Redistricting

Significance: The racial or ethnic makeup of various voting blocs can be a significant consideration when drawing electoral district boundaries. Once established, multiethnic districts may also experience intense political competition among different groups.

Redistricting is a procedure that has tremendous significance for the way that the individual votes cast by US citizens are translated into the selection of legislative representatives. Racial and ethnic groups, as well as any number of other groups, may be either concentrated in particular districts or divided among many districts.

The Process

The citizens of the United States are divided into 435 congressional districts, with each district electing one legislator to the US House of Representatives. Each state is allocated a certain number of districts based on its relative population. Every ten years, after the census is completed, the 435 congressional seats are “reapportioned” among the states based on the new population figures.

The states then draw new district boundaries, both to permit an increase or decrease in their allotment of congressional seats and to ensure that all districts include approximately the same number of voters. These objectives derive from prevailing voting rights standards. In Wesberry v. Sanders in 1964, the US Supreme Court decreed that congressional representation must be based on the one man, one vote principle; that is, districts must be created “as nearly as practicable” with roughly equal numbers of voters.

Gerrymandering

Simply creating districts with numerically comparable populations does not ensure that the one-person, one-vote principle is observed. With knowledge of certain voting indicators (such as party affiliation), a district can be drawn that is heavily weighted toward a particular political party or group. This practice is known as “gerrymandering.” Gerrymandering has a long tradition in US politics, having been observed in reapportionment efforts since the late eighteenth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, various redistricting plans were rejected for their overt skewing in favor of a particular party. In Davis v. Bandemer in 1986, the US Supreme Court held that gerrymandering could be considered a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Yet at the same time, gerrymandering based on race or ethnicity (rather than party affiliation) seems to have the support of institutions such as the US Department of Justice and the Supreme Court. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, districts intentionally created to include a large percentage of racial minorities officially were seen as an appropriate corrective to address the small number of minority legislators in the US Congress and in various state and local legislatures. In other words, it was assumed that the voting strength of racial and ethnic groups could be increased by concentrating on individual minority voting districts. Such a procedure was understood to fulfill the objectives of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and was bolstered by a 1982 amendment to the act that upheld the right of African Americans and Hispanics “to elect representatives of their choice.”

This reasoning implies that racial and ethnic groups have unique, shared interests; that those interests can be represented only by a member of the group; that the members of a racial and ethnic group tend to vote in the same way; and that “outsiders” will tend not to vote for a member of the group. If all of these suppositions are true, then dividing a racial group between two districts may indeed dilute the voting strength of the bloc. Yet critics claim this reasoning conflicts with the traditional principles of US liberalism, which place individual interests above group interests, and which hold ascriptive characteristics such as race to be irrelevant to the awarding of political benefits.

Gerrymandering became increasingly common in the early twenty-first century, especially as new technology made the process even easier. Following the 2010 census, aggressive gerrymandering led to a high proportion of Republican candidates gaining seats in both the US House and state legislative offices. Many experts believe gerrymandering undermines the principles of representative government, causing fewer competitive US House seats and narrowing the focus of elected representatives who no longer need to show attention to anyone but those in their own party. Because White voters overwhelmingly identify with the Republican Party, critics believe the gerrymandering of the 2010s has resulted in the diminished power of Black voters.

Legal Challenges to Majority-Minority Districts

In the 1990s, the notion of “majority-minority” districts came under increasing, powerful attack. Although many leaders of minority groups continued to defend such districts as a necessary mechanism for increasing minority representation, the public mood and the US Supreme Court turned against the idea.A watershed occurred with the Shaw v. RenoShaw v. Reno[Shaw v. Reno] decision in 1993. In this case, two predominantly African American districts in North Carolina were at issue. Under pressure from the US Department of Justice, the North Carolina legislature had created the districts in an attempt to ensure that the state, whose population was 22 percent African American, would elect its first Black congressional representatives in more than a century. Both districts did indeed elect African Americans in 1992. However, five White voters in one of the districts sued the state, claiming that they had been effectively disfranchised by the reapportionment plan. The case reached the Supreme Court, whose 5–4 majority decision instructed the lower courts to reconsider the constitutionality of the district lines, which created a “bizarre” shape and had an “uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” Although the lower courts again upheld the district (while making findings to satisfy the Supreme Court), Shaw opened the door for more legal challenges to majority-minority districts. In the ensuing court and policy battles, minority groups that stood to “lose” districts created expressly for them were pitted against White voters. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congressional Black Caucus, and various other groups associated with minority issues expressed their support of the concept of majority-minority districts. Some claimed the trend would lead to the “ultimate bleaching of the US Congress.”In 1995, the Supreme Court more definitively rejected the notion of race-based districts in Miller v. Johnson. In this case, the court rejected redistricting plans in which “race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.” Miller forced the Georgia legislature to amend its reapportionment plan, and subsequent decisions forced other states to do the same. A number of incumbent minority legislatures found themselves running for reelection in districts that no longer had a high proportion of minority voters. Many minority groups saw this as a reversal in their quest for greater representation. Some even claimed that Miller was akin to the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that African Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” However, many of these incumbent legislators were reelected in their newly White-dominated districts. The relationship between race and redistricting was being rethought once again.RedistrictingLegal challenges to congressional redistricting plans continued into the twenty-first century. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause, in which North Carolina voters claimed that the state's districting maps favored Republicans and disenfranchised Black voters, that as long as the intent of redistricting was partisan and not racial, gerrymandering was constitutionally permissible. In 2023, the Supreme Court's ruling in Allen v. Milligan determined that Alabama's 2021 congressional redistricting plan had likely violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by including only one Black majority district (Alabama's population was 27 percent Black at the time of the ruling) out of seven total districts. The Supreme Court's decision demanded that Alabama redraw its congressional districts to include a second majority district for Black voters. The decision was praised by many who felt that the Supreme Court had weakened the Voting Rights Act through previous rulings.

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