Excerpts from First Declaration of Bernard Grofman on Badham v. Eu

PS: Political Science & Politics

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 1985, Pages 544-550

  Grofman, Bernard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84974127004     PISSN: 10490965     EISSN: 15375935     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1049096500022162     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. ln my view “what defines a gerrymander is the fact that some group or groups (e.g., a given political party or a given racial/linguistic group) is discriminated against compared to one or more other groups on that a greater number of votes is needed for the former to achieve a given proportion of legislative seats than is true for the latter, and this bias is not one that can be attributed solely to the differing degree of geographic concentration among the groups” (Bernard Grofman and Howard Scarrow, “Current Issues on Reapportionment,” Law and Policy Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 1982), 435–474). This is another way of saying that gerrymandering exists when votes are not accorded the same weight. I believe that districting is inherently political and that the notion of blindfolded districting paying no attention to political outcome but only looking at formal guidelines such as compactness or equal population is fundamentally misguided. I also believe that when legislatures are controlled by what Professor David Mayhew of Yale University (David R. Mayhew, “Congressional Representation: Theory and Practice on Drawing the Districts,” in Nelson Polsby (Ed.), Reapportionment on the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)) has so aptly called “partisan lust,” it is both appropriate and necessary for courts to assure effective representation to all citizens (see also Robert G. Dixon, Democratic Representation and Reapportionment on Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 968), and “Fair Criteria and Procedures for Establishing Legislative Districts” in Policy Studies Journal, Special Issue on Reapportionment, Vol. 9, No. 6 (April 1981), 839–850, reprinted on B. Grofman, A. Lijphart, R. MacKay and H. Scarrow (Eds.), Representation and Redistricting Issues (1982), 7-19; and Richard G. Niemi and John Deegan, Jr., “Competition, Responsiveness and the Swing Ratio,” American Political Science Review (1978); Gordon E. Baker, The Reapportionment Revolution (New York: Random House, 1966; Bernard Grofman, “For Single Member Districts Random Is Not Equal,” in B. Grofman, A. Lijphart, R. MacKay, and H. Scarrow (Eds.), Representation and Redistricting Issues (1 982), 55–58). Like Justice White and Justice Stevens (in Karcher), my research on reapportionment equality is an inadequate method of judging the constitutionality of a reapportionment plan,” and that an “obvious gerrymander” should not be “wholly immune from attack simply because it comes closer to perfect population equality than every competing plan.”
2. Richard G. Niemi and John Deegan, Jr., “Competition, Responsiveness and the Swing Ratio,” American Political Science Review (1978), 1304.
3. This difference must be understood on context of the reduction of Republican seats from 21 in 1980 to 17 in 1982. As Cain (Bruce Cain, “Assessing the Partisan Effects of Redistricting,” Social Sciences Working Paper 491, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, September 1 983: 5) trenchantly puts it, “The key then to the partisan gerrymander is that incumbents on the party controlling redistricting will be treated differently from those on the party that does not. The average level of electoral safety might actually increase more among incumbents on the non-controlling party than among those on the controlling party since greater safety is a by-product of higher electoral inefficiency.” Indeed, “If one were to consider the average gain or loss of incumbents by party, one might mistakenly conclude that the non-controlling party was better off. The point is that many of the individual incumbents on the noncontrolling party will be better off, but if the gerrymander is effective, the party as a whole will be worse off.” It is important to realize that on California a combination of “partisan reconstruction” (i.e., changes on the distribution of partisan registration across districts) and “the artful removal of inconveniently placed [Republican] incumbents” was used to alter the seat distribution and make the majority party more “efficiently distributed” than the minority party (Cain, 1983: 35).
4. Dellums (Dist.-8) may be vulnerable, but that is doubtful given his 56% success against a very well-financed Republican challenger on 1982. Moreover, the district is overwhelmingly Democratic on registration (a 34.8 percentage point Democratic registration edge on 1982) and has been made marginally more so on Plan II.
5. Although a geographically grotesque district but strongly Democratic seat was carved out for him three days before the filing deadline John Burton announced his decision to retire, and the seat was won by a “last minute” Democrat running an underfinanced campaign.
6. John Burton's former seat also had no incumbent put into it.
7. See, e.g., Robert S. Erikson, “The Advantage of Incumbency on Congressional Elections” Polity, Vol. 3 (1971) 395-404; David R. Mayhew, “Congressional Representation: Theory and Practice on Drawing the Districts,” in N. Polsby (ed.), Reapportionment on the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Morris P. Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); John A. Ferejohn, “On the Decline of Competition on Congressional Elections,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 71 (March 1977), 166-176; Bruce E. Cain, “Assessing the Partisan Effects of Redistricting,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 1–4, 1983; Social Science Working Paper 491, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, September 1978.
8. Bruce E. Cain, op. cit.
9. David R. Mayhew, op. cit.