All Things in Moderation

My maiden blog post. We’ll see if it generates any interest. . .

I’ve been thinking about gerrymandering and redistricting a lot lately; here in Utah we’re picking up a fourth congressional district and so, in addition to the normal horseplay that goes on (see what happened last time they redistricted and tried to gerrymander our lone Democrat out of office: http://tinyurl.com/5uj4p44. Jim Matheson is the rep for the second district, that one pin-pointed in SLC and then winding around to the east and south), they’re trying to decide whether or not to concede that the urban Wasatch front (centered on Salt Lake City) votes differently than the majority of the rest of the state and set up the new CDs in such a way that we’ll have a pretty reliably Democratic CD, with the other three being solidly Republican, or whether to try to gerrymander four Republican districts out of the state and leave Democrats twisting in the wind again. They’ve even set up a website seeking input from residents (http://tinyurl.com/64z8czp).

This also ties in with the thinking that I’ve been doing about Pennsylvania’s move to try to change the way their Electoral College votes are allocated in order to make the state less reliably blue in presidential elections (which Nate Silver isn’t at all sure would work out for Republicans in the end: http://tinyurl.com/3ow8zfn)

So here’s my question: why do we gerrymander? I understand that politics is a contact sport, and both sides try their best to tip the scales in their favor, but does that actually give us the best government for our money? One of the perennial problems here in Utah is that, because districts from state legislative on up have been so gerrymandered that one party or the other is a virtual shoe-in for the election, voter turnout is traditionally very low. This also leads to the fact that incumbents win re-election something like 90% of the time (nationwide), whether they’re really doing good work for their electorate or not. Why not create non-partisan committees in every state to do the re-districting in a geographically coherent manner? Does designing a district in such a way that it votes reliably for your candidate, regardless of the needs of the individual voters in disparate parts of the district, make for good governance?

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