Legislators knock politics of redistricting

Seventy-seven percent of North Carolina’s U.S. House of Representatives delegation is Republican — while just 55 percent of North Carolina voters cast ballots for Republican U.S. House candidates during the 2014 general election.

For decades, both congressional and state legislative districts throughout North Carolina have been subject to gerrymandering, or manipulating the boundaries of political districts to sway elections in a particular party’s favor. The phenomenon is commonplace in more than half of the states, where state legislatures are tasked with redistricting after each new census.

“The way redistricting gets done these days does not reflect the population of the state,” said Jane Pinsky, director of the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform.

A bipartisan group of 63 N.C. House members is trying to change that with House Bill 92, which would establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission to oversee the process starting in 2020.

“I think that redistricting is important to the functioning that governs the state,” said Rep. Chuck McGrady, R-Henderson, a primary sponsor of the bill. “I think that we’ll all get a better result if we try our best to put the redistricting in the hands of a more or less neutral body.”

Gerrymandering tends to reduce the competitiveness of elections. Since 1992, about 43 percent of state legislative races have had only one candidate on the ballot, and just 8 percent of 2014’s races were competitive — meaning they were won by 5 percentage points or fewer.

The commission would adjust the districts as needed after each census and present a revised map to the legislature, which would then hold public hearings on the topic. The legislature can then accept or reject the proposal.

“It doesn’t allow people to look at political factors like where incumbents live, the political makeup of the district and voter turnout the last time, so it makes it apolitical,” Pinsky said.

According to a 2013 poll commissioned by the N.C. Center for Voter Education, 70 percent of North Carolina voters support creating a nonpartisan redistricting process.

This neutral plan, known as the “Iowa model,” would also lower costs in the long run because the state would be less likely to endure lawsuits about inappropriately drawn maps or delayed elections because legislators can’t agree, Pinsky said.

“It can’t become a political bargaining chip,” she said.

There is no guarantee the Republicans will still be in control of the legislature by 2021, when the next redistricting happens, said Rob Schofield, policy director at left-leaning N.C. Policy Watch.

“We have this absurd situation in which the state is a purple state, and the voters are about evenly divided between the major parties — and yet Democrats literally have no chance in some of the districts as they are drawn right now,” he said. “At some point that will change, and the Republicans will rue not having done this if they don’t.”

But the bill’s chance of succeeding during the 2015 session appears low. Several N.C. Senate leaders have said the chamber will most likely not take up the issue.

“Leadership in the Senate has made it pretty plain that ... to voluntarily surrender their power and possibly lose their majority is not going to happen,” Schofield said.

McGrady said he doesn’t think the bill will pass this year.

Efforts to reform redistricting have been brought before the legislature for decades, but they have yet to succeed. House Speaker Pro Tempore Paul Stam, R-Wake, has sponsored similar bills in the past, and he is once again a primary bill sponsor.

“The (current) process gets done, especially, by the people who really have something to win from the process or lose from the process,” Pinsky said.

“And so they act in their own self-interest and not in the interest of the people of North Carolina.”

state@dailytarheel.com