Have court rulings in Michigan and Ohio turned the tide on partisan gerrymandering? Salon:
“A federal court overturned Michigan’s congressional and state legislative maps on Thursday as an illegal partisan gerrymander ‘of historic proportions.’ The very next day, a different federal court also declared Ohio’s congressional map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, tossing aside a GOP map that had safely entrenched a 12-4 Republican delegation in a highly competitive purple state, no matter how many votes Democrats received. In Michigan, the outraged three-judge panel cited secret emails that boasted of packing ‘Dem garbage’ into a small handful of districts so Republicans would hold the advantage in all the others, as well as studies that created thousands of random, neutral maps and conclusively demonstrated that the ones enacted by legislators had only one intent: Locking in a decade-long partisan advantage for Republicans. The bipartisan judges not only ordered that new districts be drawn well ahead of the 2020 elections, but sent a message to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case will now head on appeal, that federal courts must act now to rein in toxic gerrymandering and ‘protect American voters from this unconstitutional and pernicious practice that undermines our democracy.’ The justices, thus far reluctant to get involved in policing maps, are already considering partisan gerrymandering cases from North Carolina and Maryland; decisions are expected by June.”
