Voting security is a critical issue during elections, but there’s an even broader concern: the integrity of the election system itself.
In a recent episode of the drill down podcast, the focus isn’t on ballot theft or election manipulation but rather on how Congressional districts are created and divided. Two recent developments have sparked debates about their effectiveness and relevance.
Host Peter Schweitzer poses an intriguing question: “What if the election was rigged before the first vote was cast?”
Recently, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson discussed the need for accessibility for individuals with disabilities in “minority-majority” Congressional districts, arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not assume automatic accessibility. She highlighted ongoing discrimination against people with disabilities, suggesting that Congressional districts designed primarily to enhance minority voting power don’t necessarily validate those groups’ voting rights. In her metaphor, she even described black voters as “disabled.”
Schweitzer countered this by stating, “Past injustices shouldn’t lead to present injustices.”
The Supreme Court is poised to make a ruling on a pivotal case regarding racially-based districting, which could send shockwaves through the political landscape. Schweitzer elaborates that while minority-majority districts differ from gerrymandering—intended to benefit a particular party—they can end up having the same effect, given that black voters typically lean Democratic. This distinction was established in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which mandated creating majority-black districts to address historical discrimination from the Jim Crow era.
As of the 119th Congress, there were 148 majority-minority districts in the U.S. House of Representatives, making up around 34 percent of the total 435. However, not all of these districts were created solely to enhance minority representation. Overall, Democrats hold 122 of these seats, while Republicans have only 26.
Republicans argue that the need for minority-majority districts has diminished, claiming the historical discrimination they were meant to address is no longer an issue. Schweitzer raises an important question: “How relevant is our country’s history to today’s distribution of seats?”
Another related issue involves the 2020 Census. Although the census aims to count the entire U.S. population, statistical methods have long been used to estimate this figure for practical purposes, impacting each state’s Congressional representation and federal funding.
Former Census Bureau Director John Aboud implemented an algorithm called “differential privacy” during the 2020 census. However, it was revealed that this led to overcounts in some Democratic states and undercounts in Republican ones, with states like Delaware and Massachusetts being overrepresented while Florida and Texas were underrepresented. Republicans believe this miscalculation cost them nine seats in Congress.
This situation has prompted Texas and California to reconsider and redraw their electoral boundaries. Texas is allowed to adjust its districts per its state constitution. Meanwhile, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a referendum to temporarily amend the state constitution, allowing Congress to redraw California’s districts in response to Texas’ actions, as California currently has 43 Democrats but only nine Republicans in Congress.
“In California, if Republicans were treated as a minority, people would cry racism!” co-host Eric Eggers remarked.
The Census Bureau admitted that the differential privacy algorithm caused these discrepancies. Ironically, as Eggers pointed out, Florida was underrepresented despite having the largest black population in the U.S.
This undercount not only affected Congressional seats but also the allocation of federal funds based on population, estimated to cost Republican-led states about $90 billion due to counting errors from the 2020 Census.
Though Schweitzer isn’t a statistics expert, he stresses that achieving a perfect population count is impossible, calling for greater transparency from the Census Bureau in refining its population projections. Looking at the methods used in 2020, he suggested there may have been an attempt to skew the results for political advantage.
Both narratives seem to imply that black voters are in some way “disabled,” which Eggers described as “deeply insulting” to those voters.
Schweitzer believes that at least with gerrymandering, the manipulation is done by elected officials, which might be a preferable alternative to formulas crafted by bureaucrats in D.C.
“Let’s return to the more direct, unfiltered politics we once had,” he suggested.
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