Unrigged by David Daley

Author:David Daley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631495762
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Duke University’s legendary basketball team attracts the nation’s top freshman talent, then launches them into the NBA draft after a single sensational season. But even as stochastic dynamics and other advanced mathematics topics beckoned Jonathan Mattingly back toward theories and equations, he would not be a gerrymandering “one and done.” Much like college hoops along North Carolina’s Tobacco Road, Mattingly couldn’t have ignored gerrymandering if he tried. Extreme maps had turned his state’s politics toxic. A Republican supermajority in the state legislature, itself the result of extreme gerrymandering, made national headlines, among many examples, with its assault on the independence of the state university system, as well as with the infamous H.B.2 “bathroom bill,” which required transgender individuals to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth.

Then, in 2016, a federal court struck down the state’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Republicans made it clear that they did not intend the new districts to be any more competitive. How clear? Well, the legislature brazenly demanded that the maps deliver a 10–3 GOP edge. Why 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats? “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats,” testified Representative David Lewis, the GOP co-chair of the elections committee, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”5 They hired master Republican mapmaker Thomas Hofeller to make it so, cocksure in their own cleverness. They’d make the maps neater, but just as partisan. And they’d admit from the get-go that political partisanship, not race, motivated the maps. After all, while the federal courts looked disfavorably upon racial gerrymandering, the U.S. Supreme Court had never found a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional. Confession would set them free!

Mattingly, meanwhile, had a new colleague at Duke. After Republicans successfully pushed Tom Ross out of the presidency of the University of North Carolina system, the esteemed judge, scholar and public servant established an office at Duke. Painfully aware of and frightened by his state’s about-face from bipartisanship, he was determined to study gerrymandering. He assembled a panel of respected jurists, most of them former justices on the state Supreme Court, equally split between Democrats and Republicans. He wanted them to simulate a redistricting commission and model what neutral maps and a nonpartisan process might resemble. They sat in a room, argued, explored possibilities and competing values, and finally reached consensus.

Mattingly, intrigued, now had three sets of maps to compare: the original 2011 congressional map thrown out as a racial gerrymander, the legislature’s 2016 effort and now the set produced by the retired judges. He and his graduate students got to work. Once again using a Monte Carlo algorithm, they created 24,518 neutral maps from a probability distribution of all possible North Carolina redistricting plans. Then they used the actual voting data from the 2012 and 2016 elections to see whether the simulated districts produced the same results as the actual maps.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

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