As Patterico is wont to point out, newspapers often hide information that undermines their slant well down in an article, usually on an inside page. Often the information is placed in some disembodied parenthetical comment that is lost even if you get that far. Today's LA Times article on the Texas redistricting decision is a wonderful example.
After going on for most of two pages about the "partisan gerrymander" that the evil Tom DeLay engineered in Texas (no doubt from the Karl Rove Battle BridgeTM), on the third page they note that under the previous Democrat remap (rubber-stamped for a second decade by a pliant/lazy federal court), Republicans got 59% of the cumulative vote for Congress, and 47% of the congressional seats.
"There is nothing inherently suspect about a legislature's decision to replace mid-decade a court-ordered plan with one of its own," Kennedy said.One might well ask what other measure of fairness in elections is there, other than "does the seat split reflect the vote?" One might even ask it sooner than paragraph 16 on the third page. Unless, of course, you view the result being fair only if your side wins, the vote be damned.Second, he said, it is not clear that DeLay's plan was less fair than the Democratic-friendly plan it replaced.
Before 2003, Democratic leaders had used their power in Austin to preserve a Democratic majority in the state's congressional delegation, even as most Texans voted for Republicans. Four years ago, 59% of Texans voted Republican and 41% Democratic in statewide tallies, yet more Democrats than Republicans won election to the House of Representatives.
By this measure, DeLay's plan "can be seen as fairer" than the one it replaced, Kennedy said.
Also entertaining is the Times' separate article about how difficult it is for Democrats to gerrymander, considering how easy it was in Texas in the 90's, and how easy it seems here in California, where there are no competitive House districts. But that got the ultimate jump -- right off the end of the article.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at June 29, 2006 09:02 AM