Getty Images By gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, the Supreme Court has made it easier for politicians to dismantle districts where voters of color can elect their preferred candidates, portraying the redistricting as motivated by partisanship rather than race.
Tennessee Republicans carved up Memphis to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. Lawmakers are pursuing or signaling similar efforts in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and other states.
Some argue that the solution is to remove party and race from redistricting altogether. Let neutral algorithms draw compact districts, they argue, and Black representation in Congress could remain roughly comparable to what it was under Section 2.
That response sounds tempting, but it is inadequate.
Section 2 protected more than Black Southern voters in congressional elections — it also gave Latino, Asian American, Native and other voters of color across the entire country an equal opportunity to elect candidates to federal, state and local offices. It is unclear that a race-blind, nonpartisan algorithm would produce comparable electoral opportunity for voters of color in all of these contexts. Research on state legislative maps suggests it would not.
While neutral algorithms are better than blatant gerrymandering, they cannot solve the deeper problems created by single-member, winner-take-all districts. For several reasons, districts drawn without considering race or party fall short of a more durable reform: proportional representation, in which a group wins a share of legislative seats roughly equal to its share of the vote.
First, politics can seep into “nonpartisan” redistricting. Commissioners are selected through processes that can be political, and algorithms do not choose their own goals. People must decide which criteria matter most — compactness, municipal boundaries, or competitiveness — and how much weight to give each.
Nor are these criteria truly neutral. Residential patterns reflect generations of exclusionary zoning, highway construction, and discrimination in housing and credit. Judges reviewing such maps can also be partisan or hostile to voting rights. Florida’s state constitution contains an explicit ban on partisan gerrymandering, but that has not stopped the gerrymandering wars from sweeping through the state.
Proportional representation reduces these vulnerabilities. In a district that uses proportional representation to elect five members, for example, it is much harder to engineer lines to determine which individual candidates or parties win.
Second, single-member districts reward residential segregation and punish dispersed communities. For example, in Massachusetts, Republicans account for about one-third of voters, but hold none of the state’s nine U.S. House seats because they are geographically dispersed. Under proportional representation, Republicans would likely elect about three of the state’s nine representatives. The same logic applies to voters of color integrated across metropolitan areas.
Third, even when communities are concentrated, single-member districts often waste votes. If Black voters are packed into one district where they are 85 percent of the electorate, for example, many of their votes become surplus to electing a representative and have no influence in the state’s other districts. Proportional representation avoids this problem.
Single-member districts have other flaws. Even when drawn using supposedly neutral criteria, in many districts voters would know the outcome before Election Day, leaving many of them with little reason to believe their votes matter or even to turn out. By contrast, under proportional representation, each additional vote can help a group win an additional seat in the legislature, giving more voters a meaningful stake in the outcome regardless of where they live.
And while single-member districts drawn by algorithms would improve representation of voters of color compared to maps designed to maximize Republican partisan advantage, they still generally “deal out representation far short of proportionality to virtually all minorities … as a matter of mathematics.”
To be sure, proportional representation faces real obstacles. Although it is commonly used around the world and has a history in the U.S., many Americans today do not know how it works. For U.S. House elections, Congress would need to adopt the change, and many incumbents who benefit from the current system will resist.
But reform has overcome similar obstacles following moments of crisis. The Voting Rights Act followed Bloody Sunday. Federal campaign finance and ethics reforms followed Watergate. Today, we are facing a similar watershed moment. If a political window for democracy reform opens, we should not settle for half-measures. We may not have another opportunity for decades.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision, Southern states are again moving to weaken the representation of voters of color. The answer is not simply to draw nicer lines. It is to build a system in which lines matter less and voters — not mapmakers — determine how representation is distributed.
Spencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor and the founder and faculty director of the Multiracial Democracy Project at GW Law School.
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