Democracy in the United States centers around “one man, one vote.” There have been struggles and redefinitions of what “one man” means over the years. Notably, African Americans were granted the right to vote in 1868, women in 1920, and the subsequent struggles during the civil rights movement that enabled African Americans to actually be able to vote.
Still, to have a representative democracy, the US strives to have representatives represent districts that contain relatively equal numbers of people. Thus, the constitution mandates that every 10 years we have a census. After everyone is counted, new districts are drawn up to reflect the new population densities.
In Georgia, we have 14 US House Congressional Districts. We also have 60 GA Senate seats and 180 GA house seats. None of these numbers changed with the 2020 census results.
What did change was that the population shifted in Georgia, with greater numbers of people now living in and around the Atlanta area, and less in the southern part of the state. Thus, new districts will have to be drawn to reflect these population shifts.
How do we pick who goes where?
Above is a 5 minute video from the Georgia General Assembly about the process.
Several states have non-partisan commissions that draw up new congressional boundaries, but Georgia is not one of them. In Georgia, the political party in power draws up new maps. A special session of the Georgia General Assembly has been called, starting Nov 3, for the express purpose of approving three new maps:
- US House Congressional Districts
- Georgia House Districts
- Georgia Senate Districts
In turn, these districts will then influence boundaries for school board, city council, and other local representation.
Here are the ground rules of redistricting:
- Each district must be contiguous; thus, the line around the district must be unbroken.
- A district can be drawn to benefit one political party.
- A district cannot be drawn minimize the voice or power of a specific racial or ethnic group.
Typically, lawsuits have hinge on two things that minimize people’s voices:
Cracking – where a specific group is spread between multiple districts. In this case, they will receive no representation.
Packing – where a specific group is bunched together into one district. In this case, they will receive not enough representation.
Looking at the graphic – think of each block as a precinct. 60% are blue, 40% are yellow. If they are split like the top left – the yellows are “cracked” and they are spread too thin to be represented by anyone. In the top right, the blues are “packed” together and while they represent 60% of the population, they only are a majority in 2 of the districts. Thus, they are not getting enough representation.
In the past, both the Republican and Democratic parties have drawn maps have been the subject of lawsuits – so no one is guilt free here.
What can you do to check that the districts are “within reason”?
As a citizen of Georgia, you have a say in how districts are formed. You can watch what the General Assembly is doing, you can check non-partisan sites to see how accurately the maps represent the makeup of Georgia, and you can comment on the situation.
- Keep an eye on the district maps as the GA General Assembly Releases them.
- Check these two websites that show if districts reflect the makeup of Georgia.
- If you disagree, the General Assembly has a FAQ about how to make you voice heard:
- contact your current representative
- submit a public comment here: https://www.legis.ga.gov/joint-office/reapportionment/public-comments
- Get online or go down to the capitol and voice you opinion. ANYONE can attend a committee meeting and make a public comment. Its even easier now, as many committee meetings will support Zoom commentary.
What does science say about district mapping?
In theory – there is a non-partisan way to draw district lines that accurately represent the population. Check out this great video to hear what the science says.
David Cottrell, an assistant professor at UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs, opened his talk by explaining legislative redistricting: the process of redrawing district boundaries every ten years following the census to ensure equal population across districts. He emphasized why this matters for democracy, noting that how districts are drawn can produce anti-majoritarian outcomes where a minority of votes translates into a majority of seats, protect incumbents (helping explain 90%+ reelection rates in Congress), and dilute minority voting power. He illustrated the mechanics with a simple model showing how the same 51% of votes can be redistributed across five districts to win either 100% or just 20% of the seats, depending on whether votes are spread evenly or “packed” into a single district.
A central challenge in his research is distinguishing intentional gerrymandering from the effects of partisan geography. Some cases are obvious, like Georgia’s famously misshapen 1992 “Sherman district” stretching from Atlanta to Savannah, or the contorted 2002 Democratic-drawn maps. But modern maps, including Georgia’s current congressional districts, often look reasonably compact while still producing skewed outcomes. For instance, although Biden won a majority of Georgia’s votes in 2020, Democrats won only 6 of 14 congressional seats and lost the median state Senate seats. Cottrell cautioned that this isn’t necessarily proof of gerrymandering, because Democrats naturally cluster in dense urban areas while Republicans spread across suburbs and rural regions, organically “packing” Democratic votes. He used Nancy Pelosi’s safe San Francisco seat as an example—with the nine Bay Area counties going only 20-25% Republican, drawing competitive districts there would actually require intentional manipulation.
To separate intent from geography, Cottrell’s research uses computer algorithms to generate thousands of simulated maps that follow neutral districting principles (equal population, contiguity, compactness, respecting county boundaries) but are blind to partisan or racial data. Comparing actual enacted maps to these simulated counterfactuals reveals the effect of intent. His Georgia simulations showed the congressional map is close to what neutral maps would produce (around 5-6 Biden districts), while the state Senate map shows somewhat more Republican advantage than simulations predict. Across 41 states he analyzed, actual maps consistently produce more safe seats for whichever party controlled redistricting and fewer competitive districts than neutral simulations would generate. He concluded optimistically that advances in computing power, data availability, and electronic shapefiles now allow academics, watchdog groups, and the public—not just partisan operatives—to rigorously detect gerrymandering when it occurs.
everybody, please give a warm welcome to assistant professor David Cottrell.
Thank you, Louis. Well, thanks for having me. This is my first time at Manuel’s Tavern, but I’ve heard all about it.
Sounds like a really interesting place, and I’m happy to here, as Louis mentioned, I study elections and representation.
An assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at UGA. A lot of what I do generally has to do with data analysis
and data science and sort of understanding politics by analyzing data.
And in graduate school, I got very much interested in redistricting and some of these computer automated redistricting algorithms
that can be used to draw districts without partisan intent. But more over be used to analyze the extent to which
districts have been drawn with political intent. So I’ll talk a little bit about that today.
Don’t think I’ll get too heavy into the algorithms, but I’ll show you some results for Georgia, for the state Senate and for Congress.
This is something I was working on in grad school with my dissertation, which is an algorithm that tries to draw really what’s called compact districts.
So I was able to do that. That’s Tennessee, but I was able to do that on a number of
states throughout the country in order to analyze the extent to which gerrymandering is being used to create or produce partisan competition.
Since then, algorithms have gotten a lot better, a little bit more sophisticated. And so we’ll touch on some of that.
I wasn’t totally sure how deep we should get into the weeds of redistricting for this group here, but I just thought we’d start simple,
What is legislative redistricting
which is what is legislative redistricting? Most representatives have constituents in a district
that are defined by boundaries of a geographic territory and districting Is the process of redrawing the boundaries
of the territory to alter the composition of the constituency. And this happens generally every 10 years following the census,
because federal and state legislative boundaries have to be redrawn in order to be equally populated.
Not to mention some states will receive congressional districts or lose congressional districts. So districts have to be drawn to accommodate that as well.
According to Westbury versus Sanders and Reynolds vs. Sims, two Supreme Court cases in the six years that state
congressional districts and state legislative districts have to be equally populated.
Every time we get the census and a new count of where people are enumerated, we have enumerations where people live.
We adjust the districts in order to make sure that they are equally populated. So why is this important?
Why is this important
There’s a lot of reasons why this is important. The big one is that in a democracy where we have democratic elections,
redistricting can lead to anti-democratic outcomes. For example, one of the big ones is that when you had legislators drawing
districts, you have representatives electing their voters rather than their voters electing their representatives.
So that’s a big one. The way you design districts can determine the outcome of the composition of the legislature.
A minority of the votes can be translated into a majority of the seats,
and a majority of votes can be translated into only a minority of the seats. Hence, you can get non majoritarian outcomes.
And one of the things that I’ll show you today is that Georgia, for example, Biden received the most votes in Georgia.
However, it does not win the most legislative districts.
So if you were to aggregate these votes up in legislative districts, either Congress or the General Assembly,
the Democrats, Biden, lose a majority of the seats. The other is that there’s incumbency protection.
But this has been a huge criticism of redistricting, is that legislators can choose their constituency
and therefore make it easier for themselves to be reelected. And some people think that this might be the reason
why we have such high reelection rates in the United States. So, for example, in Congress in 2018, We had a reelection rate of 91 percent.
And that’s really common. It’s above 90 percent almost every single year. The average margin of victory in 2013 was plus 30 points.
And, you know, there’s about 30 of the 435 congressional districts in 2018 that we could classify as tossups,
as districts that we don’t know really what is going to be the the outcome. And so there is a lack of partizan competition in the house.
And so a lot of people think that that’s because legislators draw themselves safe seats. And another problem of legislative
redistricting is minority vote dillution The idea that the majority in legislature controls the districts.
Press the votes of minorities by sinking those votes into districts where they’re
not able to have sufficient numbers to elect members of their choice. Right. And so it leads to minority dillution So these are a number of reasons
why we should be concerned because of redistricting. If you didn’t know before, a little bit more as to why this important will go.
How it works
So as to the logic, we can take a model, let’s say a state has five districts in
order to have a majority of the districts, you need three out of the five. And let’s say you just have a marginal percentage of votes.
Say something like 51 percent. That party wins just 51 percent of the vote when it’s just the majority, by a small percentage of the vote,
by a small margin, can redistribute those votes across the districts so that each district is reflective of the state so that.
If you have 51 percent of the votes, every district has 51 percent. If every district has 51 percent of the votes
then you have 100 percent of the seats. So, for example, in this case, this is a case where if we say every
every district has a same number of people, it’s represented by the length of the bar and the amount of votes that you have
or support that you have in a two party system where Democrats are blue and red, the number of votes is represented by the blue bar in the red.
And so in this case, you need more than 50 percent to win a district. You get more than 50 percent of it to win the district or the most votes in the two party system.
You get the entire seat. So just one more vote gets you 100 percent of the seat.
And that’s what’s key in this system. In this case, we’re going to translate 51 percent of the vote into five districts
controlled by Democrats, which is 100 percent of the seats, right. You can also think of.
So in this case, Democrats win the first district, the second district, the 3rd district, the 4th district, the 5th district,
because they have more votes than the Republicans. You can also take from those four districts
where Democrats have a majority pack those voters into one district, and then you now have a party who has 51 percent votes.
It’s the same number of votes. Right. But all those Democratic votes have been packed into one single district
right here, District five, and taken from districts one, two , three and four. And therefore, in districts one, two, three and four, Democrats
lose the majority. Right. And only have majority in a single district. And that’s called packing.
This is an example where if you’re Democrats with a majority of the votes, you can get 100 percent of the seats
or you can just get one out of five of the seats. Another thing that you could do is pack all Republican votes
and have a very safe Republican district, along with very safe
Democratic districts, and that is how you create safe districts through gerrymandering. So the point of this is that spending on how you draw the districts,
you can get very different outcomes, very different outcomes. And that is powerful if you control how the districts are drawn.
So because districting is so consequential, there is an obvious concern
that legislators will intentionally draw districts to their advantage through gerrymandering.
And so, therefore, I think that we wanted to be able to detect gerrymandering when it occurs.
And so this is part of what my research involves. And there’s a lot of people at the moment that are doing stuff like this,
but being able to detect gerrymandering when it occurs and sort of understanding the effects of gerrymandering where it exists is an important thing
because gerrymandering can be so consequential. One of the biggest challenges, the major challenge in detecting
gerrymandering and detecting the effects of gerrymandering it’s just intentional. The intentional drawing of districts to advantage your party or yourself
is separating it or distinguishing it from the effects of geography. Sometimes doing that is really odd.
So I’m going to tell you, I’m going to explain how the effects of geography can be mistaken for the effects of gerrymandering and vice versa.
Sometimes the distinction is obvious and we can just point to Georgia. So this is a map.
Sherman District
Georgia’s congressional districts after they’d been redrawn in 1992.
There’s this famous district. It is called the Sherman District and is called the Sherman District,
because the district stretches from Atlanta all the way down to Savannah
to capture voters who are both in Atlanta and as well as in Savannah.
Now, this is a district that we would say is not very compact. Compact districts are just districts that contain people
who live next to each other, sort of a neutral district in principle. It’s a principle that we often use when we draw districts is something
you should strive for to contain people who live next to each other. In this case, this is a district that violates that principle very much.
Right. It contains people who are very far from another. Oftentimes, when we measure the compactness
of the district, want to say that ‘Oh that district looks weird’. One of the things that we do is we take this minimum bounding circle.
It’s a circle that just barely circumscribes shape. Compare the average of that shape, the area that shape to the area
of the district. And that gives us some measure of how misshapen it is, how strange the shape is.
But there’s also something to point out here, which is really important, is that
this district is really designed to combine black voters
in the south of Atlanta with black voters in Savannah to create one of the largest majority minority districts in order
to give black voters an opportunity to elect a member of their choice. This was ultimately struck down because it was done in an egregious way
and that you can create a district that does just about the same thing without having to be so intentional.
And so this district, this map was ultimately struck down by the courts.
But the point is, is that sometimes, you know, just by looking at it, that the district had been drawn very intentional.
Georgia they didn’t just stop in 1992. In 2002 is very well known for the gerrymandering that went on in Georgia.
Georgia
And this is in part because Democrats saw the writing on the wall. They were losing.
They had majorities, they had this trifecta, they had Governor. They had majorities in the upper and lower chambers of the General Assembly,
but they were losing it And Georgia was turning red. And knowing that that was the case, the Democrats egregiously
changed the boundaries of their districts in order to have an advantage.
Ultimately, it didn’t work out for them. The state turned red and so did the legislature and governor.
But this is this is cause to this district here. This is the 13th district is called a dead cat on the expressway.
But these are clearly non compact districts, and it gets even worse for the state Senate and the state House.
You can see these like little stringy districts here. Right. Here’s a district that almost ranges across the entire half of the state.
And one of the things that this map is known to do was to pin incumbents against each other.
And in Georgia, you have to in order to run for a seat in the legislature, you have to reside within your district.
So one thing you can do is you can take two incumbents from the same party, put them into the same district, and then they have to run
against each other because they live in that district. Otherwise, they got to move. Sometimes like in 1992 and in 2002, it’s obvious, right?
Sometimes it’s not. Here is the current Congress. These are districts that were designed by Republicans.
And the districts are not misshapen like you saw in 1992 and 2002.
They’re very different. And so maybe it’s not obvious that this is gerrymandering, if it’s gerrymandered at all.
Was this designed in a way to give Republicans an advantage? Right.
Was this designed in a way that gives incumbents advantage? It’s hard to tell, just by looking at it.
So one thing that might make you suspicious of gerrymandering is by looking at the fact that
in 2020, Biden won a majority vote, had a majority of the votes. And therefore, Democrats had a majority, a very small one,
a minor majority, but a majority nonetheless. Right. And in one of the things that we like to look at is to what extent can
majorities translate that vote into a majority of the seats? And this is Congress. And there’s 14 seats in Congress.
If we align every single one. So essentially what I did was they took precincts and merged them with the congressional districts
to get an aggregate vote share between Biden and Trump for every district. Right.
And so we can see whether or not Trump or Biden wins that particular district, what share of the vote that Biden has in that district.
And if we order those the districts from most Republicans to most Democrats.
Right. We get this little distribution here. Right. So these are all 14 seats. And in order to have a majority of the delegation, in order
to have a majority in the delegation, you need to have eight of those seats. So you need to control these two in these two in the middle, which are those median
districts are close to about forty five percent Biden of the two party vote share.
So that means that Trump beat Biden in those districts. Those are Republican districts.
So in the state of Georgia, despite having a majority of the votes, they do not translate into a majority of the seats.
Democrats or at least Biden only wins six. Of the 14 seats, part of that reason for that
disproportionality is that these Democratic districts here are heavily Democrat. Right.
And so they’re packed. All the votes get packed into these districts. You don’t need 80 percent, 90 percent of the vote to win a district.
You need just more one vote more than the other guy. And so that means that these votes here are wasted, wasted Democrat,
just like these votes here are wasted Republican votes. In this case, the districts are designed intentionally or unintentionally.
The districts are designed in a way that votes get wasted in these…
The Democratic votes are more likely to be wasted than Republican votes. So that was the, that was our congressional delegation.
Right. Although it’s interesting to talk about majorities in congressional delegation, it’s meaningless because they had ultimately go to Congress
and you need a majority in Congress itself to win. But in the Senate, you know, majorities are important.
And so we can do the same thing with all 56 Senate seats
just align them from most Republicans to most Democrats.
Remember, most votes in this election went to right to Democrats. But Republicans control the two median seats.
So they despite having a majority, that Democrats don’t have enough
of the distribution where it matters. Right. And therefore don’t have a majority of seats in the Senate.
So the point is, is that sometimes the districts don’t look terribly misshapen. Right.
And there’s this anti majoritarianism that’s going on that seems suspicious. Does that mean that it’s gerrymandered persay?
Does that mean that they have been intentionally designed? And the answer that is not necessary, because sometimes
partisan geography
partizan geography creates that type of outcome. What I mean by partisan geography.
Well, we talked a little bit about how packing the packing of a party’s votes into one district, wastes those votes,
so that they can’t be used elsewhere, gain majorities elsewhere. That packing can be done through the intentional design of the district.
That packing can also be done naturally, in part because we are so geographically polarized.
Democrats and Republicans live in totally different places. Specifically, Democrats tend to live in dense urban areas, whereas Republicans
tend to live along the periphery and in urban and rural areas. And what that does is it tends to cause these densely
urban, highly Democratic districts that have a an inefficient
concentration of Democratic votes, whereas more lukewarm Republican districts exist in the periphery and in the suburbs.
So one of the big things about how Georgia flipped congressional districts was because those suburban districts went a little bit bluer.
And so anyways that is generally the Republican advantage due to partizan geography.
So that that partizan advantage may not have anything to do with
intentional redistricting and everything to do with the residential geography of partizans.
And to be clear, this is just it’s just the geographic distribution of the Biden votes from 2020.
And you can see south Atlanta and it’s blue, north it’s all red. That exists in every single
major city, the clustering of paersons. So to belabor this point and clearly
Nancy Pelosi
belabor this point one thing I like to point to in order to belabor this point is Nancy Pelosi.
I’m from California, in fact, just south of San Francisco. And this is certainly an example of, you know, this
question of is it gerrymandering or is it geography? And you might ask this question when you’re when you’re
thinking about this incumbency advantage issue, when you’re thinking about the lack of electoral competition in Congress.
Well, Nancy Pelosi has one of the safest seats in the country. It contains about 80 percent of San Francisco.
She consistently wins with 80 percent plus of the vote, and she’s been reelected since 1987.
So one might say, well, clearly the district has been designed to give Nancy Pelosi a an advantage.
But if we take a look at the partizan geography of the area
there, Pacifically, San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s 12th district is right on in the city of San Francisco.
That’s right there. And if we take a look at the Clinton vote share of all of the little precincts
Bay Area
within the Bay Area, you’ll notice that it is a heavily blue location. There’s seven million over seven million
people living in nine Bay Area counties. The nine Bay Area counties are 20 percent
Trump 25 percent Romney, 25 percent McCain. Republicans barely get a quarter of the votes in the Nine Bay Area counties,
a district congressional district, only 700000 people. Right. So he’s got seven million people in the Bay Area.
How do you draw a district that is going to be Republican? Right. How do you draw competitive districts if you’re doing this
with respect to neutral districts and criteria? You just want to draw districts that out people who live next
to each other in a district. You can’t. The answer, the only way to get more lukewarm competitive districts is to extend the district way out into the valley.
Right. And pick up some of those Republican votes. And that would be intentional. You’d have to do that intentionally.
So I belabored the point that it could possibly be geography and not intentional redistricting.
So given that we wanted to detect gerrymandering, the question becomes
how do we distinguish between intentional gerrymandering and the effects of geography and other things or non intentional factors?
And the answer is that we can compare the maps to ones that have not been gerrymandered and see if there’s a difference. Right.
So if we want to know what is the effect of gerrymandering on this in the state, well, we would have to look at the outcomes in that state and compare it to the outcomes
of a counterfactual environment where no gerrymandering occurred. And the difference between the gerrymandering maps and non gerrymandered maps is
the effect of gerrymandering. That would be detecting gerrymandering. The problem is that 1, It’s hard to know whether or not there was intent in the redistricting process.
And 2 we’ll never see that counterfactual where there’s a non gerrymandered district. So one of the things that we can do is we can have computers, draw the districts
in the same way that the legislators would, using the same neutral criteria so nonpolitical criteria , except the computers could do it
without political intent. The reason that 1, they are computers, and 2, we not give it any partizan
or political data and we just draw the districts in the same state in the same number of districts using the same residential patterns.
And partizans geography adhering to the same basic principles of districting, which is that
they need to be equally populated, but districts need to be contiguous, meaning that if you are in one part of the districts
you can get to any other part of the district without crossing the boundary. And they need be compact, which is that people live next to each other.
So, again, the difference between the map, the maps that we observe and these computer simulated non gerrymandered maps
can be attributed to political intent, to the effect of gerrymandering So there are a number of different ways to make computer simulations.
Computer simulations
These are just the outcomes of ones that I produced just a couple days ago.
This is the actual congressional map, and here is a simulated version.
This particular simulation has been drawn… You’re drawing maps at random, and they’re accounting for not just making
sure they’re equally populated , but in some population threshold. Not just that they’re contiguous, not just that they’re compact,
but also that they adhere to county boundaries, which is another principle that districters or map makers try to adhere to.
You can see that they try to keep county boundaries intact, just like the actual districts. So they’re fairly similar.
You have a computer draw a thousand of those maps. And I did that for Congress.
So this is the congressional delegation for Georgia. Remember, there’s 14 seats,
and this is just a histogram of the outcomes of the districts. So, again, there’s a thousand simulated district maps.
I just looked at for each one of those 1000 maps, how many of those districts preferred Biden over Trump
and just counted those the numbers up plotted distribution. So most of the simulations had about
five Biden favored districts. The next was 6 favored districts.
So somewhere between five and six favorite districts. Right. Five and six Biden districts out of 14.
The actual maps have about six suggesting that there’s not a huge difference
in terms of the outcome of the actual maps compared to a
non gerrymandered simulated. Right, not a Huge difference. But one thing to keep in mind is that most of the simulated maps,
the non gerrymandered maps, the partizan, not conscious of any political data,
produced fewer than a majority of the congressional districts. Remember, Biden won a majority of the votes.
So that’s sort of the important takeaway, is that a map that is being designed
blind to partizanship blind to race, etc.
produces non majoritarian outcomes, in part because the geography of Democrats and Atlanta alone tend to pack those urban districts. Right.
Creating an inefficient distribution of Democratic votes. One of the things that we’ve noticed actually now relative to any time period
in the last 50 years is that the vote for president is almost identical to the vote for Congress.
There are some cases of… the benefit of using presidential votes over congressional votes is that sometimes congress people run unopposed.
So you want to know what is the support for Democrats in that district? So you’d use
Democratic candidate for president… so you could use the total number of congressional votes but again, because a number of congresspeople ran unopposed.
And you want to know is what do the districts do with a sum total votes statewide?
How do they translate the statewide votes into seats? And there’s other things with congressional races like incumbency,
and the name recognition, all sorts of things that go into why a candidate might do well in the congressional election
despite being in a competitive partizan district. Right. And that’s why you did you sense the partizanship of the district
now, not to mention congressional votes and presidential votes are very much alike. And lastly, this is the Georgia Senate.
Again, this line marks the majority. This is the median. So you need 29 seats in order to have a majority.
The simulations fall well below the majority. So, again, despite
having a majority of votes, the Democrats are getting less than 40 seats. And in this case, the actual districts are producing
even fewer, not that much fewer, but a bit fewer Biden districts
than simulation studies, suggesting that there might be some gerrymandering, some intentional use districts
to advantage Republicans who are in control of districts. But again, it’s pretty close.
And you do get randomly drawn districts that produce 25 Biden supporting
districts. This is something that I published a while ago in essentially doing simulations, a bit less sophisticated.
These are not simulations that are accounting for county boundaries or anything like that designed to make really compact districts.
And did these four 41 states for Congress from the US Congress and took the simulated outcomes and plotted them in gray
right with these error bars that represent essentially the range of simulated outcomes, where you can see that
the simulated is the simulated maps create a large number of safe Republican districts,
around 130 seat Republican districts, and about one hundred and thirty safe Democrat districts with about an even number
of marginal Republican and marginal Democratic districts. So it’s highly symmetric. Right.
This is, again, the gray is the outcomes for the simulations.
These little red dots are the outcomes of the actual enacted maps And so you can see that in the actual enacted maps across the country,
there are far more saved Republican districts than the simulated counterfactuals and far more safe Democratic districts
than simulated counterfactuals suggesting, And we see this when we break it down by who controls the districts, places where Republicans have a trifecta
that a governor, they have the upper and lower chamber in the state, and they’re able to pass a map that they want. You see
Republicans creating safe Republican districts. You see the same thing with Democrats as well. Yeah.
So remember, these simulated districts have been drawn on a partizan geography where Democrats are clustered.
That is the current partizan geography. So these simulations, these simulated districts are controlling for the effects of partizan geography.
So the difference between them is the effective intent, not the effect of geography. And so what we’re seeing here
is that in the aggregate, you have the effective intent across all the states, is that there are fewer marginally Democratic districts. Right.
Fewer marginally Democratic districts, and more safe Republican and state Democratic districts than than would exist if there wasn’t gerrymandering.
Maps were drawn by a computer. Essentially, what you’re seeing when you break it down is that Republicans are taking marginal districts
and turning them into safe Republican districts. Democrats in places where Democrats control the redistricting process,
there’s not a lot of marginal Republican districts. So what they’re doing is it’s a safe haven targeting marginal Democratic districts
and making them more marginally or more safe. They turn them into safe districts.
And this is part of my research. It’s a great time to be doing this
because it’s a very exciting time for map makers And so what’s nice about this is, again, we’re concerned about gerrymandering.
We should Be concerned about gerrymandering. for representative purposes, but in the past, it’s been hard to detect
because it’s hard to know what the effect of intent in the redistricting process is, but with the advancements of
computers, technology, the advancements of data the idea that we have this low level data that we’re working with,
electronic shapefiles, these are electronic versions of maps.
And we can do some much more sophisticated analysis of the maps than we ever were able to do in the past.
And this technology doesn’t just exist with few people who want to gain an advantage.
It also exists with public and watch groups and academics. I suppose who can sort of analyze
the districts of, let’s say, those that have been drawn Thank you. Thanks for having me.