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Thread: Independent Commissions Gerrymander Just as Much as State Legislators

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    Independent Commissions Gerrymander Just as Much as State Legislators

    Actually they're worse.

    Independent Commissions Gerrymander Just as Much as State Legislators

    ...A December 2016 New York Times editorial offered the conventional wisdom that the problem largely the result of "partisan gerrymandering—the drawing of federal or state legislative districts to benefit Republicans or Democrats." The editorial board declared gerrymandering "among the most corrosive practices in modern American democracy. It lets incumbents keep themselves and their party in power even without majority support, it deprives voters of representatives who reflect their wishes and it contributes to the hyperpartisan gridlock in the nation's politics."

    The solution? "A permanent fix for partisan gerrymandering would be to take redistricting entirely out of the hands of self-interested lawmakers and give it to independent commissions," the Times' editors argued. Now Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) is introducing a bill that would, among other things, set up such independent commissions to draw congressional districts.

    On the face of it, taking the process out of the hands of self-interested politicians might sound like it would reduce incumbent-protection redistricting. But a new working paper by researchers at UCLA and Yale suggests otherwise.

    ...When they compared the final redistricting maps devised the state legislators with the publically proposed alternative maps, the researchers found that the legislators' efforts were less competitive than 71 percent of the proposed alternatives. But the maps created by nonpartisan redistricting commissions were worse; 76 percent were less competitive than the proposed alternatives.

    ...H.L. Mencken once quipped, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." Independent redistricting commissions appear to be just such a solution.

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