Voting Districts

11 Key excerpts on "Voting Districts"

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  Spaces of Democracy

  Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation

  • Clive Barnett, Murray Low, Clive Barnett, Murray Low(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In the US, states are the only fixed units of representation, for the United States Senate. Thus, it is necessary to de-limit representative districts for the House of Representatives, for all state legislatures, and for the large majority of counties, cities, school districts and other units of local government. The goal of districting is to make possible the meaningful and effective participation of voters in electing representatives. Voters need to feel that voting is worthwhile, that their vote matters, that their interests and those of their community will be considered and have some chance of being addressed. And this is why the geography of electoral districts is important. The geographic design of districts is itself a major element in the balance of power. Manipulation is tempting and perhaps inevitable, but if citizens perceive the system as unfair and corrupt, a sense of disenfranchisement and futility develops, in turn leading to reduced participation, reduced willingness to support government, and to reduced quality of representation and of governance.

  Obviously there are very disparate interests, even within a district: not only will there be a winner and loser between the likely two major ‘parties’, one of which may be out of power for very long periods, but lesser interests are never likely to be embraced. This fact leads to the principle of ‘virtual’ representation, that in a large, diverse country like the United States, representatives from other jurisdictions indirectly address your interests. Alternatively, forms of proportional representation have been developed to increase the chances of minority interests being voiced in one’s own territory.

  Even the freest societies constrain who may participate in governance, how they may participate, and what aspects of life are subject to collective (or private) decision-making. Societies typically restrict participation to citizens deemed to have a stake, implying both a right and a responsibility. Who is deemed worthy of participation has evolved over time, for example, from males with significant property to most adult citizens. This still excludes the dependent youth (under 18 now in the US), aliens (who presumably can participate in another country), and usually, those in prison. How

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  21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook

  • Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  These analyses provide valuable insights into the cultural, eco- nomic, and social geographies of various areas within particular societies. Electoral geography also involves understanding of how electoral systems operate in geo- graphical context. The process by which individual votes are counted is often crucial to election outcomes and, therefore, to campaign strategies implemented and used by political parties. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of electoral geography and of voting from a geographic standpoint. Discussion of democracy and voting in histori- cal context is followed by more detailed analysis of con- temporary elections and electoral systems, emphasizing the U.S. presidential election of 2008 and recent elections in other countries. This analysis is followed by discussion of the future of elections and electoral geographies in the years ahead. Democracy and Voting in Historical Context Democracy as we know it today is a product of the past 2 centuries. After becoming independent following the American Revolution, the United States became the first 207 208 • HUMAN GEOGRAPHY country to practice democracy on a large scale. However, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, voting and politi- cal participation were limited to white male property own- ers. Since the early 19th century, we have seen a steady increase in the number of countries in different regions of the world that practice democracy. The percentage of adult residents holding citizenship and voting rights in all coun- tries has also increased steadily. Expanding the Franchise In the United States, property ownership requirements for voting were eliminated before the Civil War, and all white males over age 21 were eligible to vote throughout the country. Women and nonwhites were often barred from participation.

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  A Companion to Political Geography

  • John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal, John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  There is one major exception to this generalization. In many countries election of at least some members of the relevant legislature is to represent a defined territory ± such as a UK Parliamentary constituency and a US Congressional District. These territorial containers are salient elements in the structuration of local political activity. The parties evaluate their political complexion, focusing their campaigning on areas they are best able to win; the more intensive the local campaign the better the candidate's/party's chances of victory, which contributes to the polarization of voting patterns (Denver and Hands, 1997; Jacobson, 1978; Johnston and Pattie, 2001; Pattie et al., 1995). Almost all electoral systems use territorially-defined constituencies in some ways, but their spatial definition is of greatest significance in those employing single-member constituencies and plurality rules (i.e. the candidate with most votes wins, irrespective of whether they form a majority of those cast). Constituency definition is thus crucial to the parties; they want boundaries drawn so that they are likely to win as many seats as possible ± and their candidates want constituencies where they are known and can develop ``friends and neighbors'' support. Redistricting is a major exercise in political cartography especially where, as in the USA, it is largely undertaken by the political parties; fairness in their construction is rarely attainable (Johnston, 1999) Two forms of electoral abuse characterize many political cartography exercises; both give a better return on its votes to a party than to its opponents. Malapportion-ment involves creating small constituencies in areas where a party is strong, and larger ones elsewhere; gerrymandering involves drawing a constituency's boundaries so that it contains a majority of the party's supporters who may be rewarded by 348 RON JOHNSTON AND CHARLES PATTIE

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  Developments in Electoral Geography (Routledge Library Editions: Political Geography)

  • Ron Johnston, Fred M. Shelley, Peter J. Taylor(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As Taylor (1978, 153) has put it, ‘elections are a positivist’s dream’. They are productive of huge amounts of quantitative data in a form readily analysed via cartographic and statistical methods; data which ostensibly also possess considerable face-validity as reflections of the popular will on a key social issue – the selection of governments. Research in electoral geography has tended to focus on one of three issues: the geography of voting, where the objective is to explain the spatial pattern of voting in terms of some other mappable characteristic(s); geographical influences on voting, where the object is to explain voting (typically the decision-making of individual voters) on the basis of ‘spatial’ contexts; and the geography of representation, which explores the means through which votes are converted into ‘seats’ in alternative electoral systems. Excellent reviews of this work include Taylor and Johnston (1979), Taylor (1984b), and, on the geography of specifically American elections, Archer and Shelley (1985). To the three ‘traditional’ questions, Archer and Shelley make it clear that a fourth has been added to the research agenda of the field: a focus on electoral dynamics and historical change in the geographies of elections. Although electoral geography has long been recognized as a sub-field of political geography, it has had little in common either theoretically or methodologically with the rest of the field. Typically the geography of elections is covered in one or two brief chapters near the end of textbooks in political geography, almost as an afterthought. As another case in point, consider the fact that Ron Johnston, certainly one of the major contributors to electoral geography over the past two decades, omits any mention of electoral geography in his essay on the political geographical nature of the state (Johnston, 1982)

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  Geography of Elections

  • Peter J. Taylor, Ron Johnston(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  As we shall see, geographical solutions to districting problems are unlikely to affect electoral bias greatly, since it is an inherent property of single-member constituency systems that up to half the voters must lose in every constituency. This chapter treats both levels of electoral reform. In the first section, we consider reform of districting procedures and substantiate our assertions that such reform is unsatisfactory. The second section deals with the more basic questions that arise when we come to consider changing the voting system. As we might expect, it is easier to criticize the existing system than it is to find its replacement. The Problem of Alternative Geographies For any state or country there are literally thousands or even millions of ways in which it can be divided up to form constituencies. Whoever has the task of creating these constituencies usually begins with some smaller administrative units – wards and districts in Britain, precincts and counties in the U.S.A. – which are then added together to make constituencies. Constraints on population size or compactness merely serve to restrict the many different ways in which this can be done. However, even where such rules are strictly adhered to, there will still be many feasible solutions remaining. The districting agency has to pick one of these many feasible solutions as the set of constituencies to be used. This is the environment in which gerrymandering thrives. However, it is also the context within which other districting agencies, the British Boundary Commissioners for instance, have to operate. Unfortunately, the districting problem of plurality voting defined in the last chapter operates whether gerrymanderers are at work or not

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  Who Speaks for the Poor?

  Electoral Geography, Party Entry, and Representation

  • Karen Long Jusko(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  As we shall see, opportunities in electoral districts where large numbers of voters have not yet been incorporated into local partisan networks, perhaps because they are new arrivals or because they have been explicitly excluded, will be especially attractive to political entrepreneurs. Incorporating Electoral Geography To see the importance of electoral geography, imagine two cases: First, suppose that the composition of electoral districts is homogeneous (i.e., each district perfectly replicates the national distribution of groups). Both 8 Although this framework was developed with Downs’s (1957) spatial voting model and subsequent analyses of party entry (especially Callander 2005, Morelli 2004) in mind, the emphasis on group membership and its connection to partisan networks is more in keeping with Przeworski and Sprague’s (1986) account, in which socialist party leaders actively shape the identities and preferences of working-class voters as part of their mobilization strategy (see also Iversen 1994). 9 To demonstrate that “geographical or natural factors have contributed very materially in creating the conditions which determine political predilections,” Krebheil (1916, 432), for example, shows that the composition of the local labor force is strongly related to election outcomes. “When the laboring class is most numerous in a county constituency,” Krebheil (1916, 424) writes, “the chances are that it will incline to the Liberal or Labor party.” Similar district-level analysis led Tingsten (1975) to introduce a “law of the social centre of gravity,” that a group’s electoral participation increases with its relative size in each electoral district (see also Gosnell 1937). Johnston, Pattie, and Allsopp (1988) (see also Johnston et al. 2005), especially, extended this analysis in a careful treatment of neighborhood effects to show that, for example, levels of class voting in Britain depend upon the class composition of each district.

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  The Turnout Gap

  Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America

  • Bernard L. Fraga(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Congressional districts offer similar variation in the size of racial/ethnic groups to counties, but are also electoral jurisdictions rel- evant to federal elections. Each of the 435 congressional districts elects a single representative to the U.S. Congress, and represents a discrete geographic area composed of, on average, 725,000 individuals. In addi- tion, congressional districts are salient to voters in biennial elections, as victorious candidates spend over $1,000,000 on average to win a U.S. House seat. Partisanship drives U.S. House outcomes (Ansolabehere and Fraga 2016), but a sizable literature indicates that voters see House elec- tions as more than just a referendum on the party in power (Jacobson and Kernell 1983; Ansolabehere and Jones 2010). Furthermore, candi- dates for Congress are strategic in both the decision to seek office (Banks 130 The Turnout Gap and Kiewiet 1989; Bond, Covington, and Fleisher 1985; Jacobson 1987; Stone and Maisel 2003; Thomsen 2014) and ensure reelection (Mayhew 1975; Fenno 1978), with race often playing a significant role (Canon, Schousen, and Sellers 1996; Highton 2004; Branton 2009; Grose 2011). Finally, the presence of majority and near majority–minority congres- sional districts serves as a sharp contrast to most electoral jurisdictions nationwide: instead of non-Hispanic Whites holding the balance of elec- toral power, minority voters have substantial electoral influence. As recognized by Hajnal and Trounstine (2005) and Hajnal (2010), dispar- ities in participation matter most in places where minority citizens are numerous enough to sway outcomes. Congressional districts thus provide an ideal testing ground for the theory of electoral influence. DISTRICT- LEVEL VARIATION IN THE TURNOUT GAP In this chapter I use two methodological approaches to determine the effect of congressional district composition on the turnout gap.

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  Ritual and Rhythm in Electoral Systems

  A Comparative Legal Account

  • Graeme Orr(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Spatial context is just as important in understanding the more officially controlled elements of elections – the casting and tallying of votes – even if those aspects of elections have not undergone such profound transformations as have campaigning and the space it occupies. Reflecting on the physical spaces in which we vote is crucial to understanding the ritual dimension of polling day. Even if we made the wholesale move to all-mail or internet only voting, we would still need to understand how such technologies, and the loss of a communal location for polling, would transform the ritual of voting. Indeed, short of humans evolving into telepathically connected brains-in-vats, even voting via the internet will involve physical objects and locations, such as a computer at home or a mobile phone on the run. The bulk of this chapter focuses, then, on the spatial dimension of voting in the sense of the physical spaces in which we vote.

  The ritual of voting is not only situated in a real or identifiable time and place, such as pre-polling at an electoral office or polling on election day in a school hall. Voting also takes place in a more abstract set of spaces. The latter part of this chapter will unpack this second sense of ‘where’ we vote. These are the spaces created and named by the practice of electoral map-making. The process of drawing electoral boundaries, known as ‘redistricting’ in the US and electoral ‘redistributions’ elsewhere, involves shaping political communities of interest and naming them for electoral purposes.

  Public Space and the Location of Polling Stations

  Where we vote is an especially significant but under-explored issue, which goes to the heart of the notion of voting as a ritual. Earlier, in Chapter 4 , we considered the growing potential for ‘convenience’ voting, whether by post and early polling, to deconstruct the very idea of an election ‘day’. In the following discussion we will focus on the question of the location of polling places on election day itself. Despite the incursions of convenience voting, the majority of electors at most elections still participate by casting votes in designated polling places on election day.

  This fact is significant not just in a temporal sense in preserving election day as the focused, culmination of the campaign. It is also significant in a spatial sense. The walk or short drive to the local polling station has an inescapably communal element, particularly where voting in assigned precincts is required.2

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  Making Votes Count

  Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems

  • Gary W. Cox(Author)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 The "vote type" column for list votes is read as follows. If the vote type is exclusive, then votes for a given list benefit only that list. If the vote type is pooling, then votes for a given list can pool within "cartels" to which the list belongs, a possibility discussed in greater detail in Section 3.4. As can be seen, pooling list votes are used in Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland (where they pool across parties; cf Lijphart 1994:134) and in Sweden and Uruguay (where they pool within parties). In addition, the candidate vote in Poland, as previously noted (Box 3.1), pools not just to the list but also to the cartel level. 3.3 DISTRICT STRUCTURE The district structure of an electoral system refers to the number and magnitude of all electoral districts used in that system - where an elec- toral district is defined as a geographic area within which votes are aggregated and seats allocated and a district's magnitude is the number of representatives it is entitled to elect. 9 If a district cannot be partitioned into smaller districts within which votes are aggregated and seats allo- cated, it is called primary. Thus, for example, the districts used in U.S. House elections are all primary. Although these districts are divided into smaller subdistricts for purposes of vote administration and counting (aggregation), no seats are attached to or allocated within the subdis- tricts, thus they do not count as "electoral districts" as defined here. Systems possessing only primary electoral districts are typically called single-tier in the literature. A secondary electoral district is an electoral district that can be parti- tioned into two or more primary electoral districts. Usually, seats are allocated first within primary districts, then, if any remain to be allocat- ed, within secondary districts.

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  Institutions and the Right to Vote in America

  • Martha E. Kropf(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C h a p t e r 9 Choosing Voters: Redistricting and Re-Apportionment If there is any electoral institution in the United States where the rules affect outcomes, it is in redistricting and reapportionment, yet it is one of the least under- stood parts of the electoral institution. The formal rules created in every state in the nation (each of the 50 states create districts in varying ways with varying laws) also affect citizen participation in electoral decisions. Citizen votes translate into public policy via representation at the federal, state, and local levels. Within states, congress members represent approximately equal numbers of individuals, but not between states. 1 Within states, state houses and senates are typically divided into equally populated geographic districts. In the 1960s, a series of Supreme Court decisions determined that legislative bodies at all levels should be equally sized in terms of population. Thus, somebody must draw the lines to determine geographic districts of equal population size from which repre- sentatives are elected. Within cities and counties, legislative bodies are often also drawn into districts. One can probably imagine how policymakers may draw legislative lines to benefit themselves or hurt the electoral prospects of the minority political party: simply move the lines such that more core voters are in one district rather than another. When our framers created this arrangement, they probably expected some clashes over choosing representatives. And, relatively recently, observers have called redis- tricting the “blood sport of politics” (see Engstrom, 2001, citing Aleinikoff and Issacharoff, 1993: 588), but perhaps hand-to-hand combat is not what is meant by that. The history of the United States does include occasional gun duels, but a voter in 2015 should reasonably expect that to be a thing of the past.

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  The Miner’s Canary

  Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy

  • Lani Guinier, Gerald Torres, Lani GUINIER(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  All voters should feel represented because the person elected by a district majority will somehow represent the interests of everyone in the 182 THE MINER’S CANARY district. 28 To understand this complex phenomenon of winner-takes all districting, it may help if we return to first principles—and back to Old Verona. An Ancient Perspective on Geographic Districting You are seated in the amphitheater many hundreds of years ago. Below you the Rabbi and the Bishop are in animated but mute discussion. “Surely,” someone to your left says, “we must be allowed a say in this de-bate. After all they are deciding our future too. I know we cannot all talk at once. And some will question whether we have anything to add. But at the very least, we need someone to interpret what the Rabbi and the Bishop are doing. I cannot hear a thing!” You are on a bench in the highest row in the outermost circle, at a great distance from the arena below. This is where women are permitted to sit, when they are invited into the stadium at all. “How shall we choose some-one to help us understand what’s going on down there?” you ask your neighbor. Running through your mind are the various ways your neigh-bor might respond to your question. You are especially intrigued because she has confided in you her ability to see the distant future. This gift is pe-culiar and limited, though, because the only future she can see is the struggle about democratic representation that would occupy the United States Supreme Court in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-ries. She has explained that democracy means rule by the people, and she has told you how these people are committed to democracy. According to the U.S. Supreme Court opinions that your neighbor has divined, the only way to ensure adequate representation is to divide the amphitheater into districts. Everyone in the amphitheater must be repre-sented, although that does not guarantee each person a vote.

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