Redistricting
The process of redistricting provides electoral boundaries in the United States where a representative is chosen from single-member districts. This is however except when the state has only one representative in the congress, which thereby necessitates the holding of a large state election. Redistricting mainly affects the type of voters vote for certain representatives, and therefore, its modification could mean the change in the required voters for certain candidates and also a shift of responsibilities assigned to the representative elected, and the delegate of the legislature. Most of all, redistricting is compromising the democracy of states for the sake of political gain, by a large scope.
First and foremost, redistricting before the decennial census is tolerating self-centered and greedy politicians. Most candidates have been known to take advantage of the process to bribe their way into victory. Most of them give a small fee to get the consultants to draw a district they can win. Furthermore, many malicious politicians use the redistricting process to kick out some other incumbents. One common example of such was when Chip Woodrum’s house was carved out of the 2000 Virginia elections which forces him to opt-out (Payne, 2019).
Redistricting also paves the way for manipulation of the state’s representation. In Texas 1992 elections, for example, the Democrats who were in charge of the redistricting process pocketed the Republicans into the fewer common districts to improve the number of potential voters in the other districts. During the elections, both Republicans and Democrats won 49% of the Texas state votes but under the redistricting plan that the Democrats had laid out, the Democrats won by receiving 70% of the congressional votes (Keith, 2013).
After the 1992 elections, the Republicans took over the redistricting process in the 2003 elections. During these elections, they decided to avenge their bitter loss by twice as much. The battle was very heated that some of the Democrats ran away to other states for the fear of the legislature taking over the redistricting process. The Republicans decided to draw lines that removed some 100,000 Latino’s out of one district in which their presidential candidate was beginning to lose supports (Hunt, 2018). Though the Republicans ended up winning, the war between the redistricting processes became more and more in the following elections which therefore means unfair elections and unfit leaders for the congressional positions.
I believe that the state should take over the redistricting process to ensure state democracy. Out of the fifty states in the United States, at least 44 of them use the select their electoral boundaries before the decennial consensus. According to Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, the appointment of members of the congress should be done through enumeration of the population of the United States. However, no explicit explanation is giving on which type of enumeration is needed for redistricting. To break this down further, 21 states wholly rely on data from federal consensus for legislative or congressional redistricting, 17 states occasionally use it for the same purposes while 6 other states only use federal consensus data when circumstances necessitate its use (Keith, 2013). A large chunk of states, therefore, basing their redistricting on federal consensus means that many of the politicians still have the opportunity to manipulate the elections for their narcissistic gains.
Remapping of Texas would help dissolve the boundaries that had been drawn to either dissolve minority groups, separate communities or destroy the political goodwill that is carefully being built in the state. Just recently the Texas legislature ruled that the Republicans had violated the Voting Acts Right after redrawing a certain district in southwest Texas so that they could remove approximately 100,000 Mexicans who were threatening the position of a Republican incumbent (Hunt, 2018). The assignment of the redistricting power to the state will thereby alleviate the political tension that has always existed in the Texas elections.
References
Payne, C. (2019). You Can’t Sit With Us: How Partisan Gerrymandering Blocks Minorities From Winning An Elected Seat. Available at SSRN 3576145.
Keith, G. A. (Ed.). (2013). Rotten Boroughs, Political Thickets, and Legislative Donnybrooks: Redistricting in Texas (No. 37). University of Texas Press.
Hunt, C. R. (2018). When does redistricting matter? Changing conditions and their effects on voter turnout. Electoral Studies, 54, 128-138.