What’s happening in Texas is ridiculous.
At the behest of the president, and in a blatant effort to simply cheat, Texas Republicans are attempting to redraw voting maps mid-cycle to help the GOP retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
There is no disputing this is true. The people doing it have admitted it is true. In fact, when asked by a CNN anchor point blank why they’re doing it, a Texas Republican responded, “Because we can.”
You know that’s not right.
I don’t want to hear your “butwhatabout” excuses. I don’t want to hear some convoluted explanation that pretends to make it ok.
It’s cheating. Plain and simple.
And it is wrong.
We know all about such wrongs in Alabama, where we’ve long championed gerrymandering to squeeze certain groups and certain voters out of the political process. We’ve done it to such an extent that even the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history has refused to allow Alabama’s maps to stand.
Because drawing maps with the goal of unfairly slanting elections to one side or the other is wrong. It’s bad government. It’s allowing politicians to pick their voters instead of allowing voters to pick their preferred candidates.
Let me be crystal clear: That is always wrong.
I don’t care if it’s Democrats doing it. I don’t care if a whole bunch of people who I really like a lot get elected because of the gerrymandering. Still wrong.
In response to the Texas gerrymandering proposal, California is now contemplating doing the same for Democrats to offset the harm done by Texas. Our country’s largest state would also redraw its districts, giving more favorable outcomes to Democrats, forcing incumbent Republicans out of office.
That’s wrong too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not equating the two wrongs. California actually handles its voting maps in the best possible way—by a nonpartisan commission. Its response to Texas would be a one-time change and the districts would revert back to the commission’s maps in the next election cycle. So, it’s definitely not the same as the blatant, repugnant attempt to cheat that’s taking place in Texas. It’s not even as bad as what Alabama just does regularly.
But hopefully, just maybe, all of this will finally be enough to stop our absurdly flawed process of allowing politicians to pick their voters. Because it truly is the dumbest way imaginable to do it.
In this age of AI and all things computer, there is simply no reason that we should ever allow a human, especially a human whose job is on the line, to create voting districts.
Every state should have a bipartisan committee that works to determine a set of parameters for drawing districts. Those parameters should include things such as racial makeup, county boundaries, population and communities of interest. Those parameters should be fed to a computer and that computer should spit out our voting districts.
Fair. Equitable. May the best candidates and ideas win the elections.
What we’re doing now, though, even when we’re not blatantly cheating, is falling well short of fairness in most states. You can see it in the weird districts that stretch for hundreds of miles and carve out tiny sections of several counties—all of it meant to achieve a certain partisan outcome.
That’s not good for anyone. And it’s terrible for the average voter.
Take Alabama right now. There are a whole bunch of voters angry at Republicans over several issues in the previous legislative session. Namely, a failure to pass comprehensive gambling legislation, allowing a repeal of the overtime tax exemption and banning hemp products.
But under Alabama’s gerrymandered legislative maps, there’s hardly any lawmakers—from either side of the aisle—who are in deep trouble. Because it would take a monumental shift in the voting habits of those gerrymandered districts to actually affect the outcome of races.
That leaves us unable to do the one thing that actually makes our elected officials listen to us.
We have to move away from this. We have to insert some fairness into the redistricting process. And we have to stop pretending that it’s OK to cheat.
It’s not. It never has been. And if you’re standing up defending this nonsense, just remember that you’re basically throwing away your power.
