Engineering elections? The highest US court examines the manipulation of electoral cards

GREENSBORO, NC (Reuters) – Before the Republican-run legislature divides their city and even their college campus into two different districts to boost the party's chances of running for office, students like Vashti Smith, a recent graduate, could vote for the Democratic candidate in the US Congress and know that this person could win.

Thanks to partisan manipulation – a practice that the Supreme Court will consider Tuesday in two cases that could have an impact on US policy for decades – this is no longer the case. A district of the United States House of Representatives that once covered much of the Greensboro Democrat population was reconfigured in 2016. The city's voters of 290,000 were inserted into two other districts covering rural areas with a reliable Republican majority.

In adopting the electoral map, the legislature divided the campus of North Carolina State University, the country's largest historically black public college, into two separate districts.

"We had a representative who shared our beliefs. Now we have two people who do not really represent us, "said Smith, 24, a 2017 graduate who works for Common Cause, a voting advocacy group that is among the plaintiffs who challenge the new districts.

After decades of Democrat election in the 12th district of the US state, Greensboro is now represented by two Republicans, occupying the 6th and 13th district seats surrendered since 2016.

Republicans and Democrats over the years have engaged in reshuffling, manipulating the boundaries of constituencies to entrench a ruling party. Critics said the practice has become much more effective and insidious due to computer technology and accurate voter data, distorting democracy.

The reworked districts that helped President Donald Trump's party win seats in the North Carolina House are part of the historic US Supreme Court battle, with only one Democratic district in Maryland, which has tipped over the seat of a republican in democrat.

In separate trials, the federal courts in Greensboro and Baltimore last year sided with the rivals of North Carolina and Maryland, ruling that the disputed districts violated the US Constitution's guarantee of to equal protection under the law, the right to freedom of speech and association or constitutional provisions govern elections.

The Supreme Court's ruling, expected by the end of June, could have a huge impact on the US elections by letting the courts stop gerrymandering supporters or stop them.

"THE SYSTEM WE HAVE"

Some Republicans and conservative rights groups rallied to North Carolina lawmakers, saying there was no constitutional right for a political party to count its number of seats in proportion to its percentage of the vote at the scale. national.

"This is not our system," said Edward Greim, a lawyer specializing in electoral law, who filed a Supreme Court brief on behalf of a national republican organization.

The centrist Republicans, whose former California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and current Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, critically criticize critics and file a memoir to show that the practice "amplifies the voices of the supporters and drowns that of the moderates.

In the creation of the 2016 map, Republican leaders in North Carolina declared their readiness to maintain a House delegation of 10 Republicans. They joked that they would have preferred to train 11 Republicans in the 13 districts of the state. "I think it's better to elect Republicans than elect the Democrats," said at the time the representative of the House of Representatives of the State, David Lewis.

Using these words as evidence, more than two dozen Democratic voters, the Democratic Party of North Carolina and two groups that campaign for fair elections have been sued.

For Smith, the new line that divides her campus along Laurel Street meant that every time she went from her apartment to the library, she would enter a new neighborhood. It also meant, she said, that her vote had been drowned by her new neighbors in the district.

North Carolina A & T political science professor Derick Smith said the borders were designed to disrupt a community known for its progressive politics, which already existed before the Greensboro sit-ins, which were a key moment for civil rights. movement.

"They break a community of common interest to create a partisan advantage for the party that draws the cards," Smith said.

Last year, the Supreme Court did not make any decisive decisions on the gerrymandering of supporters in Wisconsin and Maryland cases.

Liberal and conservative judges both criticized gerrymandering as a form of partisan juggling. But for decades, the Supreme Court has not been sure of the power of the federal courts to curb this inherently political act.

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina have said that judges are not equipped to determine how much policy is too much in the lines. The complainants said that closing the doors of courthouses would encourage cartographers to be even more partisan.

PACKAGING AND CRACKING

Legislative districts across the country are redefined to reflect the demographic changes determined by the federal census each decade. In most states, constituency sharing is done by the ruling party, although some attribute it to independent commissions for the sake of fairness.

Gerrymandering consists of piling up the largest number of like-minded voters in a small number of districts – called "bundling" – and spreading the rest in other districts too thinly to form a majority – called "cracks". ".

Greensboro has been at the center of several large-scale prosecutions since Republicans gained control of the state legislature in 2010, thus ending nearly a century of redistricting led by Democrats who have often provoked Republican anger.

The Republicans adopted a new card in 2011 and have won nine or ten of the 13 seats in the state in each election since, without reflecting the presence of a very divided electorate between the two parties. The seats were more equitably distributed in the past. In 2010, Democrats won seven seats out of six for Republicans.

Last year, although the Democrats won about half of the votes nationwide, they won only three of the 13 seats in the House. Authorities have ordered the holding of a new election for a seat after allegations of fraud in the polls favoring the Republican candidate.

The North Carolina case concerns a 2016 map adopted after a court found that Republican lawmakers illegally used race as a factor when redrawing certain districts of the US House after the 2010 census .