Tricky

There was an article in the most recent NYRB about the awful gerrymandering of congressional districts. Gerrymandering which meant that very few seats were ever likely to change hands and that the republicans would retain the majority in the house for rather longer than was proper.

The 12th district of North Carolina was cited as one of the worst.

But on a quick reading, what I missed was that this oddly shaped constituency, one of two such, was deliberately created out of a ribbon of black areas to make sure that there were some black congressmen from North Carolina. Which some people thought was a good idea.

While other people thought that it was a bad idea to suck democrat votes out of marginal constituencies, leaving them safe havens for republicans.

So while having constituencies with a silly shape like this one is hardly desirable, it is clearly going to take a while to sort the problem out.

PS: further ruminations on waking this morning reminded me why gerrymandering really is awful. Given a reasonably mixed up population of republican and democrat voters, with careful districting - easier to make a verb out of district than constituency - one can arrange things so that one side or the other gets up to twice the number of seats that its proportion of the total vote would suggest was right. So 20% of the people could snaffle up to 40% of the seats. In the UK, where, of course, we do things so much better, for a long time the Labour Party was getting rather more seats than it deserved for reasons of this sort. Bring on PR! Something that some of the other members of the European Community are rather keener on than we are.