POLITICS - How To Rig the Game

"States stretch the limits of geography for politically uniform districts" PBS NewsHour 8/12/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  No matter what the polls tell us about how unpopular Congress is, 90 percent of them are reelected every time.  It’s no accident.  Their districts are drawn that way.

For proof, look no further than the state of Florida.  Last month, a federal judge said two key districts there designed to protect the incumbents representing them were illegal.  So, yesterday, the state legislature came up with new maps, two weeks before the next round of primary elections, and even though a million voters have already cast ballots.

Florida is not the only state where the lawmakers from both parties have stretched the limits of geography to create politically homogeneous districts.

Here to explain what’s up and why is NewsHour political editor Domenico Montanaro.

So much of what happens, Domenico, in the midterms doesn’t have to do with what voters themselves are voting for directly.

DOMENICO MONTANARO, Political Editor:  A lot of it has to do with how the table is set before the voters actually go into the polls.

You think that you’re voting directly for direct election of your congressman.  And what actually has been happening is that the cake kind of gets baked.  And over the last couple of decades — and it’s really gone back to even our founding fathers in certain instances, but really over the past decade or so, they — both sides have really perfected the game, perfected an art almost of how to draw some of these districts to either pack in a lot of voters of one party, to — in order to keep districts safe outside of that, or to exclude them in other ways.