Editorials: Can statistics save us from gerrymandering? | Stats.org
The Supreme Court is weighing the question of whether voting districts can be drawn in ways that give an advantage to one party, thereby violating the principle of one person, one vote. In Harris v Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, a group of Republican voters argue that the districting commission redrew the boundaries in 2011 such that, as the Tucson Sentinel put it, “almost all of Arizona’s Republican-leaning districts are overpopulated, and almost all of the state’s Democratic-leaning districts are underpopulated.” The US constitution requires every state to reevaluate the boundaries of voting districts after each national census, taken every ten years, and to redraw those boundaries to take into account changes in population. But did Arizona’s redrawing amount to gerrymandering—the deliberate manipulation of voting district boundaries to give Democrats an advantage? Or was the commission simply trying to comply with the Voting Rights Act amendments requiring that districts should be drawn so as to maximize minority voters?