Good gerrymandering can’t cure bad gerrymandering

Election Day for Virginia voters arrives April 21. The voters of the Old Dominion have received enough glossy mailers to fill several dump trucks, urging them to vote for or against a state constitutional amendment that changes the state’s redistricting process.

That proposed amendment would “allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” In plain English, it would allow the state legislature to scrap the work of Virginia’s independent redistricting commission and draw its own House districts.

Control of the U.S. House may hinge not just on voters this fall, but on a growing redistricting arms race that has now reached Virginia. In a narrowly divided House, even a handful of seats redrawn mid-decade could determine control.

The Virginia amendment is sold as a way to “restore fairness” — a controversial description. That understanding of “fairness” rests on the notion that off-cycle gerrymandering in other states is bad gerrymandering — and so it therefore must be offset by “good” gerrymandering. That is presumably the foundation for another of the proposal’s claims: The amendment will give voters the power “to level the playing field in the midterms this fall.”

The playing field that the amendment’s backers seek to level is the national electoral landscape — in particular, the partisan demographics of congressional districts across the country. Each state in the Union draws its own congressional maps.........

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