Partisan Gerrymandering--Invidious or Benevolent? Gaffney v. Cummings and Its Aftermath.

In its decision of Gaffney v Cummings, the Supreme Court legitimized a Connecticut districting scheme which purposefully was designed to yield rough proportionality between a party's share of the total vote and its share of legislative seats This paper examines the method used by the state's attorney, Robert Dixon, to show that the scheme was fair, and was not an "invidious gerrymander", proposes an alternative method for detecting a biased districting scheme, and looks at Connecticut legislative election outcomes in the 1970s to see whether or not Dixon's standards of fairness were realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]