What shape do you see? Examining Va.'s voting districts with data analysis

Gabe Cavallaro | Staunton News Leader

Virginia Republicans significantly outnumber Democrats in both the U.S. Congress and Richmond, but according to an analysis of the way voting districts were drawn, that representation doesn't necessarily reflect voting results as evenly as it could.

Virginia as a state has seven Republican to four Democratic U.S. Representatives and 66 Republican delegates to 34 Democrats in the General Assembly.

But the state went blue by almost 5 percent in the 2016 presidential election and has two Democratic U.S. Senators.

According to an Associated Press analysis, partisan redistricting — aka gerrymandering — may have played a role in those uneven results. Republicans have won a disproportionate number of seats compared to the number of votes they received in Virginia, the data finds.

They measured "wasted votes" cast for a winner beyond what was needed to win as well as votes cast for losing candidates. i.e. if a candidate defeated his or her challenger with 60 percent of the vote, 10 percent of the votes for the winner are considered "wasted," because the vote went beyond what was needed to win.

Likewise the 40 percent vote for the losing candidate is also considered "wasted."

The researchers who developed this metric, Nick Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law professor, and Eric McGhee, a researcher at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, aim to measure the efficiency of each party in translating votes into seats. That means looking at where votes were used in favor of each party that ended up being fruitless in terms of winning seats, or "wasted" — that's the thinking here.

It's a metric that's gained enough steam to be cited by a federal appeals court last year as "corroborative evidence" in the court's ruling that Wisconsin Republicans unconstitutionally gerrymandered the state's legislative districts. That case is now being heard on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So just how inefficient are the voter districts in Virginia when looking through this lens? On the U.S. Congressional side, Virginia was the 16th most gerrymandered state for either Republicans or Democrats (in Virginia's case Republicans) using the 2016 election data. That's out of 43, not 50 states, as Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming have only one U.S. House seat and thus have no district data.

And in comparing the 2015 Virginia House of Delegates election data to the 42 states who had statehouse elections in 2016, the commonwealth was significantly more efficient in translating votes into seats for each party, but still favored Republicans. The data shows Virginia to be right in the middle in terms of efficiency — more efficient than 22 states, but more gerrymandered than 20 other states.

More notable however than Virginia's efficiency in state legislative races was the fact that 71 percent of Virginia's House of Delegates seats were uncontested in 2015. Of the 42 statehouse elections in 2016, only Georgia, Massachusetts, Arkansas and South Carolina had more races in which a candidate ran unopposed.

That indicates that Virginia's efficiency may be worse than its score indicates, as the metric essentially holds those races neutral in the statistical calculations.

It's a system that's drawn the attention of Del. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, with bills that have attempted to address some of its failings but have been ultimately shot down in subcommittee.

His 2017 bill would have "prohibit[ed] any electoral district from being drawn in order to favor or disfavor any political party, incumbent legislator, member of Congress, or other individual or entity" through an amendment to the state constitution.

He said he hoped to make districts less partisan and contain fewer split localities and precincts, even if taking on redistricting reform's never "an easy process and it’s always controversial."

Landes said he thinks the bill failed because many delegates believe they "should have total control and that their hands should not be tied” when drawing district lines. He said if he's re-elected in November, he'll consider pushing for similar legislation again in the 2018 General Assembly session.

If Landes were to be defeated by the Democratic challenger for his seat, Angela Lynn, redistricting reform projects to be a legislative priority as well. Lynn's made putting an end to gerrymandering a focus of her campaign, saying that with the current system "they've more than fixed the game," during a March speech in Staunton.

"This is not a democracy anymore," she said. "That's a crime."

Lynn has a background with One Virginia 2021, an organization actively working in Virginia to try and get the General Assembly to adopt an amendment to the Virginia Constitution setting up an "independent, impartial commission to apply a fair and transparent process in drawing political districts" when they are next drawn after the 2020 census.

The group got a boost with the news last Monday that the Supreme Court would hear a potential landmark case that addresses how far lawmakers can go in choosing their voters and attempt to set a standard in the drawing of election districts. It's a case that could fundamentally shake up the way redistricting works in Virginia and elsewhere around the country.

The court will hear the appeal when its 2017 term begins in October.