Proofiness - Charles Seife [71]
It was the Wild West for political gerrymandering, and even the few gentlemanly rules that seemed to hold people’s ambitions in check were dissolving. In 2001, in response to the new census numbers, a split Texas legislature finally compromised on a redistricting plan. It was a long and bitter fight, but it was over until the next census. Or so the Democrats thought. When the Republicans won both houses of the legislature in 2002, they re-redistricted, flouting the once-a-decade tradition. The Democrats attempted to stop the re-redistricting, fleeing the state so that a vote couldn’t be called—while the Republicans called in the Department of Homeland Security to track down the wayward legislators—but the plan eventually went through, giving Republicans control of twenty-two of thirty-two legislative districts in the state. The case—or more precisely, four cases—went to the Supreme Court, which decided that except for one predominantly Latino district that had been illegally cracked apart in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the gerrymandering was hunky-dory. Even though the redistricting was not tied to the census and was only carried out for bald political gain, it was just fine.
Figure 15. District 12 in North Carolina, one of many gerrymander monsters.
At the moment, gerrymandering, so long as it’s not racially motivated, is perfectly respectable in the United States. Though it allows politicians to cherry-pick votes, functionally allowing them to dilute the unfavorable ones, the courts don’t seem inclined to correct the problem.70 As a result, many of our voting districts remain so twisted and distorted that they put Elbridge Gerry’s original monstrosity to shame.
Until there’s a major change in the way the Supreme Court views the practice, gerrymandering proofiness is here to stay.
Gerrymandering is just one mathematical threat to democracy. There’s another form of proofiness that’s even more dangerous because it’s less overt. This method has enabled politicians to deprive opponents of their votes. Even more than that, it renders them nonexistent—turns them into nonpeople who don’t have the right to be represented in Congress. And the worst part is that the authors of this scheme are the very people who are supposed to be a last check against the excesses of the politicians in the government: this particular brand of proofiness comes directly from the Supreme Court of the United States.
The proofiness in question is a form of voter suppression—keeping “undesirable” votes away from the polling places. There’s a long history of voter suppression in the United States, and as with gerrymandering, the political monkey business is inseparably mixed up with racial nastiness. After the Civil War, former slave-owning states used all sorts of tricks to prevent emancipated slaves from exercising their right to vote. They would create barriers to voter registration that were particularly burdensome to African Americans, who tended to be in the poorer and less well-educated segments of society. For example, in a number of states, people weren’t allowed to vote unless they had paid a small fee—a “poll tax”—which of course hit poor African Americans much harder