John Boyle

Asheville

In my spare time, I like to do a little heavy academical reading, with a dash of downright mathematical hoodoo thrown in so my head explodes.

OK, that's a horrible lie.

But when a coworker sent me a link to a story about a study of election map redistricting a couple of Duke University brainiacs had done, I did find it intriguing (You can read the article and download the study for yourself.)

I mean, really, who can resist this kind of mellifluous prose, which I take from the study summary: "Recall that if a districting § is not connected, then J£(§) = ∞. Thus, proposed redistrictings that are not connected are never accepted."

Hey, buddy! Hey! Wake up! Are you still alive? (Those aren't even the right mathematical symbols, because our computers here weren't smart enough to read them.)

Trust me, the article from Public Radio station WUNC 91.5 is much more readable than that excerpt I just cited. The article recounts how Duke math Professor Jonathan Mattingly and one of his students, senior Christy Vaughn, examined the 2012 U.S. Congressional elections in North Carolina.

If you'll recall, nine of the Tar Heel state's 13 congressional seats that year went to Republicans, even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans.

Hey, everybody knew the Republicans gerrymandered the districts after winning control of the legislature in 2010, but this study proves it. Mattingly and his student did dozens of computer simulations using redrawn districts that meet the basic criteria, both federal and state, of redistricting: Each district must have roughly the same population, and the districts must be compact.

They created an algorithm to redraw district boundaries, and as Vaughn told WUNC, "And then, we just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings." Mattingly noted that Vaughn did an enormous amount of programming, and that it took four weeks for the computer to draw out a series of 100 different maps, or 100 different possibilities.

So, what did they find?

"When random districts are drawn and the results of the 2012 election were re-tabulated under the drawn districtings, we find that an average of 7.6 democratic representatives are elected," they wrote in their study. "Ninety-five percent of the randomly sampled redistrictings produced between six and nine Democrats. Both of these facts are in stark contrast with the four Democrats elected in the 2012 elections with the same vote counts.

"This brings into serious question the idea that such elections represent the 'will of the people.' It underlines the ability of redistricting to undermine the democratic process, while on the face allowing democracy to proceed."

So, any way they sliced it, a state with this many folks voting Democrat should've had six-nine Democrats in Congress. But we got four.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you, that politicians would do something ethically suspect.

I asked state Sen. Tom Apodaca, R-Henderson, about this. The Henderson County resident chairs the Senate's powerful rules committee, and he's been around long enough to well remember when Democrats ruled the roost and drew the district lines.

Hey, the Dems had just about all the power for a good 140 years.

"That's my first question: Did they go back to 2000 and 1990 and look at those (elections)?" Apodaca said with a hearty laugh. "I think the same arguments were made in 1780 and 1790. The party in power draws the lines that are somewhat beneficial to them."

The legislature has kicked around the idea of a nonpartisan redistricting commission designed to take the politics out of the process. The House even passed such a proposal last year, Apodaca says, "because they knew we wouldn't even hear it in the Senate."

I can't really see such a plan going anywhere, but maybe they'll make a good show of it. Apodaca, now on his sixth two-year term, says the "minority party always proposes this," meaning the nonpartisan commission route for redistricting, which occurs every 10 years after a new Census comes out.

But the nonpartisan commission idea is not a panacea by any stretch.

"Who's going to appoint the commission? Politicians," Apodaca said. "There's really no way to take politics out of it."

Sadly, I know he's right, even when I'm slapped with mathematical evidence that the current system subverts democracy.

This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at 232-5847 or jboyle@citizen-times.com