The Future of Partisan Symmetry as a Judicial Test for Partisan Gerrymandering after LULAC v. Perry

While the Supreme Court in Bandemer v. Davis found partisan gerrymandering to be justiciable, no challenged redistricting plan in the subsequent 20 years has been held unconstitutional on partisan grounds. Then, in Vieth v. Jubilerer, five justices concluded that some standard might be adopted in a future case, if a manageable rule could be found. When gerrymandering next came before the Court, in LULAC v. Perry, we along with our colleagues filed an Amicus Brief (King et al., 2005), proposing the test be based in part on the partisan symmetry standard. Although the issue was not resolved, our proposal was discussed and positively evaluated in three of the opinions, including the plurality judgment, and for the first time for any proposal the Court gave a clear indication that a future legal test for partisan gerrymandering will likely include partisan symmetry. A majority of Justices now appear to endorse the view that the measurement of partisan symmetry may be used in partisan gerrymandering claims as “a helpful (though certainly not talismanic) tool” (Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Breyer), provided one recognizes that “asymmetry alone is not a reliable measure of unconstitutional partisanship” and possibly that the standard would be applied only after at least one election has been held under the redistricting plan at issue (Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Souter and Ginsburg). We use this essay to respond to the request of Justices Souter and Ginsburg that “further attention … be devoted to the administrability of such a criterion at all levels of redistricting and its review.” Building on our previous scholarly work, our Amicus Brief, the observations of these five Justices, and a supporting consensus in the academic literature, we offer here a social science perspective on the conceptualization and measurement of partisan gerrymandering and the development of relevant legal rules based on what is effectively the Supreme Court’s open invitation to lower courts to revisit these issues in the light of LULAC v. Perry.Governmen

Behavioral Social Choice: Probabilistic Models, Statistical Inference, and Applications

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings

Why the Democrats’ likely poor midterm performance this year may be of their own and Joe Biden’s making

As the November midterm elections approach, polling shows that the Democratic Party may well lose control of the US House and Senate. Bernard Grofman looks at why the Democratic Party – and President Joe Biden – may have fallen out of favor with much of the American public

This Way to the Egress and Other Reflections on Partisan Gerrymandering Claims in Light of Lulac v. Perry

After winning control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship, Texas Republicans eventually succeeded in redistricting Texas’s congressional seats in 2003, replacing a 2001 court-drawn plan. LULAC v. Perry reviewed a number of challenges to that second redistricting. The decision deals with a multiplicity of issues, including, most importantly, the standard for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the nature of tests for unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. While there are some clear holdings in the case, several of them reflect different combinations of Justices in the majority and, since there are six different opinions, it is hard to lay out a clear line of jurisprudence in this case, much less find a consistent theory of political representation that might be used to unify different areas of voting rights case law. Moreover, there are almost as many questions left unresolved by LULAC as there are questions answered. For reasons of space, however, in this essay I will deal only with the aspects of LULAC that are related to partisan gerrymandering claims. (I hope to write about the Section 2 aspects of the case in the future.

This Way to the Egress and Other Reflections on Partisan Gerrymandering Claims in Light of Lulac v. Perry

After winning control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship, Texas Republicans eventually succeeded in redistricting Texas’s congressional seats in 2003, replacing a 2001 court-drawn plan. LULAC v. Perry reviewed a number of challenges to that second redistricting. The decision deals with a multiplicity of issues, including, most importantly, the standard for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the nature of tests for unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. While there are some clear holdings in the case, several of them reflect different combinations of Justices in the majority and, since there are six different opinions, it is hard to lay out a clear line of jurisprudence in this case, much less find a consistent theory of political representation that might be used to unify different areas of voting rights case law. Moreover, there are almost as many questions left unresolved by LULAC as there are questions answered. For reasons of space, however, in this essay I will deal only with the aspects of LULAC that are related to partisan gerrymandering claims. (I hope to write about the Section 2 aspects of the case in the future.

Bellwether counties are mostly a matter of chance and are now poor predictors of presidential election results.

Those who believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election have held up his victories in many bellwether counties as evidence of electoral fraud. In new research, Bernard Grofman and Haotian Chen argue that the evidence shows that this claim is laughable. They write that the electoral record shows that not only are bellwether counties poor predictors of who will win a presidential election, rising polarization means that their ability to predict long streaks of elections has been in decline over the last two decades

The Electoral Authoritarian's Subtle Toolkit: Evidence from Singapore

Table of Contents: Introduction Parliamentary Elections in Singapore Key Arguments - Changing Ethnic Electoral Geography Through Ethnic Housing Quotas - Effects of Manipulating District Magnitudes - Specific Electoral Boundary Manipulation - Electoral Secrecy - Malapportionment Conclusion: Electoral Rules and Gerrymandering to Preserve Dominant Parties Looking to the futur