Guest Essay
SC redistricting races to a finish, with voters in last place.
By Shayna Howell, Co-Chair, Redistricting Work Group, League of Women Voters of South Carolina
Voters in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District have been envied for the past 10 years: They had the distinction of having a choice in the general election. They could — and indeed did — elect both Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, fostering competition that steered candidates of both parties away from hyperpartisanship. Meanwhile, the six other congressional seats in South Carolina — five Republican and one Democratic — were won by margins often exceeding 20%.
Unfortunately, if the S.C. Legislature passes its proposed redistricting maps when lawmakers come back for votes this week and next, South Carolina’s only competitive congressional seat will be gerrymandered out of voters’ control.
Senate map-drawers used partisan voting history to slice up municipalities and counties to render a partisan gerrymander. James Island, Johns Island, West Ashley and the Charleston peninsula are each split, with some precincts in the 1st District and some in the 6th District, which reaches over Orangeburg and Clarendon to include part of Columbia. The plan defies all sound logic.
The past decade’s significant coastal growth meant that changes to the 1st District’s boundaries were necessary, but the new boundaries could have been drawn around communities of interest.
For instance, in the League of Women Voters’ proposal, Dorchester and Charleston counties would have been kept whole alongside a portion of Berkeley. This proposal would have retained a Republican lean for the district, but it would have been competitive in November, accurately representing the political diversity of the area. In the proposal from Senate staff, a Republican candidate would be expected to have a 14-point margin of victory.
Perhaps even more alarming is the proposal that the S.C. House of Representatives released in early November for its own districts. A thorough mathematical analysis of that map shows extreme gerrymandering, far beyond the existing incumbent gerrymandering that has thrived here for decades. Out of more than a billion simulated potential maps, only 0.0005% exhibit more extreme geometric partisan bias than the one our representatives propose for us. (The league’s map proposals and analyses are available at lwvsc.org.)
What is the result? Disenfranchised voters. An analysis shows that out of 124 S.C. House districts, we will be lucky if nine are competitive come November. Voters are being pushed out of relevance by the very people elected to serve them. While some districts are not competitive because of demographics, the map submitted by the League of Women Voters of South Carolina had 19 competitive seats — and would have given many thousands more voters a choice.
The bottom line is that most S.C. voters will have no way to hold their representatives accountable for action on the issues that matter to them: the economy, the environment, health care, education. The push to political extremes will ratchet up since the only real voting decisions will be made by the very few primary voters for whichever party is favored to win in a district.
The race for fair maps in South Carolina was always uphill for the voters. We knew that achieving voter-focused redistricting was a long shot when we left the starting line, but perhaps we didn’t understand just how much we stood to lose.
As far as we know, public hearings by the redistricting committees are over, but this week we have one last chance to tell our individual state Senate and House members that we deserve better. Ask them to reconsider and amend their proposals as they are debated on the floor of the House and the Senate. We owe it to ourselves to give this one final push before the finish line.
Shayna Howell is co-chair of the Redistricting Workgroup of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.
