Editorial: SC House districts are an embarrassment; go back to the drawing board
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
We’re glad to see S.C. legislators returning to work this week and next to debate new legislative and congressional districts for the 2022 elections, rather than handing incumbents yet another advantage by delaying action until next year.
We just wish we could feel as good about the districts themselves.
We recognize that a Republican legislature is going to draw districts that are favorable to Republicans, just like a Democratic legislature would draw districts that are favorable to Democrats.
We don’t like that — we think districts should be drawn that are favorable to voters, not to either party or any incumbents — but we understand that most elected officials fixate first on their own reelection and second on partisan advantage.
Still, the League of Women Voters of South Carolina has presented statistical analyses that show it would be difficult to draw maps that were skewed more for partisan advantage than the ones the House Judiciary Committee approved for the 124 S.C. House districts. It’s worth noting that the analysis of the proposed Senate maps showed no such extremities. Nor did an initial review of the proposed congressional map the Senate staff released last week, although the League says it appears to be much more partisan than the Senate map.
The League asked two statisticians to review the proposed districts to determine how likely it was that those configurations would occur based on such traditional redistricting criteria as keeping counties and precincts intact, and how likely it was that map drawers prioritized such partisan considerations as voting history and where incumbents live. The statisticians produced more than 11 billion ways to divide South Carolina into 124 contiguous districts, and analyzed the results two ways.
The first analysis found fewer than 26,000 of the 11 billion configurations that showed more evidence of partisan gerrymandering than the House plan. Yes, 26,000 sounds like a lot, but by comparison, analyzing just 1 billion of the possible configurations turned up 42 million that were more gerrymandered than the current districts — districts that have elected a supermajority of Republicans in the House for the past decade. In other words, the proposal up for debate Thursday is 16,000 times more gerrymandered.
The second analysis found only 407 of 11 billion configurations that were more partisan than the House proposal — compared to 13 million out of 1 billion analyzed that were more partisan than the current maps.
Those numbers are almost too large to comprehend, but this should be clear: Even when you bake in an expectation that the new election districts are going to ensure that Republicans continue to dominate the House for the next decade, this proposal is beyond the pale. Yet when the League presented its findings to the House’s redistricting panel, no one asked a question or tried to dismiss the findings. Just silence. Which is astounding, given how astounding those numbers are. And embarrassing, since it suggests that House members don’t care how obvious their extreme partisanship is.
Again, the question isn’t whether the maps favor Republicans; as the League notes, Republicans consistently win around 55% of the vote in statewide contests. The question is whether map drawers deliberately manipulate the district lines to ensure that one party wins a much larger number of districts than it naturally should.
Doing that is unfair to the other party, but more importantly, it’s unfair to the voters, and it’s bad for society because it means elections get decided in the primaries instead of the general election. And when elections are decided in the primaries, the elected officials are either far more conservative or far more liberal than they would be if we had competitive general elections.
We don’t pretend that the League of Women Voters is interested only in good government; its positions on issues align much more closely with Democrats than Republicans. But it is thorough and careful in its research, and its mathematical critique of the House plan is devastating — to the degree that anyone pays attention.
The League drew its own House map, which it suggests should be used to demonstrate what can happen when you don’t consider voting history or incumbents’ addresses. It produced 77 districts where a Republican would be expected to win, 28 where a Democrat would be expected to win, and 19 where the race could go either way; in other words, even if all 19 of those contested races went to the Democrats — something that wouldn’t happen — Republicans would still have a 77-47 advantage in the lower chamber. (The current House has 81 Republicans and 43 Democrats.)
The House Judiciary Committee plan, by comparison, has 84 Republican districts, 31 Democratic districts and — here’s the biggest problem — only nine districts where there would be any question which party would win in the November election.
We don’t expect Republicans to give the Legislature to Democrats. We don’t even expect them to draw districts that would result in 45% of the House going to Democrats, to reflect the party’s strength in our state. But we do expect them to show a little respect for voters. They need to try again. Surely they can come up with a map that’s only gerrymandered, say, 10,000 times more than the current map.
