Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Ending gerrymandering by using school districts in drawing congressional maps

Ending gerrymandering by using school districts in drawing congressional maps

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks at an anti-gerrymandering rally in 2019.

Photo by Howard Gorrell

Gorrell is an advocate for the deaf, a former Republican Party election statistician, and a longtime congressional aide.

On December 12, 2000, major television news networks assigned their fastest staffers on feet to deliver a written issuance of the U. S. Supreme Court decision on the Bush v. Gore case from the court clerk's office to their respective two-news reporters' teams on the Court's 252-foot-wide oval plaza. While speeding, the runners flipped to the last few pages and verbally told the final ruling to their first reporter, and then the first one announced the result to the viewers quickly, while the second reporter flipped 158 pages to add more comments for the viewers.


Being deaf since birth, I focused on the closed caption on my television to know the result.

Today, having television to know what the Supreme Court will rule on the Moore v. Harper case is unnecessary since we use our smartphones to quickly get the result.

The Moore watchers are waiting to know if the Court would moot the "single most important case on American democracy in the nation's history" (according to a leading conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig) or if the Court would decide by late June or early July. (Several scholars and I believe the Court may issue a narrow final opinion by ruling the Independent State Legislature Doctrine/Theory applying only to redistricting.)

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

In this case, the Supreme Court is considering whether a state legislature itself could have the power to set rules on congressional district lines and the state judiciary could play no role.

Will it end gerrymandering if the Court rules in favor of Moore? Nay, it will be the opposite - making partisan and racial gerrymandering even worse. The ISL theorists have feared that the North Carolina state legislature is free to adopt new maps or use old ones for 2024 that eliminate up to four Democratic seats.

This favor would also eliminate nine independent redistricting commissions. If so, the Democratic-controlled New York state legislature could go from a 19D-8R map to a 23D-3R map, including gerrymandering Rep. George Santos (R) out. Same as Maryland, where the state government is controlled entirely by Democrats for the first time in eight years, for sweeping all eight congressional seats in 2024.

If mooted or the Court denies the Petitioners, it shall continue the gerrymandering war for another decade!

For 53 years since I got a job with the National Republican Congressional Committee as Assistant Election Statistician in 1970, I have been tired of reading/listening to the Democratic Party and Republican Party pointing to each other for gerrymandering congressional maps every decade.

For example, I got confused by The New York Times declaring "the fairest House map of the last 40 years." The indisputable fact is that forty years ago, in 1982, the Democratic Party gained 27 seats in the House of Representatives of the 83rd Congressional Session - 269 Democrats and 166 Republicans. 269 was the highest seat number in the last 40 years. Twenty-three Democratic state legislatures gerrymandered most seats.

However, 28 years later, in 2012, a Republican wave (fueled partly by fundraising for the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Redistricting Majority Project) resulted in all-GOP state governments getting to draw almost half the 435 congressional districts the following year. Also, the Republican Party took over the House of Representatives for the first time in 56 years (1954.) This result was one of President Barack Obama’s most embarrassing moments.

Today, most of the public has blamed the Republican Party for gerrymandering during the 2020 census cycle. It is slightly true, but they must have forgotten that the Democratic Senate did zero to end the gerrymandering during the 213 days of their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate from July 7, 2009, to February 4, 2010.

This commentary urges state legislatures and independent redistricting commissions to use school districts to draw congressional maps.

In Maryland, interested residents could draw congressional maps to submit for consideration to its redistricting commission. On September 19, 2011, I sent my third-party submission to the commission. One month later, my congressional district plan caught the eyes of Maryland's well-known election analyst, Dr. Todd Eberly. He wrote about my proposal in his political blog, "The Free Stater Blog."

Eberly believed that the plan truly represents the diversity of the state - my decision to rely on the school district as the basic unit of "community" represents a true understanding of the building blocks of neighborhoods and common ground.

A few days later, I received a surprise email from Maryland Delegate Susan McComb (R). She congratulated me by informing me, "Actually, the Harford County Council Redistricting Commission used your idea of the schools as communities of interest. It was very successful since there was no opposition to the proposal at the public hearing. Naturally, common sense and communities of interest will not win the day, but you have done a good job."

To know how to add clusters of high schools and their feeder schools in redistricting, you may read my five drawing steps.

Eberly admitted that he tried to keep counties together at all costs. He thought "[my] use of school districts was a great way to keep community connections intact even when crossing county lines." So Eberly strongly believes that using school clusters is an excellent way to define “communities of interest.” Reminder that 23 states that do not have criteria for preserving communities of interest.

A decade later, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) sponsored his doomed bill, the "For the People Act of 2021," which stated that, among other things, calls for including this language: "Communities of interest may include political subdivisions such as counties, municipalities, tribal lands, and reservations, or school districts."

At the New York State Independent Redistricting Commission public hearing last February, a local school superintendent, Daniel Henner, gave his feedback --- encouraging the commissioners to “think not just of county lines but also school district lines as the schools build relationships with their district's legislators.” He paused, "Where the school building is might not be where the representative is. They might represent people in our district, but not where the school building is."

So you, standing in front of the school building, would wave at only a congressional candidate of each party, instead of two or three sets of political candidates from the other gerrymandered congressional districts, in your local parades.

Read More

Presidential promises, promises, promises....

Former President Donald J. Trump answers question from Pastor Paula White-Cain at the National Faith Advisory Board summit in Powder Springs, Georgia, United States on October 28, 2024.

(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Presidential promises, promises, promises....

When Donald Trump made his first successful run for president in 2016, he made 663 promises to American voters. By the end of his 2021 term of office, he could only fulfill approximately 23 percent of his vows. Before we get too excited as to what will happen when Trump 2.0 takes effect on Jan. 20, let’s take a moment to reflect on covenants made by a couple of other presidents.

PolitiFact tracks the promises our presidents have made. PolitiFact is a non-partisan fact-checking website created in 2007 by the Florida-based Tampa Bay Times and acquired in 2018 by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalists. Here’s a report card on three presidents:

Keep ReadingShow less
A bold next step for the Democratic Party

DEMOCRATIC PARTY FLAG

Getty Images//Stock Photo

A bold next step for the Democratic Party

In order to think about the next steps for the Democratic Party and the February 1, 2025, vote for a new Democratic National Committee Chair, it is useful to remember the context of three pairs of Democratic Presidents since the 1960s.

JFK and LBJ led the way for major progressive changes, ranging from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Affirmative Action and the War on Poverty. Johnson's Great Society was the most progressive agenda ever promoted by an American president.

Keep ReadingShow less
The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall

Vice President Kamala Harris presides over the electoral college vote count during a joint session of Congress in the House chamber on Monday, January 6, 2025.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall

When the 119th U.S. Congress was sworn in, some newly elected women members made history.

Emily Randall, from Washington’s 6th Congressional District, is the first out LGBTQ+ Latina. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks are the first Black senators to represent Delaware and Maryland, respectively — and the first two Black women to ever serve concurrently in the upper chamber. Sarah McBride, from Delaware’s at-large House district, is the first transgender member of Congress. All are Democrats.

Keep ReadingShow less
What can we learn in 2025 from the 100-year-old Scopes Trial?

Two groups of protesters, one blue and one red, marching with placards across an abstract American flag background.

Getty Images//Stock Photo

What can we learn in 2025 from the 100-year-old Scopes Trial?

Based on popular demand, the American Schism series will renew in 2025 with a look at science-based public policy caught in the crossfires of today’s culture wars.

Readers often send me comments on how this series effectively sheds light on our contemporary political divisions through careful examination and analysis of our own American history, since so many of our present issues are derivative of conflicts long brewing in our past. As I wrote last year on these pages, history can act as a salve for our present-day wounds if we apply it.

Keep ReadingShow less