PD Editorial: Ensuring fair and competitive elections

The U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow this week against gerrymandering - a $10 word that essentially describes politicians picking their voters instead of the other way around.

Ruling in a case from North Carolina, the justices concluded that state lawmakers violated the Constitution when they packed large numbers of black voters into two congressional districts, thereby diluting their voting power.

Gerrymandering is almost as old as the republic. The word itself was coined in 1812 from the name of an early Massachusetts governor, Elbridge Gerry, and a salamander-shaped state Senate district that he approved.

The modern practice is infinitely more sophisticated. The availability of mountains of data about American voters and computer programs designed to sift through it allows majority party incumbents to maximize their advantage and limit opportunities for political opponents. In the North Carolina case, a federal appeals judge said state lawmakers targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision” as a newly elected Republican majority tried to buttress its position.

The result of such legislative shenanigans is fewer competitive elections for legislative and congressional seats.

Monday’s ruling puts an important new limit on the disreputable tradition, but it won’t eliminate the practice.

California voters took a step in the right direction with the creation of an independent commission to draw congressional and legislative districts. Six other states have similar commissions.

Whoever draws the boundary lines, as is required every 10 years, the process begins with the census - and the 2020 census already is off to a bad start.

Counting the 300 million-plus people in the United States is a costly, time-consuming exercise, requiring a great deal of preparation. But the director of the Census Bureau is quitting. There is no deputy director. No one has been appointed to the Commerce Department post responsible for oversight of the Census Bureau. The Government Accountability Office has raised red flags about untested technology and other obstacles to an accurate count. And Congress seems intent on underfunding the decennial count.

All this may seem a little bureaucratic, but the census has an essential role in American democracy. Census data determine the distribution of billions of tax dollars for housing, transportation and other programs. It also determines how seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states and informs the process of drawing congressional and legislative district lines.

Several field tests have been canceled, and it’s no longer clear that the Census Bureau can conduct the end-to-end test planned for 2018, so it could be heading into the 2020 census without the benefit of a dress rehearsal.

“If you underfund the Census, you get an undercount,” Kenneth Prewitt, who directed the bureau during the 2000 census, told Time magazine recently. “And if you don’t count people, they are politically invisible, in effect.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s rebuke to North Carolina legislators may make it harder for politicians to treat voters as invisible, but a botched census would have the same effect. The president needs to fill the vacancies at the Census Bureau, and Congress must ensure that it has the necessary resources for the 202o count. The clock is ticking.