Redistricting tests boundaries of democracy

Excuse the language. Mr. Mitchell, who died in 2016 at age 85, had a point to make.

I thought of him when absorbing the recent news that the N.C. Supreme Court had thrown out its previous ruling against gerrymandered voting maps.

In short, the state Supreme Court had been controlled by a Democratic majority when it struck down the maps last year “because they said it gave Republicans outsized electoral advantage compared to their voting power,” as an Associated Press Report described. Republicans have since gained control of the state Supreme Court, leading to last week’s ruling that asserts the General Assembly should be the one making all of the district-drawing decisions and not the high court.

I suppose there’s a deeper issue than the letter of the law of the state constitution.

Gerrymandering is not a Republican or Democratic phenomenon; Rather, its origins are at least as old as the country itself.

But the name is distinctly American. It derives from Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts governor who was also one of James Madison’s vice presidents and a genuine founding father. As governor, Gerry signed off in 1812 on a new state senate district to favor his Democratic-Republican party. The redrawn district’s boundaries meandered around the state in such pronounced fashion that the map seemed to evoke an image of some type of slithering creature, or salamander, as someone is believed to have pointed out.

In a story on the subject for History.com, political science professor Thomas Hunter offered, “Modern forms of gerrymandering continue… In some ways, [it is] politicians picking their voters as opposed to voters picking their politicians.”

Therein lies a problem for a country that prides itself on democracy. The will of the people is often swept aside by partisanship.

This, from Politico in March, on North Carolina’s redistricting battle: “The state is closely divided. President Joe Biden lost to former President Donald Trump by less than a point and a half in the state in 2020. Republicans in the state, if the case breaks their way, could put a new map in place that would have 11 Republican-leaning districts and three Democratic-leaning ones — a significant boost for Republicans’ hopes of keeping the U.S. House.”

If we’re truly to have government by the people and for the people, why is it that politicians make most of the decisions for us? Why don’t more referendums happen? And why is the popular vote so often stifled?

Our founding fathers, like Gerry, were perhaps wise enough to devise a system of checks and balances to ensure neither the people nor one person had too much power. There are decisions I’d much rather have determined by nonpartisan experts, if that’s even possible, than by popular vote. I think that’s supposed to be a key feature of representative democracy, but the system ceases to be about the people at all when their will is routinely overruled by a party’s desire for power.

Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who represents North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District, said in 2016 of the state’s redistricting process, “It’s like monkeys throwing darts.”

Hyperbole, sure, but North Carolinians deserve a better system than that, as do all Americans. We deserve elected officials who understand that lines on a map, necessary as they are, cannot be seen from outer space. We deserve representatives that believe the people within those imaginary boundaries are what really matter, regardless of who those people voted for in the last election.

At the very least, we deserve lawmakers, government officials and educators that are more forthcoming about the differences between a representative democracy and a direct one, and which one is being employed and when.