Following a recent Duke study which calls into question the fairness of North Carolina’s elections, some politicians are looking to introduce legislation to correct the issues.
Jonathan Mattingly, professor of mathematics and statistical science, along with Duke senior Christy Vaughn, claim to have found evidence of gerrymandering in the 2012 House of Representatives elections. Gerrymandering is the political process by which legislators in the state assembly redraw district lines in order to give themselves a partisan advantage during elections.
In the 2012 elections, the Democrats received 50 percent of the popular vote, and the Republicans received 48 percent. However, only four out of the thirteen seats in the House went to Democrats, with nine going to the Republicans.
Voters and policy makers in the state felt that the Republicans had unfairly gerrymandered in 2011 prior to the elections, and the 2012 results only raised more questions. Mattingly and Vaughn sought to examine whether the election was as unfair as people had claimed.
“We have this idea in popular American culture that if everyone gets to vote, and there’s no obstruction to your voting, then it's democracy and it expresses the will of the people,” Mattingly said. “But the question is how much did gerrymandering really affect the outcome of the election, and that’s what we set out to explore.”
To answer this question, Mattingly and Vaughn conducted a probability analysis on North Carolina’s district map. Through a computer simulation, they created a hundred different districts that would fulfill the legal requirements of equal size and district compactness, and then re-ran each voting precinct’s votes on the new maps. After running numerous simulations, they were still unable to replicate the actual results of the 2012 elections.
“We saw a median outcome of seven Democrats elected, and sometimes we saw six Democrats, and sometimes we saw eight Democrats,” Mattingly said. “But we never saw four.”
The study’s authors interpreted their results as strong evidence that the Republicans had purposefully gerrymandered the election.
“If you run a simulation, and something is so unlikely to happen that it never happens in the simulation,” said Vaughn, “then that suggests it was intentional.”
Mattingly said that he wants to see the politics be taken out of redistricting prior to elections.
“If you want to protect our democracy, if you want our elections to actually represent the will of the people, we need to keep some checks and balances to keep things in the middle," Mattingly said. "Just having a non-partisan commission would be a good start.”
A bill, sponsored by Senator Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, and Representative Charles Jeter, a Republican, might do just that. They plan to introduce the legislation, which would create an independent redistricting commission, in the upcoming General Assembly session.
“As long as the maps drawn by the commission are drawn according to the established criteria, any map will be a tremendous improvement on what we currently have,” Jackson said. “The purpose of this bill is to ensure the process is sound and that the public’s confidence is restored.”
Mattingly’s study has not been without criticism. Representative David Lewis, another architect of the redistricting plan, claimed that the study ignores some key variables, such as legal requirements set forth by the Voting Rights Act.
“I’m also certain that the professor’s modeling didn’t follow the law,” Lewis said. “If we were not restrained by law, we could have produced maps that resulted in different results too.”
The Voting Rights Act has in fact become the subject of litigation against the 2011 redistricting plan. The lawsuit Dickson v. Rucho was filed by Margaret Dickson, a Democratic member of the North Carolina General Assembly, against Republican Robert Rucho, a key architect of the 2011 redistricting plan.
Edwin Speas, attorney for the plaintiffs at the law firm Poyner and Spruill, said the plaintiffs are alleging that the general assembly acted in violation of the Voting Rights Act by unnecessarily grouping minorities into certain districts. The Voting Rights Act does allow for the creation of majority-minority districts, but legislatures can only do so under limited circumstances, which Speas said were not met.
Creating overly big or unnecessary majority-minority districts is known as “packing,” and it can be a gerrymandering technique because it makes it harder for minorities to have a substantial impact on elections in other districts, said professor of Political Science John Aldrich.
“They were going to draw the districts so the black voting-age population was more than 50 percent plus one,” Speas said, “and to achieve those goals they created some very peculiar districts that were not necessary under any reasonable interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.”
The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument, but Speas indicated plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Vaughn acknowledges that she and Mattingly chose not to include the Voting Rights Act and its requirements in their mathematical analysis.
“The Voting Rights Act encourages the creation of majority-minority districts, and, because minorities often vote democratic, to include this would smell partisan,” Vaughn said. “We wanted to make our model as easy and transparent as possible.”
Because of the variables left out of this initial simulation, Mattingly said that he is planning to continue this study during the summer of 2015 to include some of these unused variables in an updated model. Possible new avenues include exploring the Voting Rights Act’s implications, acknowledging and showing how both Democrats and Republicans have gerrymandered throughout history, and how redistricting procedures differ between states.
Vaughn, who will continue working on the study this summer, said other undergraduates are encouraged to apply. The Information Initiative at Duke and the Social Science Research Institute are sponsoring this research project.
“I think there’s a lot to be learned from this experience,” Vaughn said. “I hope that people from different backgrounds who might find this program interesting will apply.”
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