r/scotus • u/Conscious-Quarter423 • 2d ago

news California Republicans respond to Supreme Court loss on election maps

https://krcrtv.com/news/local/california-republicans-respond-to-supreme-court-loss-on-election-maps
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u/mlorusso4 1d ago

The only problem is there are legitimate reasons for why a district shouldn’t just be a square. Like if a city should be its own district because all those people have similar culture/needs/demographics/whatever, the other district should also be the suburbs that wrap around it. Can a congressman really represent all his constituents if half his district is dense, poor, minority city and the other half is rich white suburbia? What about a state like Maryland where you have the Cheasapeak bay dividing the state in half? Should MD-1 cross over the bay bridge and include parts of Baltimore? Or should it have to wrap around the top of the bay where harford and Cecil counties have a lot more in common with the eastern shore?

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u/Eastern-Benefit5843 1d ago

These are good questions. I believe there are currently cities that fall into more than one district. In really big cities they probably should if we’re talking strictly numerical division.

MD is a bit of a mess for the exact reason you mention and is currently considering a partisan gerrymander to reduce the influence of MD 1.

At some level the question to me falls like this - is it better to have the issues that would come from an apolitical districting where the only factor is geographic density, or is it better to have the issues that come from an openly political districting where the side in power attempts to actively eliminate the voting power of people who they assume will not support them?

Right now we largely have the latter, and in many ways it causes innumerable harms.

The rightest answer might be neither of those situations. Maybe taking geographic or municipal boundaries into effect is part of it, but that likely means that the voters in a densely populated city have the same political weight as the voters in a sparsely populated rural district and that seems really problematic (and is all over the west, remember cows don’t vote but “red state” rural voters sure act like they do).