes, it can make this process easier and potentially fairer, but it's not a silver bullet.
SPEAKER_03: That's Galen Druk, host of The Gerrymandering Project, a podcast mini-series from FiveThirtyEight. Chadwick Matlin was the editor of the project. Kate Bakhtiarova and Alice Wilder contributed to the production. If you enjoyed this, we really, really encourage you to go listen to the whole series. They got into so much more detail and it was completely fascinating. The team at FiveThirtyEight also put together all these incredible maps and graphics that you can play around with to try to understand different districting priorities and how they impact the shapes of the maps. There will be links on our website, 99pi.org. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Yousif, Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. The rest of the staff includes Avery Truffleman, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners just like you. You can find 99% Invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit, too. We have more visual design stories and even videos at 99pi.org.
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