Today, Explained - Gerry with the bad maps

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

A historic court decision erased some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country this week. North Carolina now has two weeks to redraw them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

there was a a race for the state supreme court last year and the democratic candidate's name started with e so republicans in north carolina passed a law that said the first candidate to be listed on the ballot their names are going to start with the letter F. What? They were literally willing to F over the voters. Oh! Republicans in North Carolina have a bit of a reputation for doing everything and anything in their power

to swing elections in their favor. Dave Daly has written a lot about one of their favorite tricks, partisan gerrymandering. We had Dave on the show back in April of last year to explain partisan gerrymandering because he wrote a whole book about it called Ratfucked. He explained the title with the help of one of his favorite bands. Well, it has become a term for political deeds done dirt cheap, to borrow a note from ACDC, as we always should in our politics. And that's dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Dirty deeds doneut cheap. Dirty days. Dundut cheap. Let's break it down.

Gerrymandering, as you hopefully remember, is the dark art of drawing district lines to advantage your party and disadvantage the other. It can be used for good to make sure a certain voting group has political power. But time and again, both parties use it for bad to just unfairly advantage their side. And there are two ways to do it. Packing and cracking. Yes, packing and cracking, which I think is probably also an ACDC song. Packing is taking all of the other party's votes and trying to stuff them into as few seats as possible. You then have big majorities in all of the other districts. Cracking involves spreading the other side's votes out, diluting them and spreading them as thinly as you can

across as many districts as possible to win more seats on your side. Anyway, this year we got a big Supreme Court decision, or maybe a big indecision on the practice of partisan gerrymandering. To the Supreme Court now, where justices are tackling two major gerrymandering cases. Justices are hearing arguments in cases from Maryland and North Carolina, and they'll have to decide if it's unconstitutional for state legislators to create election maps to gain political power. Back in June, I think a lot of voting rights advocates really despaired because what the court did was, in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Roberts, was they called partisan gerrymandering a non-adjusticiable issue,

which means it's a political issue that the court is not able to decide. And they essentially slammed the doors of the federal courthouses closed to these claims forever, essentially. This decision came at a time when bipartisan panels around the country were saying, we need to fix this and we have all of these solutions. But instead, Justice Roberts and the conservative majority said, let the states figure this out. The chief justice insisted that he was not leaving complaints about this awful practice to sort of echo into a chamber and not be heard. And one of the things he said was that state courts have the right to go ahead and adjudicate these claims at the state level. And that's exactly what happened this week in North Carolina.

A three-judge panel in Raleigh yesterday unanimously ruled that North Carolina's House and Senate maps were drawn to maximize the Republicans' power and are unconstitutional. Dave, how bad exactly were these maps in North Carolina? The partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina was an absolute mess, and there are so many ways of looking at this. So in the 2018 election, which was a blue wave by all all means, across the country. Democratic candidates in North Carolina got more votes for the state House and for the state Senate. Republicans got 48% of the vote for the state House. They turned that into 54% of the seats. Republicans got 49% of the vote for the state senate. They turned that into 58% of the seats. This was no accident. In this trial, there's an amazing mathematician at Duke by the name of Jonathan Mattingly,

and Mattingly ran a suite of about 25,000 neutral random sample maps. And what he found is that the map enacted by lawmakers in North, this deep and entrenched of a firewall for Republicans in the state could have happened by chance or by accident. So what happened this week to North Carolina's gerrymandered maps? They're gone. North Carolina has been ground zero for partisan gerrymandering and also racial gerrymandering trials this entire decade. There have been trials about the congressional maps, about the state legislative maps at the state level, at the federal level. These maps have been thrown out and redrawn multiple times. And these state legislative maps that have entrenched Republicans so effectively were overturned by a unanimous bipartisan panel of judges this week. And they ordered that new maps be in place for 2020.

What did the judges specifically say in their decision? found that these partisan gerrymanders were so extreme and that they diluted the votes of Democrats in the state so effectively that it interfered with the, you know, fair ascertainment of the will of the people in North Carolina, because you continue to have election after election in which one side got more votes and they could never translate those votes into a majority of seats. And that essentially what that did was it violated their political expression as guaranteed by the North Carolina Constitution. This map's been in place for a few years now at least, right? Why was this decision just coming now? Is it a direct result of the Supreme Court decision?

It's not. This case has been going back and forth now for years. Several years ago, 28 of the House districts were overturned as an unconstitutional, a racial gerrymander because the North Carolina court found that the mapmakers used a race data in a way that essentially violated the Voting Rights Act. You cannot use race data for the purpose of diluting votes and drawing districts. So what the North Carolina lawmakers did was pretty clever. The courts had never said that you can't use a partisan data. So they said very clearly, what we're going to do is draw a partisan gerrymander. And because the courts have never said that that's not okay, we will just go ahead

and try and get away with it that way. So what does this mean for North Carolina? What comes next? Do they have to redraw the maps? The legislature has two weeks to redraw these maps. And this court does not trust this legislature at all. Two weeks? Two weeks. I mean, that's fine, actually.

The technology these days is so sophisticated that they could probably draw these maps in a couple of hours. I mean, if you're using neutral criteria, this is not all that complicated of a task, especially these days, given the power of map-making software. You could probably sit at a Starbucks in Raleigh and draw these lines as easily as you manage your fantasy football team. Except these justices don't want this happening in a Starbucks in Raleigh. Fair. They don't want it happening in a back room. And that's where this process has gone on every other time. It's been this deeply political Republican strategist, Tom Hoffler,

whose name you might recognize from the Supreme Court battle over the citizenship question on the U.S. Census. He died last year. His estranged daughter came across these hard drives that include files that the plaintiffs here are saying suggest that Hoffler was involved in crafting the administration's push for the citizenship question. Hoffler concluded that adding a citizenship question to the census could politically benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.

Who also drew all of these maps. Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters. And he did so in private, not talking with Democrats at all, not accepting public input. And what the courts have said is that you will draw these lines in public. You will not use any political data. And they even went so far as to say, as you are doing this, the screen that you are using has got to be in full public view. Wow. Like, what does that mean? Are they going to like live stream it or something? Is this going to happen on Twitch? They probably could, you know, I don't know how many people would watch

it. Although you've actually had, you know, an awful lot of people in North Carolina get really, really entertained about gerrymandering down there. So I know, I know one guy who would watch it, Dave. Yeah, I might. This has never happened before. This is really a historic decision. This is a court saying to a legislature that you have the right to draw these lines, but you have so abused this right time and again that we no longer believe that you will carry out your responsibility to draw districts in a fair way that actually gives

the people of North Carolina a chance to have fair and honest elections. And they are actually mandating not only that all of this happens in public, but that people are watching and these judges are watching. And essentially what they are saying is that if you can't get the job done right this time, we will appoint an independent special master who will. An independent special master? Who wouldn't want that job title on their resume? That really is what we are all trying to be in life. Yeah, yeah.

It definitely looks good on a business card. I'm picturing it now. Sean Ramos Firm. Independent special master. It really does. I think you want to go for that. The amazing thing about all of this, though, is that there's also the ability to check these legislators' work. severely in that state that they always won 13 of 18 seats, 71% of them with fewer than 50% of the vote. They sent the maps back to the Republican legislature to draw. And the Republican legislature

came up with a map that was much prettier and it split fewer towns than before. It didn't have as many crazy shapes. And so Pennsylvania's legislature tried to do something sneaky and get away with it. And they ran these maps past Moon Duchin, who is this brilliant mathematician at Tufts outside of Boston. And she did the exact same kind of work that the mathematicians did in this North Carolina trial. She essentially tested the map for partisan bias. And what she found is that it was just as bad as the one that came before. It simply put lipstick on the pig. And this court

in North Carolina clearly is going to try something similar. They are not going to let North Carolina's legislators get away with it. This court is on guard against this legislature, which has been playing games with these maps for the last 10 years. And it's the Republicans in North Carolina who have been playing these games. Are they angry about this? Are they going to appeal this decision back up to the Supreme Court? They would love to appeal this decision, except North Carolina's state Supreme Court is controlled six to one by Democrats. So they are going to live with this as best they can. The thing is, they're always up to something.

This court is aware that they're always up to something and they will be watching. But who knows what they will try to do. This legislature could come up with a state constitutional amendment and try to find a way around the court and sort of put this to the voters. They could do any number of things here. They may already have draft maps on a hard drive somewhere in Raleigh done by Tom Hofler before his death in possible expectation of this moment. You look at what this legislature has been willing to do over the last decade to preserve their ill-gotten gains and entrench themselves in power, and you don't put anything past them

until these lines are drawn and they're actually called neutral and fair by neutral and fair observers. It's hard, I guess, after everything you just said about North Carolina Republicans and how they've schemed throughout the years to get themselves the least fair elections possible to view this decision from the court in North Carolina as a win for free and fair elections. But that is what it is, right? This was a big deal win for... It's a big deal win for free and fair elections. It simply comes nine years into the decade. North Carolina has essentially had unconstitutional representation in its state legislature for the last nine years. And we're right on the verge of 2020, which means

the next round of redistricting starts the year after that. So this is all about to happen again with better technology, with no fear of a U.S., the Supreme Court, a ruling, and who knows what is going to happen next time around. It's one of the things that makes this ruling so important, though. This is a roadmap for the rest of the country, but it is not fairness for the rest of the country. Dave, do you think there's anything we missed? I think that was a beautiful place to leave it. I think that's a lot of stuff, and I hope it wasn't too boring. I felt boring. No, no.

Once again, you were not boring. You weren't boring the first time. Good. Last time we did like an ACDC ridiculous. We did. We did. I wish I could think of a song called Special Master. I mean, if there was one.

There must be a good master song. I'm just not coming up with it off the top of my head. There's Master of Puppets by Metallica. There we go. I'm liking this, yes. Dave Daly, author of Ratfucked Independent special master of my heart Thank you so much A pleasure, thank you for having me

Thanks to Karen Brown at New England Public Radio For helping us record Dave at his home in Massachusetts And thanks to Britt Hansen for her help this week too I'm Sean Ramos for him This is Today Explained. Irene Noguchi is on executive vacation. Afim Shapiro is on the ones and twos. Noam Hassenfeld is out reporting.

Halima Shah is learning about demetrication. Amina Alsadi is thinking about death. Bridget McCarthy is looking into a ghost. And Will Reed is back on Slack. Jelani Carter is our silent guardian, Lauren Katz is our watchful protector, and the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is our dark knight. Shoutouts to Joss Fong here at Vox

and Gene Demby from NPR's Codeswitch podcast for filling in for me when I was out. Thank you. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. you