Yesterday a panel of federal judges threw out Virginia's congressional map, ruling that Republican lawmakers concentrated black voters in one district, with the intent to dilute their political clout everywhere else in the state.

The district in question, Virginia's 3rd (pictured above), is the least-compact district in the state -- meaning lawmakers have drawn it with sprawling, irregular boundaries, in this case for the purpose of pulling in black voters from a number of Virginia metro areas. It's also one of the least compact in the nation.

Per a Justice Department directive following the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the district has been majority-black since it was drawn in 1992 and has been held since then by Democrat Bobby Scott. As Wonkblog explained last year, the Justice Department has used Section 5 of the VRA to promote the creation of majority-minority districts in certain states. The idea was to ensure that traditionally oppressed groups, blacks in particular, would be guaranteed adequate representation in Congress.

But soon the law of unintended consequences kicked in, as the Virginia case so clearly illustrates. If you take a group of black voters and put them all in one district - Virginia's 3rd, for instance - by necessity you diminish their political clout everywhere else in the state, an effect that is well-documented in the political science literature. Black voters would be heavily over-represented in the third district, but under-represented everywhere else. This would make it easier for candidates in other districts to disregard the concerns of black voters completely.

It wasn't long before Republicans discovered that they could exploit this finding to their advantage. Political scientist David Epstein has found that in the South, each extra majority-minority district has the effect of getting two extra Republicans elected in surrounding districts.

The Supreme Court essentially rendered Section 5 of the VRA null last year. With that, we've seen a handful of novel lawsuits whereby Democrats are suing to get majority-minority districts overturned. A Florida judge voided two districts in that state earlier this year, citing racial gerrymandering in one of them. A similar case in Alabama will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court next month.

As my colleagues write today, these cases "have sometimes created tensions between minority groups and the Democrats they most often favor. Black incumbents especially want to make sure that districts remain safe for reelection, while other Democrats want minority voters more dispersed to increase the party’s chances of winning more races."

This was certainly the case in Florida. Democratic incumbent Corrine Brown was stridently opposed to redrawing her district. She had actually partnered with state Republicans to draw that district back in the 1990s.

So far that hasn't been the case in Virginia -- Bobby Scott issued a neutrally-worded statement saying he supports fair districts, and left it at that.

Overall, the case presents yet another compelling argument for why we should take politicians out of the redistricting process completely, as California and, to a lesser extent, Arizona have done. Better yet, we could take the process out of human hands altogether.

It would be a trivial task to use a computer algorithm to generate compact equal-population districts that follow Census block boundaries. Software engineer Brian Olson has already done it. Here's a comparison of how Virginia's congressional districts currently look, and how they would look with algorithmically-drawn boundaries:

Current districts:



Brian Olson

Algorithmically-drawn districts:



Brian Olson

The knock against computer-drawn districts, of course, is that they won't necessarily reflect "communities of interest" -- that is, some common denominator among a district's residents, whether it be racial, economic, cultural, geographic or what-have-you.

But when we allow politicians to define communities of interest to their liking, it opens up the door to all manner of redistricting shenanigans. It creates fertile ground for self-interest to thrive.

The questions boils down to whether whether people in a given district are similar to each other on any given demographic measure or whether the political process is free, fair and democratic. And there's a much better chance of that happening if we stop letting politicians choose their electorate by drawing their own boundaries.