By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

“The current decennial Census brings up again the possibilities for chicanery in redrawing of electoral districts. It is sometimes felt that gerrymandering is such an obvious form of chicanery that any political body sincerely desiring to achieve a completely equitable redistricting should have no trouble in carrying out such a purpose. It may, indeed, be possible to proscribe effectively, or at least to avoid, the more extreme manifestations of this art, by laying down rules as to contiguity, compactness, and the like. But whenever the drawing up of the boundaries is left even slightly to the discretion of an interested body, considerable latitude is left for the exercise of the art.”

Those words were written by William Vickery in Political Science Quarterly, back in 1961, showing that this partisan gerrymandering has been a persistent problem for decades, and not something new cooked up by either party, though the latest bout of partisan gerrymandering was triggered by an unprecedented mid-decade redrawing of Texas boundaries, a move Vickery was possibly writing about when he used the term chicanery.

That Texas partisan gerrymandering may be offset by California’s move to sideline its independent commission designed to reduce the most odious forms of partisan gerrymandering. It has put these independent commissions in the spotlight. In this article, we will test to see if blue states or red states are more likely to have these nonpartisan drawings of district lines. Or we will see there a relatively even distribution of red and blue states that have adopted this form of what supporters call “good government.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures wrote “Traditionally, state legislatures have been responsible for redistricting for state legislative and congressional districts. Since the landmark Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s that established the one-person, one-vote principle, a number of states have shifted redistricting of state legislative district lines from the legislature to a board or commission. There are pros and cons to removing the process from the traditional legislative process to a commission.”

Ballotpedia identifies the following states as having a commission to draw districts other than the traditional method of legislators drawing districts themselves for their own, or partisan, benefit. Alaska, Hawaii, California, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Michigan, and New York have non-politician commissions to draw the lines. Missouri, Arkansas, Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have such commissions, but they are made up of politicians. Virginia’s commission has politicians and non-politicians.

Of these 16 states with such commissions for state legislatures, seven (California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Washington) have voted Democratic in the last three elections. Six states (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas) voted Republican in the last three presidential elections. And the others (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania) have split their vote, often in very narrow contests. Eleven of the states (Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Washington and California) have such commissions for their U.S. congressional representatives, a mix of blue, red, and purple states.

Clearly, there’s no partisan bent to having commissions designed to reduce gerrymandering. But Texas’s move has threatened California’s own independent commission, and may trigger a tit for tat that could destroy one of the few methods to counter such toxic redistricting.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.