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      ‘From dark art to dark science’: the evolution of digital gerrymandering

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      The fight to voteUS politics‘From dark art to dark science’: the evolution of digital gerrymanderingIt’s easier than ever to carve US electoral districts to one party’s benefit – but it’s also easier to expose the practice The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkSun 22 Aug 2021 04.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 04.44 EDTThe first time Kim Brace drew electoral district maps for the state of Illinois, more than 40 years ago, things moved slowly.He and his colleagues hung maps of the state on the walls in the office of the speaker of the state house of representatives. Someone would climb a ladder, moving different blocks of people into different districts while another took notes below. In the evenings, they would go to the largest bank in Springfield and use a mainframe computer to generate a daily report. Over the course of the four-month legislative session, Brace was able to draw about 10 possibilities for electoral maps.Ten years later, in the 1990 redistricting cycle, Brace, the president of Election Data Services, a redistricting consulting firm, was back at the drawing board. But this time, he and his colleagues didn’t have to draw on walls. They rigged up two personal computers – one couldn’t handle all the data they needed – with rudimentary mapping software. They drew about 100 potential maps.The next major US voting rights fight is here – and Republicans are aheadRead moreBy 2000, Brace was able to draw about 1,000 plans. In 2010, the last time he drew maps, he was able to produce 10,000 possible maps. “It lets you see and imagine different alternatives,” Brace said. “It gives me that capability of understanding the parameters and playing field that I’m playing in.”It’s an exponential growth that reflects just how quickly the nature of redistricting – the decennial process of redrawing electoral districts – has changed. Every 10 years, when mapmakers sit down to draw district lines, they take on a God-like role, grouping tiny census blocks – the smallest unit of geography the Census Bureau defines – into different districts.They’re looking not just at demographic information like age, sex, race and ethnicity and income level, but also at years of election results in presidential, gubernatorial, senatorial, US House and other races. In recent years, as American politics has become more polarized, it’s become easier to predict how voters will cast their ballots, political scientists say. Using that data, the mapmakers can precisely forecast how elections will turn out for years to come.The ease with which mapmakers can move around pieces of the puzzle in creating a map now allows them to see more variety, tweak more and make their maps more and more precise.In the coming weeks, new technology will play a huge role in helping Brace and other mapmakers carve up America’s 435 congressional districts in the US House and even more state and local districts. There will also be fewer guardrails in place than ever before; in 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that there were no federal limits on how severely politicians could draw districts to give their party a political advantage, a practice called gerrymandering.“What used to be a dark art is now a dark science,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Before, you weren’t sure about the data, but now you’re much more certain so you’re able to draw things in ways that can be more aggressive.”Over the last decade, mathematicians and others have also begun to automate the map-drawing. New algorithms allow mapmakers to very quickly generate thousands of sample maps based on whatever criteria they input. They could immediately generate thousands of gerrymandered maps, for example, that give one party a significant advantage while also meeting other neutral redistricting criteria like keeping districts compact and meeting the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. The point isn’t necessarily to use a computer to draw a map, experts say, but to explore the possibilities of what’s possible.“That’s a big deal. Sure, there were algorithms 10 years ago, but they were absolute stone age,” said Moon Duchin, a mathematician who leads the MGGG redistricting lab at Tufts University. “You just didn’t have, 10 years ago, good techniques for really seeing a lot of variety and now we do. And that’s a superpower you can use for good or evil.”Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who helped develop a tool to measure gerrymandering a few years ago, said that algorithms might help mapmakers explore possibilities that they might not have considered on their own.“An algorithm can help if you want to do a lot of things at once. If you want to do a maximal gerrymander and you want it to look pretty nice, and you want to respect county and municipality boundaries, then an algorithm can be helpful in identifying certain solutions that a human just might not stumble on to,” he said.Even so, Stephanopoulos questioned how much sophisticated technology was needed to gerrymander.“The power of technology for gerrymandering I think is somewhat overstated. Primarily because it’s so easy to gerrymander without the technology,” he said. “An ordinary human is perfectly able to design a very effective gerrymander virtually everywhere. It’s such an obvious technique.”“I don’t know how to put this nicely – gerrymandering is not really rocket science,” added Samuel Wang, a Princeton professor who leads the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “You can be reasonably clever and at the level of an excellent checkers player or a reasonably good board gamer and do a good job of drawing a map that confers partisan advantage.”US’s white population declines for first time ever, 2020 census finds Read moreDuchin and other experts are working to make sure the algorithms are used for good. While the algorithms can be used to generate extreme maps, they can also be used to identify them by generating hundreds or even thousands of possible sample maps according to neutral criteria. Armed with those sample maps, experts say they will be able to more easily see when a map lawmakers are considering is more extreme than what’s expected.“You can still build extreme maps, maybe even better than ever. But now we kind of have a method to kind of show that they’re extreme,” Duchin said.Reformers have already seen how powerful these algorithms can be in fighting gerrymandering.In 2017, Jowei Chen, a professor at the University of Michigan, used a computer algorithm to draw 1,000 theoretical maps for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional seats. The algorithm built districts based on “non-partisan, traditional districting criteria”, like keeping county and municipal boundaries intact as well as equalizing populations and keeping districts compact.Chen also told the algorithm to favor protecting incumbent members of congress. When he compared the 1,000 sample maps to the one Pennsylvania Republicans enacted in 2011, it was clear that the actual map in place was an extreme outlier, far more partisan than if lawmakers were trying to fulfill non-partisan criteria.When the Pennsylvania supreme court struck down the maps in 2018, the majority pointed to Chen’s analysis as “perhaps the most compelling evidence” the map was so gerrymandered that it violated the state’s constitution.The software most widely used for redistricting is called Maptitude, created and licensed by the Caliper Corporation, a Boston-based company with a few dozen employees that specializes in transportation software. Initially, the company didn’t think the process required specialized software, but it started hearing from redistricting consultants who wanted something that would help them draw political maps. Caliper rolled out its first version of Maptitude for redistricting in the 1990s. Today, a license can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000, said Howard Slavin, the group’s president.In 2010, Republicans took advantage of redistricting like they never had before. The party launched a concerted effort, called Project Redmap, to win control of state legislatures and then aggressively drew districts that entrenched Republican control.“We were horrified with what some people had done with our software,” Slavin said. “We were software guys, math guys. We were making tools and stuff. And we weren’t invested in, you know, trying to make one side win against another or anything like that.“Part of the problem is that when you make a tool you don’t get to control what it’s used for. You can use an axe to chop down a tree and I guess you can also use it as a murder weapon. We didn’t anticipate it,” he added.After seeing what happened 10 years ago, Slavin began tweaking Maptitude to make it harder for mapmakers to get away with extreme gerrymanders. This time around, the software includes new metrics that will lave a kind of paper trail and make it easier to identify extreme gerrymanders.“Now, with our software, it’s going to be pretty much impossible for anyone to hide a gerrymander,” Slavin said. (In previous years, however, mapmakers have gone to extreme lengths to conceal discussions from mapmaking from ever becoming public.) While mapmaking has long been done in secret, there’s been an explosion of publicly available, high-quality tools that the public can use to draw districts for free online. Watchdog groups have also developed easy-to-use online systems that can quickly score maps to see just how gerrymandered they are.Duchin, the Tufts mathematician, has developed software that allows ordinary citizens in places like Michigan and Wisconsin to their own sample districts to show lawmakers which parts of the state should be preserved. “One of the big differences from 10 years ago and especially from 20 years ago is the leveling of the playing field, where anybody can have access to voting data and to scoring software that allows the evaluation of a map for fairness or unfairness,” said Wang, whose groups plans to publicly score maps as they are released. “That’s a big change in the positive direction in terms of pro-democracy and pro-disclosure.”Those scoring tools, Wang said, will allow a vigilant public to identify gerrymanders that aren’t obvious to the naked eye and hold lawmakers accountable, Wang said.“The fact that there’s just armies of nerds out there ready to look at these things, ready to … score things, that’s a real change from 10 years ago,” he said.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterTopicsUS politicsThe fight to voteCensusfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump

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      BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
      Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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      ‘Don’t go down without a fight’: Texas Democrats’ effort to block voting restrictions sputters

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      Fight to voteUS politics‘Don’t go down without a fight’: Texas Democrats’ effort to block voting restrictions sputtersSome Texas Democrats dismayed their colleagues returned to make a quorum, but others hope their protest has drawn attention to voting rights Sam Levine in New YorkSat 21 Aug 2021 06.26 EDTLast modified on Sat 21 Aug 2021 06.29 EDTA last-ditch effort to stall Texas Republicans from passing sweeping voting legislation effectively ended on Thursday evening after enough Democrats returned to the state capitol in Austin to allow lawmakers to proceed on legislation.It’s a coda that came a little more than a month after Democrats in the state house of representatives dramatically left the state capitol, denying Republicans a quorum to conduct legislative business. As Republicans threatened those who fled with arrest, the effort electrified Democrats, in Texas and around the country, at a moment when Republicans have been able to ram through new voting restrictions in state capitols across the country.With a quorum now intact, Texas Republicans are expected to quickly approve legislation that would outlaw practices that local election officials adopted to make it easier to vote in 2020, including drive-thru and 24-hour voting. The measure would also give more authority to partisan poll watchers, prohibit officials from sending unsolicited absentee ballot request forms, and provide new rules, and potential criminal penalties, for those who assist others in casting ballots – a move that could make it more difficult for people who are disabled and others to get help voting.Texas Democrats always acknowledged that Republicans would be able to pass the legislation. But by denying a quorum, they hoped to buy time for Democrats in Congress to pass new federal voting legislation to blunt the measure in Texas. They spent much of the last six weeks in Washington, lobbying Democrats to do just that.Democrats in Congress have pledged they will move ahead shortly with two pieces of significant voting rights legislation, including one that would require Texas, among other states, to have its voting laws approved by the federal government before going into effect.The three Democrats who returned on Thursday pointed to the possibility of federal action as justification for coming back. But others in the caucus continue to stay away from the capitol and have openly criticized their colleagues for returning, saying it amounted to abandoning the effort.“It was disappointing on so many different levels,” said Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic state representative from Dallas who said she had no plans to return to Austin anytime soon. “We’re supposed to be a family.”Crockett was also among nearly three dozen Democrats who released a statement on Friday saying they were “betrayed and heartbroken” that their colleagues had returned to the capitol. “Our resolve is strong and this fight is not over,” they said.The caucus was broadly divided into three camps on strategy, according to Rafael Anchía, a Dallas Democrat who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus. One group felt the best strategy would be to return to Austin and try to negotiate with Republicans in the legislature, while another wanted to maintain leverage by staying away from the capitol and negotiating. A pitfall to both strategies, Anchía acknowledged, was that Republicans in the legislature have shown no interest in negotiating. A third group, he said, was uninterested in returning to the capitol under any conditions.“There was never a disagreement about ultimate goals,” he said. When there was disagreement, he added, “it was always tactical.”Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house, last week signed warrants authorizing the sergeant-at-arms to arrest the Democrats who were denying quorum and bring them to the capitol. But while law enforcement visited the homes of a few lawmakers, according to the Texas Tribune, none have been arrested. Some of the Democrats who returned to the state were unfazed by the possibility of being brought to the capitol.Celia Israel, a Democrat who represents the Austin area, said she returned to Texas recently to deal with a medical issue. She said last week she had been mostly working from home. While she said it was “unsettling” to have a warrant out for her arrest, she wouldn’t let law enforcement in her house if they showed up.“They can kiss my Texas behind before I walk on to that house floor and give them quorum over the horrible bills that they have lined up,” she said. “I have not committed a crime. The department of public safety cannot come into my house and grab me.”Crockett, the Dallas Democrat, also practices as a criminal defense lawyer. She said she had been to the local courthouse in recent days, and even though it was filled with law enforcement who knew who she was, no one had tried to detain her.While Democrats in the house remained away from the capitol, Carol Alvarado, a state senator from Houston, also tried to slow down the Republican effort. Last week, she held the floor of the state senate for 15 hours, filibustering the Republican voting bill.Running on just a few hours of sleep from the night before, Alvarado wore a catheter – she was prohibited from taking bathroom breaks – as well as a back brace and comfortable running shoes as she spoke on the floor. Once she ended the filibuster, Republicans quickly passed the bill.“This bill’s going to pass in the end, no matter what we do or say, it’s gonna pass,” she said in an interview. “But, just because we don’t have the numbers doesn’t mean that we can’t put up a fight and draw attention to it where possible, when possible, to make sure people know what’s going on in our state.”She also hoped Texas Democrats would “serve as a motivation, energizer, to other legislative bodies, that even if you’re outnumbered, don’t go down without a fight”.TopicsUS politicsFight to voteTexasRepublicansRaceanalysisReuse this content More