Written by: Janakiram Rajaraman
Edited by: Michael Shalonov
With the midterm elections nearing in a few days, a discussion arises about how new voter registration laws have impacted voters in addition to gerrymandering and how the impacts of those policies may help swing the midterms in favor of one party or another. Mail-in voting as well as absentee ballot voting have also become more scrutinized after the controversy surrounding the 2020 election. Gerrymandering is practically the outlining of the boundaries of an electoral constituency for personal political gain. Electoral boundaries come in two types and apply to two different sets of elections. Statewide boundaries are mainly used for elections involving the Presidency, state senators, and state officials like governors and attorneys general. Congressional boundaries can be used for electing state and congressional representatives. The purpose of redistricting was to ensure that changes in local, state, and national officials “are in miniature an exact portrait of the people as a whole” according to John Adams (Reeves 7).
With gerrymandering, legislators are effectively diluting the power of existing voting blocs, usually by either breaking down large voting blocs into smaller ones that are distributed among other voting blocs or by expanding existing voting blocs to cover more area and more people as a result. These processes have been termed ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’ due to how they inflate the power of a voting bloc or disseminate it. Both of these processes happen simultaneously as a result of gerrymandering since the existing voter population is just redistributed among the voting districts or blocs. Since every house seat is on the ballot later this week, there is a lot at stake here. Every representative has their own voter districts, each of which could be affected by gerrymandering or by restrictive voting laws.
Earlier this year, congressional Democrats sought to pass a bill called The Freedom to Vote Act, which was also named in honor of former Representative John Lewis. As per the act, voters could petition a federal district court to look over an electoral map and judge accordingly whether the redistricting lines have been drawn fairly or not. In the event that the lines have been drawn to skew election results in favor of one party or another, the court can rule that there needs to be a fairer map drawn up before the elections (Li et al. 3). If there is not much time left before the election, then the district court itself can redraw the district lines temporarily right before the election. These lines will then revert to what was drawn up earlier once the election is complete. Unfortunately, this act was not allowed to pass in the Senate due to a filibuster.
Redistricting itself has been a game-changer for the current elections cycle, with several states adding extra congressional or statewide districts for more voter blocs. North Carolina, California, and Colorado are just a few states that have gained congressional districts because of an increase in population (Reeves 12). However, these are the only states that took part in acceptable redistricting. Other states have been embroiled in controversies surrounding gerrymandering right before the election, leading to federal court intervention. States like Alabama and Georgia had their voter maps analyzed by judges, and the courts did not allow some state legislators to make changes to the electoral maps any further, given how close it is to election day (Reeves 13). Democratic states are not without their own share of blame either. New York and Maryland were also among a group of states that initially had their electoral maps qualify, but would not work under the John Lewis Voting Rights Act (Li et al. 4). These maps would then have to be filtered of political partisanship by federal judges and then redrawn again. However, this process has also contributed to the increasingly polarizing nature of appointments to the federal bench. In essence, this is another reason why partisanship has crept into case rulings and federal judge appointments.
Coupled with restrictive voter identification laws and more restrictions on mail-in ballot laws, states are seeking to dilute the power of the voting system and use it to their advantage in the political playing field. While Georgia initially had a signature matching process for absentee voter verification, it now requires state-issued documents or identification in order to submit an absentee ballot (Harte 8). This could end up being a problem for absentee ballot voters since they vote by mail from outside of their state and procuring state-issued identification could be a challenge due to proximity issues. While some states have tried to restrict voting by mail in a certain way or form, others, like Kentucky, have sought to make it easier on themselves by granting state legislatures the power to correct absentee ballots in case of errors (Harte 14). What is even more interesting, is after the 2020 election scandal, the country seems to be moving in the opposite direction by giving more partisan groups access to the election system under the guise of preventing fraud. This is not exclusive to any political party in particular; Republicans and Democrats are both equally guilty. Given the glaring presence of these voting barriers, the country is in need of an independent election commission that canvasses each state, rather than allowing state legislatures to wield so much power over electoral maps and their respective voting blocs.
[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University]
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