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Congressional redistricting requires institutions to make decisions about which criteria they will use to draw new district boundaries. These decisions unavoidably prioritize certain criteria at the expense of other criteria. Further, the competitive nature of redistricting criteria also means that when institutions use certain criteria at the expense of others, they are also correlating with certain forms of group representation at the expense of others. This paper argues that the representational consequences of redistricting are best understood through an approach that accounts for this process and the full array of redistricting institutions and criteria. Using a novel research design and an extensive data set covering six decades of redistricting cycles, this paper supports these claims with empirical evidence describing the relationships of seven categories of redistricting institutions with a wide range of criteria. This paper finds that partisan legislatures, bipartisan legislatures, and political commissions facilitate partisan group representation; state courts facilitate geographic group representation; federal courts facilitate racial and ethnic group representation; and independent commissions facilitate both geographic and racial/ethnic group representation. These findings emphasize that Americans are categorized and grouped differently during congressional redistricting depending on who is drawing the lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The group-centered theory of party development provides a new theoretical framework for understanding early party development. Specifically, it provides a logical framework to understand why early state legislators were motivated to engage in partisan gerrymandering during a period without national organizations. I use Pennsylvania as a case study to determine if partisanship influenced the creation of congressional district maps in 1802, 1812, and 1822. Using county-level congressional election returns and state legislative journals, I provide evidence of strategic partisan gerrymandering by the Democratic-Republicans during each apportionment year. I also show that the Federalist minority in Pennsylvania knew the national political impact of the process and attempted to influence congressional maps for their own partisan advantage. Lastly, I demonstrate how multi-member districts were the Democratic-Republicans' weapon of choice to engage in partisan gerrymandering throughout the period. These results highlight the connection between state legislatures and congressional party politics during the first party era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the contemporary US context, this article examines the ethical quandaries raised by partisan gerrymandering, where constituency boundaries are manipulated for electoral benefit. More specifically, it will examine the ethics of retaliatory gerrymandering. Though gerrymandering cannot be defended as a political practice by any agent who assigns intrinsic value to democracy, it might be justified as a 'dirty hands' (DH) practice, where it is all-things-considered justified as a lesser evil that still leaves a moral residue. However, it does not work as a standard DH problem, as the stakes of gerrymandering are usually less extreme and the causes more structural, making the usual language of DH a poor fit. The core moral intuition behind DH, of doing wrong to do right, is still appropriate, but is best understood within the context of retaliation. When others set the terms of the competition to make a practice such as gerrymandering essential for political victory, a proportionate use of these practices might be necessary to compete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from televised COVID-19 press briefings, this study explicates how the interplay between verbal and visual resources help policy makers restore public trust following organization-level failures by neutralizing unfavorable discourses that threaten the public's perceptions of their competence, integrity and benevolence and by emphasizing positive aspects associated with these factors. The findings reveal that these mediated multimodal speeches not only prioritize the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the surveillance failures, while aggrandizing their ad hoc responses without addressing the causes. This trust repair practice serves to frame the pandemic – initially as an external biosecurity threat and subsequently as a natural and expectable characteristic of an infectious disease that can be handled – hinging largely on the creation of "us-them," which undermines equitable public health objectives and transmission mitigation in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the creation and verification of databases of all precinct boundaries used in the United States 2016, 2018, and 2020 November general elections, enhanced with election results for all partisan statewide offices. United States election officials report election results in the smallest geographic reporting known as the precinct. Scholars and practitioners find these election results valuable for numerous use cases. However, these data cannot be augmented with other geographically-bound data, such as U.S. Census data, without precinct boundaries. Here we describe the collection of precinct boundary data from state and local election officials, sometimes provided in GIS formats, images, text descriptions, and – in rare cases – verbally. We describe how we verify boundaries with other election data, such as geocoded voter registration files. Our open-source data has appeared in redistricting litigation argued before the United States Supreme Court; and has been used by state and local redistricting authorities, media organizations, advocacy groups, scholars, and a vibrant community of mapping enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court has adopted divergent interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause as applied to race and redistricting. Vote dilution doctrine requires mapmakers to consider race to ensure that racial minorities are not packed or cracked. Congress, moreover, has embraced vote dilution doctrine in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. By contrast, racial gerrymandering doctrine triggers strict scrutiny if mapmakers subordinate traditional redistricting principles to race, thereby threatening Section 2's constitutionality. To resolve this doctrinal riddle, this Essay examines whether, as originally understood, the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment governed the use of race during redistricting. The Equal Protection Clause did not apply to political rights. Indeed, the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men nationwide. The Reconstruction Framers debated whether the Fifteenth Amendment also protected the right to hold office, but they barely discussed redistricting. This Essay then turns to postratification evidence. The Enforcement Acts did not regulate the use of race during redistricting. During the 1870 and 1880 redistricting cycles, Republican Southern states empowered Black voters whereas Democratic Southern states packed and cracked them. This Essay argues that, from an originalist perspective, the competing doctrines of vote dilution and racial gerrymandering are improperly grounded in the Equal Protection Clause. This Essay further claims that, under the Fifteenth Amendment, there is some historical evidence in favor of vote dilution doctrine but virtually no historical support for racial gerrymandering doctrine. The upshot is that Section 2 is valid legislation under Congress's Fifteenth Amendment enforcement authority to protect the rights to vote and hold office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 redistricting cycle closely resembled recent cycles in many ways, but also differed substantially in others. I, therefore, begin by discussing some of the new, unique features of redistricting. Next, I extend existing work on the impact of different redistricting methods to 2022 and discuss how the trends in the most recent cycle compare to years past. From there, I discuss how the most recent redistricting plans could impact future elections. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of ideas for future research in the areas of gerrymandering, redistricting reform, and laws around how lines are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do representatives change their messaging to match the partisanship of their district? Prior studies of Congressional communication reveal a correspondence between district and member partisanship, but rely on cross‐sectional comparisons that do not distinguish between the role of electoral selection versus re‐election incentives. In this paper, we address this gap using decennial redistricting, examining how the partisan extremity of members' social media posts changes when they are redistricted into more partisan or more moderate districts. We find clear evidence of rhetorical responsiveness to the new constituency. Additional analyses show that rhetorical responsiveness complements roll call responsiveness, but is greater in magnitude. We argue that rhetorical responsiveness is normatively complex, potentially aiding representational processes but also possibly contributing to affective polarization. An examination of changes in specific word usage following redistricting supports the latter concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistricting is constantly accompanied by political conflicts as well as academic arguments in countries with majoritarian or mixed electoral system, as a result of the process could potentially influence the outcome of elections. In the international scientific discourse and legal processes, this conflict is managed by different approaches. So far, Hungary didn't implement such methodologies by the executive branches, therefore such anomalies as malapportionment, are not taken care of, as the electoral reform of 2011 has not been advanced by any kind of social or scientific disputes. Having reviewed existing processes of redistricting in the US, UK, and Canada, a procedure was created in this paper for revising district boundaries, that would fulfill the requirement of proportionality in respect of Hungary as well. To achieve that, at the first place, proportionality among counties must be assured. Secondly, if a given county will have modified number of constituencies, district borders must be redrawn to gain proportional representation of voters. The results show, that the proposed subdivision would provide proportional allocation for the forthcoming 10 years at least. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important quantitative geography application area derives from the periodically repeating apportionment process of redrawing legislative district boundaries to guarantee equal voter representation through identical or equivalent population counts, a situation confronting the U.S. Supreme Court with gerrymandering rulings on a decennial basis. This remains a small geographic sample size domain, with states having between one and fifty-two (i.e., California) congressional precincts in 2023. Texas constitutes an informative case study because its sample size of thirty-eight exceeds the frequently touted minimum of thirty, and its 2020 increase was two seats, more than any other state, some of which experienced decreases. Hence, although all fifty states also have undergone internal population redistribution, the Texas redrawn boundaries offer the greatest opportunity for dramatic borderline changes. This article appraises outcomes of this Texas gain within its legal constraints as they pertain to a novel uniform distribution explicitly embracing spatial autocorrelation, a fundamental georeferenced data property. Its name is sui-uniform to differentiate it from the prevalent auto- model convention; this article furnishes its first empirical application. After accounting for spatial autocorrelation, the inferential conclusion for Texas is as preferred: Superpopulation geotagged voting-age populations conform to a uniform distribution, whereas racial and ethnic subpopulations do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely on various proxies for community illustration, such as compactness and municipal split counts, to guide redistricting, recent legal challenges and scholarly works have shown the difficulty of balancing multiple criteria in district plan creation. To address these issues, we propose the use of spatial interaction to directly quantify the degree to which districts capture the underlying COIs. Using large-scale human mobility flow data, we condense spatial interaction community capture for a set of districts into a single number, the interaction ratio (IR), for redistricting plan evaluation. To compare the IR to traditional redistricting criteria (compactness and fairness), we employ a Markov chain-based regionalization algorithm (ReCom) to produce ensembles of valid plans and calculate the degree to which they capture spatial interaction communities. Furthermore, we propose two methods for biasing the ReCom algorithm towards different IR values. We perform a multi-criteria assessment of the space of valid maps, and present the results in an interactive web map. The experiments on Wisconsin congressional districting plans demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods for biasing sampling towards higher or lower IR values. Furthermore, the analysis of the districts produced with these methods suggests that districts with higher IR and compactness values tend to produce district plans that are more proportional with regard to seats allocated to each of the two major parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of $2N$ equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) met for the first time in 2020 after it was created via ballot initiative in 2018. The MICRC included thirteen Michiganders tasked with drawing state house, senate, and congressional districts. The newly amended Michigan Constitution charged the MICRC with incorporating a new criterion previously unknown to Michigan redistricting: communities of interest. Communities of interest (COIs) have played a role in redistricting law across several states, gaining prominence after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Shaw v. Reno as an ostensibly race-neutral "traditional districting principle." However, the concept is difficult to define. This Note is the first to study the MICRC's attempt to codify the cultural, historical, and economic interests of communities across Michigan, as defined by Michiganders themselves. Although the MICRC worked tirelessly to review the flood of public comments, it will need to modify its approach for the next redistricting cycle. We propose several substantive and procedural changes to improve the COI review process, including firming up a thematic, "bottom-up" approach, strengthening public outreach efforts, and modernizing the comment database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weighted voting involves weighting representatives' votes by the populations that they represent. Such systems have been adopted in legislative bodies as a remedy for malapportionment and are sometimes used to elect candidates for the executive branch of government. But they receive little attention. This article observes the neglected vices of weighted voting systems: they violate intuitive conditions of monotonicity and participation. These vices count significantly against the use of weighted voting, and reflecting on why they arise improves our understanding of axioms in social choice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reapportionment, the decennial process of allocating congressional seats (and, relatedly, Electoral College votes) to each state after the census, was a messy process from the birth of the United States until the early twentieth century. Every ten years, Congress would engage in reapportionment and controversy was often the order of the day. After the 1920 Census, controversy over reapportionment led to a complete breakdown of the process (i.e., reapportionment didn't happen). Following this utter failure, Congress passed legislation in 1929 to put the reapportionment process on what amounts to autopilot, and since passage of that legislation, reapportionment has proceeded without much controversy. In recent years, commentators have called for changing the reapportionment process either through legislation or judicial intervention. These proposals include calls for the courts to enforce a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment known as the Reduction Clause that could be used to deprive states of congressional seats (and Electoral College votes) for denying or abridging voting rights. This Article contends that it would be unwise to reopen the reapportionment process. Reopening a reapportionment process that has functioned smoothly for nearly a century would add another potentially contentious issue to what have become known as the "voting wars" that have raged between the political parties for the last several decades. And calls for the courts to enforce the Reduction Clause, which has never been used in its 150-plus years of existence, are misplaced because implementation of the Reduction Clause would be terribly difficult, likely be tinged with partisanship, and might well lead to a return to the reapportionment stalemate of the 1920s. The judiciary would be wise to steer clear of interfering in this realm and it has several judicial tools, such as the political questions doctrine and standing principles, that it can use to keep from messing with reapportionment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we look ahead to the 2024 presidential election, ensuring a fair, open, and accountable voting process is a key topic of discussion. Elections have become seemingly more contentious in recent years, including concerns of a rise in gerrymandering in voting districts across the United States. In Virginia, the 2021 Redistricting Commission, made up of eight state legislators and eight citizens, was given the task of drawing new district maps for Virginia's voters. However, the Commission failed to come to an agreement and the Virginia Supreme Court ultimately created the new maps. This article uses data from the Virginia Commonwealth University Wilder School Commonwealth Poll to explore the extent to which Virginians were aware of the Redistricting Commission (and could thus provide input during the process), perspectives on the Redistricting Commission's efforts, and perspectives on what should be done to improve the redistricting process. We conclude with recommendations for ways in which redistricting commissions could be changed in the future to ensure that their work is better aligned with public opinion, with a key recommendation of ensuring that future commissions are made up of experts and citizens, rather than consisting largely of elected officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the court case In re 2021 Redistricting Cases, wherein the Alaska Supreme Court held that the state's legislative map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander violating the state equal protection clause based on its intended discrimination against a class of voters. The court assessed the neutral factors of regional partisanship, selective treatment of political subdivisions, and ignorance of communities of interest and public opposition as evidence of partisan intent.

In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by casting approval ballots. This approval-based apportionment setting generalizes traditional apportionment and is a natural restriction of approval-based multiwinner elections, where approval ballots range over individual candidates instead of parties. Using techniques from both apportionment and multiwinner elections, we identify rules that generalize the D'Hondt apportionment method and that satisfy strong axioms which are generalizations of properties commonly studied in the apportionment literature. In fact, the rules we discuss provide representation guarantees that are currently out of reach in the general setting of multiwinner elections: First, we show that core-stable committees are guaranteed to exist and can be found in polynomial time. Second, we demonstrate that extended justified representation is compatible with committee monotonicity (also known as house monotonicity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For reapportionment of local districts, legislators routinely rely on unadjusted total population data from the United States' decennial Census to identify their population base and equalize their districts to comply with the One-Person, One-Vote doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since 1950, the Census Bureau has specified that students living in university housing such as dormitories will be enumerated in the Census as living in their "college towns," as opposed to their hometowns or parental homes. However, many college students are not permanent, legal, or voting residents in their college towns. This was particularly true during the 2020 Census Enumeration period, during which the vast majority of college students were not physically residing in their college towns, but were enumerated in the Census as residents of their university housing. When local legislatures rely on unadjusted Census total population numbers to identify an apportionment base and equalize their districts, actual voting and legal residents of college towns enjoy highly inflated voting power and representational strength in comparison to neighboring districts without large student populations, creating a "college town advantage." While many college towns are disproportionately white and wealthy compared to the rest of the state, districts that neighbor universities are disproportionately minority and poor, placing the largest political dilution burden of the college town advantage on poor and minority members of local communities. This Article argues that for local districts with large votingineligible college student populations, the college town advantage runs afoul of the permissible apportionment base requirement under the One-Person, One-Vote doctrine. This Article advocates for litigation over the inclusion of college students within certain localities' apportionment bases under an apportionment base theory of One-Person, One-Vote compliance. This Article highlights the issue of the current college student enumeration practice and the strength of an apportionment base legal challenge through a case student of the City of New Haven's 2022 redistricting plan in the districts surrounding Yale University. Additionally, this Article presents several legislative and executive solutions to address the limitations of college student enumeration challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case that threatens the bedrock of America's democracy, and it is not clear how it will shake out. The cumbersomely named "Independent State Legislature Theory" is at the heart of the case Moore v. Harper, which is before the Supreme Court this term. The theory holds that state legislatures should be free from the ordinary bounds of state judicial review when engaged in matters that concern federal elections. Despite being defeated a myriad of times at the Supreme Court, the latest challenge stems from a legal battle over North Carolina's redistricting maps. If the Court rules in favor of the theory--as some recent scholars urge them to do--then historically undemocratic state legislatures would be free to engage in all manner of devious disenfranchisement tactics, with little to no redress in state courts.† [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reversing historical trends, 2020 congressional redistricting produced national partisan parity. However, as this Article argues, all is not well with our congressional districts. With partisan gerrymandering now a bipartisan affair, electoral competition has diminished. Federal redistricting reform efforts have stalled. The Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable. And future redistricting cycles or state-law litigation could re-bias the national House map. This Article analyzes the pitfalls of recent political and legal developments in redistricting and proposes a solution: interstate redistricting agreements. Through interstate redistricting agreements, sets of states with offsetting partisan gerrymanders could agree to standardize redistricting in procedure, substance, or both. These agreements could deescalate "redistricting warfare," bolster electoral competition, and increase state legislators' own electoral opportunities without ceding partisan advantage. This Article addresses policy design questions and interstate redistricting agreements' constitutionality under the Compact Clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When partisan politics completely frustrate the efforts of a state to redistrict after a census, federal district courts are tasked with the "unwelcome obligation" of imposing court-ordered electoral maps that meet the federal constitutional one-person, one-vote requirement. This Comment terms these cases "intrastate redistricting stalemates," novelly distinguishing them from other Equal Protection one-person, one-vote cases. In the wake of Moore v. Harper, federal courts may be remediating more intrastate redistricting stalemates than ever if state courts are stripped of their power to impose remedial congressional maps as outside the scope of "ordinary judicial review" permitted under the Elections Clause. Remediating intrastate redistricting stalemates is trickier for federal courts than remediating other Equal Protection one-person, one-vote cases. In crafting or selecting remedial maps, the U.S. Supreme Court has instructed federal courts that they must defer to states' policies and plans. To inadequately do so is reversible error. But when is a state policy or plan owed deference? The answer is clear in cases where a state has recently redistricted but a federal court has struck down the state's new maps for failure to meet federal constitutional or statutory requirements: the state's policies as expressed in its recently enacted, post-census reapportionment plan are owed deference to the extent they do not violate federal requirements. But when a state fails to redistrict post-census due to an intrastate stalemate, this Comment argues that there is no recently enacted reapportionment plan owed deference. This Comment argues this holds true whether the intrastate stalemate presents as (1) an intralegislative conflict, due to one or both legislative branches failing to agree on a map or to garner sufficient votes to pass a map; (2) a conflict between the state's legislative branch and the executive branch via the governor vetoing a legislatively passed map; or (3) a conflict between the state judiciary and the mapmaking body over the state constitutionality of the reapportionment plan. Instead, this Comment argues that the controlling source of state policy owed deference when remediating an intrastate redistricting stalemate must be the state's constitution over other conflicting sources of state policy. This is particularly critical because often state government parties advocate for their own rejected or stalled reapportionment plans--which do not have the force of law--as proposed remedies in these intrastate stalemate cases. To blindly select a proposed map solely because it was prepared by the branch delegated with state mapmaking power puts the federal court in the position of selecting a winner in a bitter, hyperpartisan dispute that could not exist under the state constitution's checks and balances--which remain critical after Moore. Instead, a federal court must select or craft a remedial map that (1) comports with all state constitutional commands and controls for electoral map outcomes; and (2) best embodies state redistricting policies as expressed in other valid state statutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of opinions surrounding the 2020 presidential election, multiple U.S. Supreme Court Justices broke from precedent to signal support of the "independent state legislature theory" (ISLT), a formerly obscure interpretation of state legislatures' power over the administration of federal elections. Proponents of the ISLT allege that the U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures plenary power in federal election contexts--including the power to discount ballots, redraw legislative maps, or appoint alternative slates of presidential electors. Although the Court denied certiorari in each case, across the denials four current Justices dissented because they considered the ISLT to be a proper interpretation of Article II power. More recently, state litigants have sought to win the Court's endorsement of the ISLT to preserve maps from the 2020 redistricting cycle that state courts found unconstitutional. Finally, ahead of the 2022 term, the Court granted certiorari in Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina redistricting case that centers on the ISLT question. These developments are, in a word, unsettling. This Note assumes for the sake of argument that the Court will endorse some version of the ISLT in the near future, through Moore v. Harper or a similar vehicle. It argues that potential election-subversion scenarios, even if undertaken by a Courtendorsed "independent" state legislature, are nevertheless textually constrained by the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. That is, a legislature acting under color of the ISLT would violate voters' due process "liberty" interests if it invokes the ISLT to manufacture antidemocratic outcomes. In so doing, this Note expands upon established due process frameworks in the voting context--including settled expectations, detrimental reliance, and fundamental fairness--and applies these principles to the novel context of the ISLT. By addressing a variety of textual and practical considerations in this developing area, this Note is the first to provide workable and credible constraints to limit independent legislatures from subverting well-settled democratic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]