Thinking about Elections

REDISTRICTING AND ITS CONTROVERSIES FOR THE 2026 ELECTIONS. This is an excellent webinar. The participants include nationally know election law experts whom I’ve watched and read for years. My heroes. The webinar’s questions and discussion give more insight than the media does about the implications of what’s going on in Texas, California, and elsewhere. Beyond that, a couple of things stand out for me.

The most interesting was the mathematician/political scientist Moon Duchin. Her work presented in court demonstrates that a district was racially gerrymandered. Racial gerrymandering is the basis for challenging the Texas redistricting and others. In case after case when legislatures defend a racially gerrymandered map, they say the map was NOT drawn based on race but on political party*. The fact that many Black people happen to vote Democrat is incidental, they say. So how do you show that the map was in fact drawn based on race? Moon Duchin describes what she does. Fascinating.

The very last comments in the webinar came from an attorney who worked on a case about the NY voting rights law. They give some hope for multi-member districts in the future. (Multi-member districts which would do away with the temptation and partisan reward of gerrymandering altogether.)

* In a 2019 5-4 decision SCOTUS ruled that federal judges have no authority to decide when partisan gerrymandering is excessive, that there is no manageable standard to use in such cases.

At the website, scroll down to “Past Events” for the October 16 webinar “Redistricting and redistricting controversies for the 2026 elections.”

https://law.ucla.edu/academics/centers/safeguarding-democracy-project