Tag Archives: gerrymandering

Listen To My Friend Morton…

As regular readers of this blog know, Morton Marcus (who comments here from time to time) is a longtime friend with whom I co-authored a recent book on women’s rights, “From Property to Partner.”

Morton also writes a statewide newspaper column, primarily focused on data about Indiana, and occasionally comparing the actual activities of our dreadful legislature with his opinions about what that body ought to be doing. A recent column was so on target, I decided to share those recommendations. (Not that our supermajority Republican legislative overlords will pay the slightest bit of attention–they’re too busy micromanaging local government, destroying public education, pandering to the gun lobby, and imposing “Christian” behavioral restrictions on Hoosiers.)

The day before yesterday, you got Gulley, today you get Marcus.

The first of Morton’s recommendations was focused on legislative operations, which is sort of “inside baseball,” but important. He advocates releasing legislators to “act without the discipline of the Caucus. Let’s make the bold assumption that our 150 elected legislators are grownups. They can make their own decisions without the dictates of a repressive party leadership fully inebriated on the power of a super-majority of automatons.”

That will happen when pigs fly–or when we elect actual grownups.

Morton’s second recommendation–passage of independent redistricting– hits at the very center of Indiana’s continuing dysfunctions. Getting rid of gerrymandering would allow voters to choose their representatives; now, as sentient Hoosiers know, those representatives choose their voters. Gerrymandering is an absolutely wonderful mechanism for vote suppression–if your vote isn’t going to count, why cast it?

Morton also points out that an independent redistricting process would “likely rationalize districts such that two adjacent House districts would constitute one Senate district. No House districts would be divided.” As he notes, “Currently the Senate and the House district maps are independent of each other. It affords chaos and cover for the ambitions of individuals who seek lifetime membership in the General Assembly.”

His third recommendation hits on something else I’ve long advocated (there’s a reason we’ve been friends so long; we have similar, albeit not always congruent, views on the issues). He advocates adoption of the Maine Electoral College allocation rules.

Now the winner of the popular vote in Indiana gets all of the electoral votes in a presidential election. Under the system used in Maine, a notoriously left-wing coastal state, the winner of the statewide popular vote gets two electoral votes. The winner of each congressional district gets the one electoral vote of that district. No Constitutional amendment is needed for this move toward a more equitable system.

In 2020, instead of all 11 Indiana electoral votes going to the Repulsive candidate, that person would have received nine electoral votes and two such votes would have gone to the party that is Bidin’ its time.

(My apologies to those unfamiliar with the Gershwin songbook and who know only Taylor Swift lyrics.)

Morton also wants legislative study committees that would consider legislation reducing the number of townships in each county, and the number of counties in the states. (There are 92 counties in Indiana, in case you are wondering; California–somewhat larger– has 58).

 Why should Warren, Fountain, Parke and Vermillion not be joined into one or two counties? Perhaps Jasper and Newton counties should be returned to their former singularity. Let’s not neglect Blackford with Jay, Ohio with Dearborn or Switzerland.

I would miss the detailed data on each separate area, but my fetish is not the concern of the state. Likewise, cost cutting should not be the dominant objective, but rather improving service to citizens in line with the structure of society in the 21st century rather than the 19th century.

This last recommendation recalls that of the bipartisan Kernan-Shepard Commission, convened by then-Governor Mitch Daniels, that examined the operations of Indiana government and recommended merging or otherwise eliminating a number of the 1008 townships that each pay township boards and trustees and the expenses of trustee offices–artifacts of a time when reaching the county seat via horseback took half a day. As I wrote back in 2011, the Commission had the temerity to suggest that–in the age of the internet and the absence of virtually all of the other tasks with which those townships had originally been tasked– we should rethink them…

As members of that Commission discovered–and as Morton, a longtime Hoosier, clearly knows–Indiana legislators don’t “re-think.” Most of the time, they don’t really think in the first place.

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Common Sense Democracy

One of the most frustrating aspects of America’s current political dialogue (if our screaming fits can even be dignified by the term “dialogue”) is the importance attributed to  various individuals–looney-tunes and statesmanlike figures alike. It makes me want to amend that famous James Carville adage–“It’s the Economy, Stupid”–with a more accurate one: it’s the system, stupid.

Call. it the “but for” problem.

But for systemic flaws like gerrymandering, Americans would be highly unlikely to elect posturing fools like Jim Jordans and Margery Taylor Green. But for the Electoral College, Donald Trump would never have occupied the Oval Office. But for our current “winner take all” system, we could send many more sane, competent people to Congress.

In a recent article for Time Magazine, two prominent political scientists pointed out that these systemic flaws are fixable.

America’s sharp division isn’t just about policy disagreements or ideology. Much of it comes down to the science of how Congress is elected. Winner-take-all elections have produced a fully-sorted two-party system in America that pits two sides against each other, incentivizes performative conflict, and punishes compromise. With the existing electoral and party system, we may as well invest all our money into a colony on Mars as hope for a bipartisan coalition leading Congress right now.

The silver lining is that America is not stuck with this broken system. Preserving the failing status quo is a choice. Winner-take-all elections are nowhere in the Constitution, and Congress has the power to change them. Multi-party coalitions work well in many other countries, and they can work in America, too, if we are willing to confront the root causes of Congress’s brokenness.

One of those root causes is America’s system of winner-take-all elections.

Winner take all elections do not result in anything remotely like accurate representation. As the authors point out,  all five of Oklahoma’s representatives are Republicans, even though about a third of Oklahoma voters consistently vote for Democrats, and all nine of Massachusetts’ representatives are Democrats, even though about a third of Massachusetts voters are consistent Republicans. But because the minority party doesn’t make up a majority of any one district, they are deprived of any voice in Congress.

That means that primary elections in these states effectively determine the general election outcome, making it easy to win for extreme candidates, harder for moderates, and impossible for anyone in the minority party.

This is one reason why the overwhelming majority of the world’s democratic countries use proportional representation for their elections, where districts elect multiple representatives to Congress in proportion to their party’s share of the vote. In America, it would allow more voters to have a say in who represents them; if a party wins 40% of the vote, it would get about 40% of the seats. Oklahoma liberals and Massachusetts conservatives would have a voice. That would mean more moderates in Congress. Members of the far right and far left would be elected, too – but in accurate proportion to their amount of support.

Proportional representation would also alter the incentive structure for representatives. Reflexive opposition to the “enemy” would no longer be the way to win elections, because voters would have more than a choice between the lesser of two evils. This would allow more ways to form a coalition in Congress capable of compromising and governing with a lot less infighting and chaos. This is one reason why last year, more than 200 political scientists, historians, and legal experts signed an open letter to Congress calling for the adoption of proportional representation.

There is much to love about Americans’ fixation on individualism and personal responsibility, but it is an emphasis that far too often masks important realities. For example, people are rarely poor because they are lazy and unwilling to work–far more often, they can’t work because they are disabled, or because the factory closed, or because the economy tanked. Congress isn’t dysfunctional just because the GOP base prefers angry buffoons –it’s our unrepresentative and obsolete electoral systems that give legislative terrorists the ability to bring the operation of government to a screeching halt.

In our winner take all system, a candidate who wins 49.9% of the vote loses to the one who garners 50.1%–and the people who voted for that losing candidate are 100% unrepresented. Then we wonder why the people who won election feel free to ignore the needs and desires of that 49.9%. After a few election cycles, we wonder why so many voters who find themselves consistently in that losing 49.9% stop voting and participating.

It’s the system, stupid. We need to fix it.

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A Case Study

Wisconsin is currently providing us with a lesson about the state of American democracy.

It isn’t just the arrogance of Republicans who are threatening to overturn the expressed will of the voters with a trumped-up impeachment of a state supreme court judge; the state is a case study for Democrats elsewhere whose voters face similarly manufactured limits on their ability to win elections.

Last December, just after the midterms, the Guardian ran a report on how Democrats had managed to fight back in what the article called “the nation’s most gerrymandered state.”

Ben Wikler spent so much time poring over polls ahead of the midterm elections that it eventually became too much to bear.

“I was throwing up with anxiety,” Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, confessed to the Guardian.

It wasn’t merely out of concern, common to Democrats nationwide in the run-up to the early November vote, that voters were set to give their candidates the traditional drubbing of the party in power, powered by Joe Biden’s unpopularity or the wobbly state of the economy.

Rather, Wikler feared that in Wisconsin his party was on the brink of something worse: permanent minority status in a state that is crucial to any presidential candidate’s path to the White House.

What the party faced in Wisconsin was dire: if Democratic Governor Tony Evers lost re-election, or if the state’s GOP achieved supermajority control of Wisconsin’s legislature, the GOP could have ensured that its electoral college votes never helped a Democrat win the White House.

As Wikler said, Wisconsin is “a state where Republicans have tried to engineer things to make it voter-proof.”

According to several studies, Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the country, and the fourth most difficult state in which to cast a ballot. It also has laws that make it practically impossible to conduct voter registration drives.

But Wisconsin’s Republicans are looking to tighten access to polling places further, and passed a host of measures to do so, all of which fell to Evers’s veto pen. With a supermajority in the legislature, they would have been able to override his vetoes. In a speech to supporters, Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for governor, made it plain that if he was elected, the GOP “will never lose another election” in the state.

Amazingly, despite being faced with enormous structural barriers,  Evers was re-elected, and Wisconsin Democrats narrowly managed to keep Republicans from a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Democrats’ success at standing their ground in Wisconsin was one of the most pleasant surprises the party experienced in the midterms.

What accounted for Evers’ robust win?

The fact that statewide races can’t be gerrymandered is obviously key. And according to various news sources, Evers had a clear advantage over Michels among those age 18 to 44 years old, an age cohort that made up more than a third of voters in Wisconsin.

Evers also had stronger support for the issues he ran on than Michels did.

The AP VoteCast survey showed the most important issue facing the country for Wisconsin voters was overwhelmingly the economy and jobs. However, Evers focused much of his campaign on abortion, which was only slightly more important to voters than the issue of crime, something Michels made a prominent theme of his candidacy.

Voters who cared most about the economy split their votes between the parties–but Wisconsin voters who said the abortion issue was very important to them were lopsidedly pro-choice. Evers attributed the strength of his win to that issue.

There is a lesson here for Indiana in next year’s statewide elections.

As with Wisconsin, Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering will be irrelevant in the upcoming statewide races. And–mirroring the Wisconsin gubernatorial contest–the Hoosier electorate cares about economic and public safety issues, but is divided on which party is best able to address those issues.

As in Wisconsin, however, Hoosiers who care about reproductive rights are lopsidedly pro-choice.

All but one of the five Republicans running for Governor are running ads professing their “pro-life” and “Christian faith” credentials. The already-endorsed Republican Senate candidate (Indiana’s male version of Margery Taylor Green) is a flat-out culture warrior who supports a ban on abortion with no exceptions, along with a multitude of other far-Right positions. (He recently called President Biden the “most corrupt person to ever occupy the White House.”  No kidding.)

I will grant that Indiana’s state Democratic party structure ranks somewhere between weak and “where the hell are you?” but the party has lucked out with strong and appealing statewide candidates–Jennifer McCormick for Governor and Marc Carmichael for U.S. Senate. Both  are on the right side of the issues Hoosier voters care about, and–if adequately funded– both can win next November.

We can learn from Wisconsin.

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Thank Goodness They Went Home…

Can you stand one more diatribe about the pathetic Indiana legislature that has finally and mercifully departed? 

During the past session, I posted several times about the GOP super-majority’s deliberate rejection of evidence about the state’s woeful performance in education. (I could have focused on a large number of other deficits, but who has the time…?) 

The GOP’s persistent efforts to privatize education–while ignoring the state’s increasingly critical shortage of the public school teachers who teach 90% of Hoosier children–required legislators to ignore the years of highly credible academic research rebutting justifications for vouchers. 

I have previously posted about the many problems with privatized and other forms of “alternative” schools that researchers have identified. Among those numerous problems is the distressingly high percentage of such schools that close within 4 years of their founding. A May 4th article from the Indianapolis Star confirms that Indiana is not exempt from such closures. It appears that a third of charter schools close each year.

Proponents of charters and vouchers claim that these closures are a “feature, not a bug”–that the closures are evidence that “the market” is working. Tell that to the distraught parent for whom these closures are disruptive at best. As the article notes, those disruptions create yet another barrier for students who are already vulnerable to low student outcomes, and particularly for students of color.

The Indiana Capital Chronicle took a look at the legislature’s education policy failures during the just-completed session–and published an analysis with which I entirely agree.

As demonstrated by the 2023 session of the Indiana General Assembly, the Republican supermajority is more concerned with creating problems rather than solving them. 

If we are not able to attract and retain teachers and education support professionals because of low pay, lack of respect and inadequate funding, it’s the students who lose out.  

Too many students are in schools where decision-makers have driven away quality educators by failing to provide competitive salaries and support, disrespecting the profession and placing extraordinary pressure on individual educators to do more and more with less and less.

Additionally, too many potential educators never go into the classroom in part because of appallingly low starting salaries and record wage gaps between teaching and professions that require similar education – gaps that get worse over the course of educators’ careers.

So, what did our elected leaders do to solve these problems? 

    • They silenced teachers by eliminating a 50-year right to discuss students’ learning conditions with school administrators. 
    • They threatened educators with a level-six felony and two-and-a-half years in jail if they recommend certain books to kids. 
    • They trampled on the ability for local schools and educators to work collaboratively with parents addressing individual students’ mental health needs. 
    • They continued to drain public schools of scarce funding by siphoning a billion dollars to wealthy Hoosiers so their kids can attend private school for free.

As the commentary pointed out, it was Republican lawmakers who ignored testimony from educators and parents, and doubled down on what has become a GOP “anti-woke”  obsession. They focused on appeasing the Republican culture warriors who are determined to attack teachers and librarians in our public schools, employing misinformation and lies.

They listened to wealthy corporate donors who gave their campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars to privatize our schools.

This agenda may benefit their political donors, but it hurts local communities which cherish and rely on their local schools – where 90% of Hoosier kids attend. 

It wasn’t just education, of course. The GOP super-majority ignored environmental concerns, thwarted efforts to improve building codes, spit on medical professionals and went to war against trans children–among many, many other things.

To call them “representatives” is to misuse the term.

Poll after poll confirms that Indiana’s legislature does not represent the policy preferences of Hoosier citizens. Thanks primarily to gerrymandering–which is the most effective of the GOP’s various efforts to suppress the votes of rational Hoosiers–Republican members of the General Assembly represent the most extreme elements of the Republican base. 

Since the Supreme Court has refused to notice that extreme gerrymandering is inconsistent with democracy and “one person, one vote,” the only way Hoosiers will ever get a truly representative legislative body is by massive turnout. Redistricting lines, after all, are based on turnout numbers from prior elections; if the people who have given up going to the polls because they’re convinced they live in a district that is “safe” for the other party were to vote in sufficient numbers, a lot of those “safe” districts wouldn’t be so safe.

I wish I knew how to get that message across.

I wish we didn’t have a legislative super-majority fixated on making Indiana the peer of a third-world country.

 

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Suppressing Hoosier Votes

The World’s Worst Legislature is coming to the end of this session, and we are beginning to see just how much damage it has inflicted and on whom.

Governor Holcomb has already signed the bill he described as “clear as mud,” depriving trans children of critically-important medical care. (That the measure was harmful and mean-spirited was clear.)

House bills still in the works will further enrich private (overwhelmingly religious) schools at the expense of the public schools that educate some 90% of Indiana children, although the Senate appears to have reconsidered.

And the Republicans who owe their seats to gerrymandering are passing measures to further suppress the vote.

According to the Cost of Voting study conducted by Northern Illinois University in 2020 Indiana’s restrictive voting laws make casting a ballot in the Hoosier state more difficult than most others. Our ranking was 41st in 2020 and if House Bill 1334 passes, it adds hurdles that are sure to get worse.

Sponsored by Rep. Tim Wesco, R-Osceola, the bill puts additional restrictions on voting by mail in Indiana, even though we already have laws in place that strictly limit access to a mail-in ballot.

The legislation’s worst section has been billed as an attempt to bring consistency to our voting laws by putting the same voter ID requirements in place for absentee-by-mail voting as those for in-person voting. In reality, this legislation is yet another attempt by the Republican supermajority to put additional hurdles in place before voters can access their ballot.

House Bill 1334 would require anyone using a paper form to apply to vote absentee by mail to include a copy of their Indiana driver’s license or include their voter identification number, which the form will suggest is the last four digits of the voter’s social security number.

That’s the first new hurdle that voters will have to scale because many of us don’t know what voter ID number is on file for us and it’s not always the last four digits of our social. This is particularly true for voters who have been registered at the same address for many years. That’s because Indiana didn’t start requiring voter registration applicants to provide any ID number until the early 2000s, when the statewide voter file was created and hundreds of thousands of voters were assigned a random voter ID number.

The author of the article goes on to explain that she is one of those “hundreds of thousands.” She’s been registered at the same address for over 20 years, but has no idea what her “randomly assigned number” might be. Under the just-passed bill, in order to complete all the information that will now be required on an application for an absentee ballot, she would need to contact the Marion County Election Board and get that information from them, inserting another step into the process.

Because I’m hyper-familiar with Indiana voting laws, I’ll know to make that call but most voters won’t have a clue. Instead, they will write down a number that may not match what’s on file for them, and their absentee ballot application will be rejected.  the legislation even anticipates that this problem is going to happen, because it requires a process be in place to “cure” defective applications.

The “cure” requires county voting officials to call the voter, explain the issue, and offer them the necessary information. But as the article accurately notes,

It’s important to remember that because our state puts limits on who can vote by mail, most Hoosiers who cast a mail-in ballot are elderly or disabled. They are least able to jump over new hurdles like providing a copy of a driver’s license or playing guess my Voter ID number with county officials.

That, of course, is the point.

Our Hoosier “Vote Suppression Is Us”legislature isn’t taking any chances. One of the least-understood consequences of gerrymandering is vote suppression– voters who live in districts that are considered “safe” for the party they don’t support are far less likely to cast a ballot. (If they all did, some of those districts wouldn’t be safe.) But just in case grandpa can’t get to the polls in his wheelchair but has the nerve to want to cast a ballot anyway, this legislation will make it much less likely that he will be able do so.

As usual, legislators piously claim that suppression efforts, like Voter ID, are meant to reduce “voter fraud”–a claim that is demonstrably bull****.  All credible evidence–including repeated academic studies–confirms that voter fraud is vanishingly rare.

Members of Indiana’s super-majority are simply intent upon retaining the ability to choose their voters, rather than acquiescing to a basic premise of democracy– the right of voters to choose their representatives.

They’re shameless.

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