Voters in this month’s US state elections may not have realised it, but they were making a choice just as significant as the one for President next year.
Recent federal court rulings have increasingly made voting rights, reproductive freedoms, and gun control the domain of the states. Perhaps most importantly, state legislators have a huge impact on who voters can choose to vote for in the future. In most states, it is state legislators who are responsible for redistricting – drawing boundaries for both state and congressional districts.
Maps will be redrawn in 2021 after next year’s census. Ideally, redistricting should be done in ways that make sense geographically, that respect the principle of ‘one vote, one value’ and ultimately ensure that voters are choosing their representatives. But in too many states, legislators are subverting the process – drawing maps which allow them to choose their voters, otherwise known as gerrymandering.
All On The Line is a new grassroots campaign, under the umbrella of former Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Redistricting Action Fund. They are working to create public input opportunities and utilise transparency measures that already exist in the redistricting process in order to hold elected officials more accountable as they draw the lines.
Saumya Narechania, All On The Line’s Director of Advocacy and Campaign Manager, told me why this hidden fight is important, and why they have started building a movement two years before maps are redrawn.
“We know that in 2021 we have a chance to affect the politics and the progress of our country for the next decade because the lines that are drawn in 2021 in all likelihood will govern who can or will serve in congress and in state legislatures for the next decade,” Narechania said.
“And those are people who are going to be making decisions on how to battle climate change, ways to move forward on healthcare and health coverage, how to protect the reproductive rights of women. So if we want to move forward on those issues then we’ve got to start by really making sure that we’ve got a fair transparent system that gets us to fair maps.”
The campaign’s focus is mobilising and skilling up volunteers in their own communities, where they can put pressure on representatives to draw fair maps. “We are not a group of insiders who are going to be able to pick up the phone and get lines drawn this way or that way, we are a group of grassroots organisers who are going to try to pressure our elected officials by telling them what we think is fair and what we believe the maps should look like,” Narechania said.
There are ten states where that pressure could yield particularly strong results: Arizona; Colorado; Florida; Georgia; Michigan; North Carolina; Ohio; Pennsylvania; Texas and Wisconsin. The campaign’s own projections, as well as independent research, indicate that the population growth or decline in these states since the last census will lead to changes in their district apportionments. Narechania explained why that change is dangerous for those fighting for fair maps: “When you’re adding new congressional seats or taking out congressional seats, the opportunity to gerrymander really presents itself.”
Due to population growth in Texas and North Carolina, they are both are likely to gain congressional seats and will need to significantly redraw their maps in 2021.
But the picture for grassroots organisers in the two states could not be more different. Texas’ redistricting process has in-built public input and transparency measures, so organisers are focusing on building attendance at the public hearings currently taking place around the state.
Conversely, North Carolina’s redistricting process is much more opaque – it features no transparency measures – and its gerrymandering more insidious. At the 2010 election, Republicans gained control of both houses of the state legislature, giving them the power to skew the redistricting process towards their own interests. The map they drew in 2011 funnelled most Democratic Party supporters into a few deep-blue districts and distributed the rest into Republican-leaning districts. The result was a map that makes no geographic sense but which returns Republican majority after Republican majority. In the first election to be held using these maps, Democrats won more than fifty percent of votes in the state but only four of the 13 congressional seats.
And the legislators responsible for drawing these maps are more than happy to boast about their gerrymandering. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” Republican member of the North Carolina House, David Lewis, said. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
Asheville, a progressive university city in the state’s west, is split down the middle. Each side of the city is packaged together with a large swathe of rural Republican-voting areas. So rather than Asheville as a whole being represented by a Democrat, as historical voting patterns have indicated is the will of the residents, the city’s electoral bloc is halved so the voters there are outnumbered by Republican voters in areas outside the city. Both halves of the city are now in Republican-held districts and are represented by congressmen whose policy positions bear little resemblance to the concerns of Asheville voters.
Students at North Carolina A&T, a historically black university in Greensboro, also have their votes diluted. There, the district line runs through the centre of campus, meaning “If you walk across and see your friends in the other dorm, they’re in a different district,” Narechania told me. “It literally splits up a set of dorms. That’s how specific some of these lines are.”
Last month a North Carolina court placed an injunction on the use of the current congressional map, with the result that it could not be used for the 2020 elections because it was likely to be found unconstitutional. So the state legislature went back to the drawing board and this week passed a new map.
Spoiler alert: the new map is gerrymandered too.
Channelling David Lewis’ pride at the gerrymandered map he drew in 2011, State Senator Jerry Tillman weighed in this week: “If [the redistricting process] belongs to the prevailing party, do you think it should be anything other than partisan? It’s set up to be partisan. Do you think we’re going to draw Democrat maps?”
All On The Line is calling on North Carolina legislators to explain themselves to voters by holding public hearings around the state. “Get out to Asheville and get out to Greensboro to listen to people who will be affected by this map, instead of just bunkering down in [North Carolina’s capital] Raleigh, pen to paper or mouse to screen as it were, to draw these maps without talking to real folks,” Narechania said.
For Narechania, it all comes back to transparency. “If the legislators don’t want a little sunlight on how and why they’re drawing the maps and if they don’t want feedback from the public or their constituents then I think that’s a real question – why don’t they want that?”
For grassroots organisers working to engage marginalised communities, this month’s elections were heartening. In one example of success for ‘fair maps candidates’, Virginia Democrats flipped the state house. There, a racially gerrymandered map was recently thrown out by the courts and the state legislature has now commenced the years-long process of establishing an independent commission to take the politics out of map drawing.
While the fight for fair maps continues across the country, the next two years are critical and AOTL campaigners know what it will take. Firstly, public education.
“We’re making sure that people understand that politicians have tools, data, map-drawing software, that help them gerrymander like never before so the problem is more dire than it ever has been,” Narechania said.
Given that politicians have the tools to gerrymander with ease and could start doing so rapidly, Narechania is also firmly focused on organising and building partnerships now. “What we’re really talking about is building power for communities who have been historically gerrymandered out of power. So when a map is drawn come 2021 we want to make sure that the right advocates, the right community leaders, folks who have been marginalised for a long time have the information and the ability to speak up and get their message out. And that takes a lot of organising right now.”
