As stated in the Public Opinion assignment I’ve posted, this is potentially my favorite class I have had the pleasure of taking here at Virginia Tech. In addition to studying about election systems, we also learned about various election laws and even had a mock court (which I will later post the full details of, both for when I “served” on a court and when I acted as a lawyer). In the election law phase, which is the second half of the course, you had to submit two case comments from the cases we discussed in class. This one was an easy pick because I remember getting my hopes up for a ruling when this happened that would help eliminate partisan gerrymandering. That’s not what history had in mind, though. Some of the assignments from the classes are very opinion-driven, and this is one of them. This assignment was submitted on November 30th, 2022.
Case Comment #2 – Gill v. Whitford
The first Supreme Court case where I had a deep-seated interest in the ruling for was Gill v. Whitford. I was unfortunately disappointed by the lopsided result in favor of partisan gerrymandering, especially to this extreme of a level, despite a clear methodology being presented to show the Supreme Court how gerrymandering could be measured so that the extremities of this practice could be outlawed. I had understood that if the decision were to have gone in the other direction, the floodgates would have opened and many partisan gerrymanders around the country would have witnessed the floodgates open upon them.
The decision in this case was, in my view, the most consequential case for the health of American democracy, even more so than Shelby v. Holder. It was a slap in the face to millions of Americans who, in my view, were blatantly unconstitutionally gerrymandered by the REDMAP program in a precisional manner. We have thankfully made slight progress on the issue of partisan gerrymandering this decade, as the maps in a few states are much more fair than the last, specifically New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But many states were able to install new gerrymanders in place: Texas, Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland all put in place maps from the state legislative level to the federal level that unfairly dilute the share of one of two parties in the state, depending on who has the power of the redistricting pen.
That’s a much larger list of states that have seen gerrymandering worsen rather than those who have seen noticeable improvement in the fairness of their maps, and illustrates how the Supreme Court’s decision has let this disease to fester. Even the state in question, Wisconsin, has found a way to implement maps for this decade that are even worse than those prior. Under the new maps for the State Assembly, Republicans gerrymandered their way into gaining 3 more seats in the chamber, just 2 seats away from a supermajority. Two of these seats were strictly flipped by redistricting, one in the North on the Lake Superior coastline, and another in the Janesville area. The third flip was on their own merit as the seat was left open by a Democratic incumbent capable of winning over conservative voters. Republicans were able to create a supermajority in the State Senate as well, thanks to the results of not just this year’s election but 2020’s as well, as the chamber has staggered seats. It is due to the court’s decision in Whitford that the only hope Wisconsinites have at making their state a democracy again (because in my view it does not meet the qualifications due to having these obscene gerrymanders) is an upcoming State Supreme Court election in April.
We’ll likely have to wait at least another generation if not more for partisan gerrymandering to even have the chance to finally be found unconstitutional due to the precedent this court has set. Millions of Americans will continue to find themselves unable to express their voice in their state legislative elections and/or congressional elections and will thus not be truly represented. It’s as disheartening to see the consequences of this decision years later as it was when it came out, but I’m holding out hope that I get to see the end of partisan gerrymandering in my lifetime.