The Revolution Generation by Josh Tickell

Author:Josh Tickell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Enliven Books

HOW TO STEAL AN ELECTION—STEP 2

Important as it was, the Voting Rights Act itself was attempting to fix a fatal flaw at the core of our voting system. You see, in America, votes are not counted as popular votes, rather they are instead counted by districts. The districts are then controlled by one of only two parties—the Democrats or the Republicans. Now here’s the shocker: the controlling party can, and often does, draw its own voting district.

Yes, you read that correctly—the fox gets to decide how to guard the henhouse. What follows is a condensed version of how this happened and where it went horribly wrong.

The US Constitution does not, as is commonly believed, mandate the creation of voting districts. However, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, the Enumeration Clause, of the Constitution sets the number of representatives at one per thirty thousand citizens. It also indicates that the number of representatives should be adjusted, as a result of a census, once every ten years. Thus, starting in 1790, and every ten years thereafter, the United States has performed a census. And every ten years, coinciding with either a US presidential election or a midterm election, the states redraw their voting districts. This mass redrawing recently happened in the years 2000 and 2010; it will happen yet again in 2020 and 2030.

Voting districts emerged as a means of aggregating votes and simplifying the process of choosing representatives. Each state manages the drawing of voting districts slightly differently, but in most cases jurisdiction to draw and redraw districts is given to the state legislature. According to Loyola law professor Justin Levitt’s informative website called All About Redistricting, “thirty-seven state legislatures have primary control of their own district lines, and forty-two legislatures have primary control over the congressional lines in their state.”20

In other words, in most of the fifty states, the elected officials directly create their own voting districts. Granted, some states do use outside commissions or require supermajority votes (two-thirds of both the House and Senate), but, by and large, the drawing of voter districts is done by those who stand to benefit from it.

The process of rigging those districts is called gerrymandering, and it’s been around since the run-up to the first Congress.21 Here’s an example of how it can work:

Let’s say the Republicans control the legislature in a given district. In gerrymandering, that party would redraw their district map so that even though half, or even the majority, of their electorate identifies as Democrats, the ruling party, in this case the Republicans, would always win.

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