I’ve never liked the idea of nose jobs. Something about taking a body part you’re born with, something central to you, and changing it, simply because it doesn’t suit you, just doesn’t seem right. Yet, despite my objections, nose jobs, brought on by modern technology, have become our country’s new phenomenon. Interestingly enough, however, we’ve been doing political nose jobs to our nation’s congressional districts far longer than cosmetic nose jobs have even existed.
Gerrymandering is the process of redrawing a state’s congressional voting districts so they favor one party over another. Gerrymandering as we know it first came about in 1812. It occurs when one party tries to gain more seats than another party, despite the fact that their party doesn’t have more support than the other. By drawing a few districts that dramatically favor the opposing party and then allowing the majority of districts to be barely won by their own party, political parties are able to win more seats than they should have from popular support. This allows politicians to pick their voters not, as it should be: the voters picking their politicians.
There is something fundamentally wrong with gerrymandering. We can’t redraw our nation’s congressional districts whenever they don’t benefit the state’s majority party like a Kardashian remakes her nose when it doesn’t suit her. Congressional districts are far too important and far too precious to be put under the scalpel.
North Carolina, unfortunately, isn’t immune to its fair share of plastic surgery. A couple years back, the state’s Republican Party was able to redraw our state’s congressional districts so that, in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney won just 50.39 percent of our state’s vote, Republicans won nine of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts. Yet, Republicans took their gerrymandering one step further. Going beyond simply suppressing the Democratic vote, the state GOP also redrew the districts so they disproportionately suppressed the black vote as well.
While gerrymandering to gain an advantage over another political party is legal, gerrymandering along racial lines isn’t. So, two weeks ago, a panel of three federal judges handed down a decision to require our state legislature to redo two racially drawn congressional districts before the March 15 primaries. While this is a needed and appropriate step forward, we as a state and even a nation need to begin reconsidering the legality of not just racial gerrymandering, but also political gerrymandering.
For, when North Carolina’s state Republicans are forced to redraw the racially gerrymandered districts later this month, they have already claimed that they will “use the political data (they) have to (their) partisan advantage.” So, while the Republican Party in North Carolina has been pushed back from wide scale racial gerrymandering, the redrawn congressional districts will still not represent the general public.
Perhaps the more troubling thing with political gerrymandering is that it has an incredibly easy fix, yet it still exists. Simply by creating a nonpartisan panel to draw our state’s districts, political gerrymandering would become extinct. No longer could politicians from either side of the aisle strategically choose what district people voted in.
Last year, such a bill was introduced in the North Carolina Legislature by Republican Rep. Chuck McGrady. The bill gained bi-partisan support, and its ideas had seen success in other states at solving the gerrymandering issue, but it got nowhere. The bill would have been revolutionary, needed so desperately in a state where gerrymandered has run rampant for years.
It is due time that we end gerrymandering once and for all. North Carolina’s gerrymandered districts are nose jobs done wrong: disgusting leftovers of politicians’ need to win despite the public not wanting them to. Every time a district is gerrymandered, it gives votes, not to the people themselves, but to the politicians who drew them. That’s the grossest plastic surgery of all.