The 2020 Census is complete, the results are due in September, the West Virginia Legislature has already announced appointments to the state’s redistricting committees and we can already foresee the devastation the imminent gerrymandering will leave in its wake.
The House Redistricting committee will consist of 18 Republicans and six Democrats, while the Senate committee will have six Republicans and three Democrats. The highly partisan bodies will set the new boundaries for West Virginia’s voting districts for the next 10 years. And this time around, the state is trying something new: 100 single-member delegate districts to take effect for the 2022 election instead of the 67 districts, a mix of single-member and multi-member, that we have now.
In a perfect world, all of West Virginia’s new single-member districts would consist of about 18,000 people, with boundaries drawn as equitably as possible. In reality, the Supreme Court has allowed state legislative districts to vary by as much as 10% (1,800 people). While drawing district boundaries based on race is unconstitutional, creating districts based on political affiliation is not. That’s where gerrymandering comes into play.
Gerrymandering is “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections,” according to Merriam-Webster. The practice was named for Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry after he approved an 1812 district map shaped like a salamander designed to break up a Federalist stronghold.
Let’s look specifically at the 51st District, which covers most of Monongalia County and all of Morgantown. Because of Mon County’s large population, it gets five delegates. Morgantown is the population center, with around 30,000 permanent residents, and four of our five current delegates are from the Morgantown area.
With the new 100 single-member district taking effect, it would be expected to see the 51st District divided into three or more new districts of roughly equal population. This seems fair — until gerrymandering comes into play, which is almost guaranteed based on national trends. According to The New York Times, “rigged maps tend to be most prevalent, and most tilted, in states under Republican control.”
In the best case scenario, Morgantown would be gerrymandered into two districts, dividing the population fairly evenly and most likely leaving only two Democratic delegates from the area.
In an OK-case scenario, an octopus-like district encompasses the most liberal areas of Morgantown while the rest of Morgantown is lumped in with districts that extend into the more rural parts of the county, taking us down to the possibility of one Democratic delegate from the area. This is called “packing,” or concentrating the opposing party’s power in one area so it will be diluted elsewhere.
In the worst case scenario, what used to be the 51st District gets divided into a pizza shape, with Morgantown at the center making up the smallest piece of each slice, essentially eliminating Morgantown voters’ influence on state elections. This is called “cracking,” or splitting up the opposing party’s voters into multiple districts so they will always be outnumbered.
We’d likely see the same thing happen to other West Virginia blue oases, such as Charleston and Huntington. This wouldn’t have much effect on national elections, but it would virtually erase Democratic representation in state matters.
In the simplest practical terms, gerrymandering — particularly the kind of hyper-partisan redistricting we see looming this fall — legally allows politicians to pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians — the very antithesis of American democracy.
