Primary Submission Category: Causal Fairness, and Bias/Discrimination
The Association between partisan and racial gerrymandering.
Authors: Christiana Drake, Xiner Zhou, Bala Rajaratnam,
Presenting Author: Christiana Drake*
In the United States the members of the House of Representatives are elected every 2 years directly by the voters in their respective districts. District boundaries are drawn by the States. A candidate is elected by a simple majority of the voters in the respective district. In 1965 Congress passed the Voting Rights Act which prohibits the disenfranchisement of racial minority voters. The US Supreme Court has ruled that it is not necessarily prohibited to draw boundaries in such a way as to favor one political party. This is popularly referred to as gerrymandering. However, the Supreme Court has not ruled on a case involving gerrymandering. Some states have independent or bipartisan commissions that draw boundaries, in other states the legislature draws the boundaries. It is tempting to create congressional districts in these states that favor the party that controls the legislature. It can be shown that it is possible to create districts in such a manner that a party that has more than 50% of the vote nevertheless ends up with fewer than half the congressional representatives in the state. We use the counterfactual framework to explore the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and the potential for racial disenfranchisement. In our model the counterfactual is a measure of the value of a vote in districts that would occur in a gerrymandered district vs. a district drawn by an independent commission.