On apportionment and gerrymandering in the United States in 2019
A tremendous and ongoing swindle of the United States election system is that of apportionment — and gerrymandering — and the most recent manifestation of it includes President Donald J. Trump exercising executive privilege to withhold documents that may well shed light on the underlying reasons for the problematic inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 US Census questionnaire.
Problematic, because the question will empower the suppression of responses by noncitizens in the census, and that suppressed value will power a plan that favors a Republican agenda to steal seats in the House of Representatives.
As The New York Times reports, on June 12, 2019: "The Census Bureau has estimated that asking all US residents whether they are citizens may spark a 5.8-percent decline in response rates from noncitizens, which Democrats fear will skew the reapportionment of House seats toward Republicans while depriving states of federal resources."
We know of this plan, because its chief deviser, a GOP strategist named Thomas B. Hofeller, has died, and in his discovered hard drives the scheme is laid plain. Again, via The New York Times, published on May 30, 2019:
"But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father's home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump's transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision."
All of this in the way of a central thesis: there is no reliable voting infrastructure, no representation on which you can count until we tackle the fundamental and severe crisis of apportionment, and its mutant cousin, gerrymandering.
We must solve for these failures in the system at a legislative and judicial level in the United States. Otherwise, we can call every active voter in every crucial state, during every election season, yet if the monsters in our house — Hofeller and Trump and many more — get their way, then you'll still watch your elections run away down the drain of apportionment and gerrymandering.
Stopping the plan that the perpetrators would enact — and that they are adopting, as we now see — is the civic duty to which we must rise: it is the voter mission of our time. We must apply ourselves to the state-level fight and the federal fight via those systems, unwinding the machine of illusion and disempowerment that has been built right under our noses. Beyond exposing and disinfecting the poisonous sack that Trump and his allies have embedded in the US Census, we must take the following steps:
The US should remove the cap on the House of Representatives, creating more districts of smaller size and eliminating the current circumstance in which densely populated districts are overwhelmingly populated by a party majority, amounting to wasted votes.
The US needs an amendment to the Voting Rights Act that stipulates, regarding partisan gerrymandering, that the nation shall attach "population equality" and racial equality to the core ideas of the Act, as guided by the Wesberry court back in 1963. Not even because all groups deserve equal representation but primarily because the framers of the 14th Amendment could not have foreseen the information technology that has allowed groups to derive unfair representation by working around the citizens who wield a vote. The founders could not anticipate that a cadre of malicious actors could redraw communities with computers to shape political outcomes while voters blithely cast ballots not realizing their vote was diluted and meaningless.
These steps represent a start. The threat of them alone, when it comes to the above measures, stands to stem some of the worst cases that can arise. In the past, we have seen the shadow of judicial intervention slowing parties' hands at using the tactics now underway. It is unclear what amount of time we have before us, but the work is evident and defined. Start calling your legislators. Lay out the demands. We must disinfect the system if we expect it to work correctly, if not in 2020, then, critically, in the years that lie beyond.