The Interocitor

or how about "all congressional districts must conform to a size that allows the average person in the district to be able to walk completely around its boundaries in a single day".

Followed by a rule that says to be eligible to run in the district, you have to complete the circuit yourself without bodyguards and secret service.

Good idea. I'd play with the language on subsections (a) to clarify that gerrymandering to benefit specific individuals is illegal, and expand (b) to prohibit gerrymandering aimed at making districts either more or less competitive. Otherwise, the party in power could comply by rigging the game to make the opponent party's districts more competitive. Example: suppose a safe 60-40 Republican district abuts an overwhelmingly Democrat (say, 80-20) district. Whatever party happens to be in control of the Legislature - let's call them the "Democrats" - redraws the district lines just far enough to replace the safe Republican district with a 50-50 split, which is as competitive as districts get. Meanwhile, the formerly 80-20 Democrat district next door is as safe as ever, with Democrats winning 70-30 instead of 80-20, no big whoop. Then the Democrats pat themselves on the back for creating more competitive districts, isn't that what the reformers wanted?

Crap, I forgot about my mocking pseudonym.

xrlq--

I'd thought that the unbalanced competitiveness would be handled by (a), as it would clearly (dis)favor one party's voters.

Although I doubt that the kind of thing you describe would ever happen as a classic gerrymander attempts to make the OTHER guy's districts 90-10 and your own districs as close to 50-50 as you dare. This wastes the votes of a maximum number of opposing voters and concentrates their wins into as few districts as possible. The 1980 Burton remap was a gerrymander of this sort.

I'm really not sure how you gerrymander to favor a particluar candidate without running afoul of (a) or (b). If you mean drawing lines that take notice of places of residence, I'm not sure I care so much so long as it isn't otherwise a gerrymander. Term limits will mitigate anyway.

I like the idea. You might run into constitutionality challenges based on overbreadth and ambiguity though.

"No reapportionment is valid if its intent or clear effect is to produce a gerrymander favoring or disfavoring voters on the basis of race, ethnicity, political party registration or historic voting pattern."

You would also have to define the term "gerrymander" somewhere. As well as "uncompetitive." Does that mean primaries? Generals? How does one define uncompetitive?

Also, the standard of reviewing for "clear effect" might be problematic, because in practice that would be a very difficult standard to meet in litigation. I'm no election law expert, but I would imagine that proving "intent" to gerrymander or "intent" to draw uncompetitive seats would be near impossible. So you are really looking at "effect" language, from which you can infer a gerrymander intent.

In practice, I'm afraid that the only way to eliminate gerrymandering is to have some body other than the Legislature do it. But I am intrigued by your idea. When I get a second, I'll post a few alternative ideas and link to this post...

Lots of constitutional sections are equally broad. See prop 209. Or the Bill of Rights. Perhaps removing "a gerrymander" and replacing it with "district lines" would be better, leaving "gerrymander" only in the title.

As for proving intent, both the 1980 and 2000 gerrymanders are quite provable -- they didn't hide it. The effect test is easier, of course.

The idea of this is to avoid the entire argument of who does it, which has been the problem in every attempt, and just saying clealy that whoewver does cannot do this thing. It's fairly hard to promote gerrymanders as a good thing.