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Census results probably will lead to jockeying for partisan representationNorth Carolina continues to be a fast-growing state. And new data released by the Census Bureau this past week shows the Raleigh area to be the fastest-growing metropolitan region in the nation. The increased population has a lot of demographers and politicians alike hoping that after the next census, North Carolina will get an additional congressional seat. The census will be conducted next year. Its purpose, as stipulated in the Constitution, is to find out how many people live in each of the states so that the number of members in...

Democrat elections, Deception, Voter fraud, and now an outright power grabs Imagine an Obama White House where they could be in charge of the numbers. What numbers, you ask? For example, the population numbers that, among other things, determine how many congressional seats are allocated and to whom. So now it’s been announced that the White House will oversee the Census. Of course, the president has ultimate authority over cabinet officers (that’s the unitary presidency theory that Democrats hated up to but not beyond January 20), and I am not prepared to charge that Rahm Emanuel or anyone else in...

Recently I was listening to a political talk show on the radio and the speaker was talking about the evils of gerrymandering congressional districts. I had to laugh a bit because he was attempting to assert that only the GOP does this, and that the DNC was completely innocent of such shenanigans. Lets forget who is at fault for a moment, and focus on the solutions. It should not surprise you that some very elegant solutions exist, technical solutions. Upon investigating this issue one discovers that technology is not the problem, but politicians are. The root problem is that neither...

But it was the unheralded passage of another initiative that may make the most history and crimp Democrat hopes for a prolonged era of dominance. Proposition 11, which passed with the narrowest of margins (50.8 percent), could mark the most serious challenge to the political class by voters since the foiled term limit movement of the 1990s. It strikes at the core pillar of power: incumbency guaranteed through gerrymandered districts. Californians took away from their legislature the power to draw its own districts--a key element of nearly uninterrupted Democratic control since 1970. The task will now be handled by an...

One looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. One is called the "Ribbon of Shame." Some have arms. Some have fingers. Many seem to defy logic. They're California's state Assembly and Senate - but not Congressional - districts, and they will change after the next Census. That's not new, of course. Districts change every 10 years. But because of Proposition 11, which passed narrowly last week, the new legislative districts that will take effect for the 2012 elections will be drawn by an independent commission, rather than by state lawmakers. That could have big implications for the state's balance of power in...

Polidata did a projection based on population trends over the past decade and are predicting that both North Carolina and South Carolina will gain a Congressional seat after the 2010 Census and with that an extra electoral vote in the Presidential elections. This would bring North Carolina up to 14 seats in Congress and 16 electoral votes and South Carolina up to 7 seats in Congress and 9 electoral votes. The bigger question is which party will benefit from this change. In South Carolina the seventh Congressional seat will almost certainly go to the Republicans. They dominate the state and...

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—A suburban village has been violating the Voting Rights Act by using an election system that leaves its rapidly growing Hispanic population without representation, a federal judge said Tuesday. The decision against Port Chester, on the Connecticut border 25 miles from New York City, is expected to force a revision of the village's at-large election system, in which all voters cast ballots for each of the six trustee positions that run the village government. The likely alternative is a district system, in which each district would elect one trustee. One district would be drawn around Hispanic neighborhoods to...

It's a hardy perennial in the more philosophically-oriented conservative circles, despite its manifest political infeasibility: the argument that the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed or should never have been passed. While this argument does have its virtues, I disagree. Regardless of whether it was a good idea at the time, repealing the 17th Amendment today would only weaken the mechanisms that are essential to conservative policies and conservative philosophy. Specifically, restoring to state legislatures the power over the election of Senators would make the Senate less directly accountable to the people and insulate the federal courts even further from public...

The Democrats have been using immigration (legal and illegal) as a form of massive international gerrymandering. The Democrats wrote the 1965 immigration law which guarantees a Democrat majority. The Democrats wrote the law to give poor people the numerical advantage and to create an endless parade of chain migration. The shrewd Democrats also realized that today's immigrants live in metropolitan areas which are already dominated by the Democratic Party. This makes it even more likely that new immigrants will vote Democrat. Once the pattern of an ethnic group voting Democrat is established, the new immigrants follow-the-leader. You can see a...

Nuñez and others want lines drawn by a nonpartisan panel. Pelosi may oppose the plan. The new dynamic in Washington, with Californian Nancy Pelosi as House speaker, threatens to thwart an effort by state political leaders to overhaul the way voting districts are drawn. Fresh from their victories in the November election, Democrats in Congress don't want to risk their fragile majority. Many Republicans don't want their relatively safe seats threatened either. Their opposition promises to crimp an effort by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) and others to change how California draws political boundaries every...

One hundred seats in the California Assembly and Senate were up for grabs on Nov. 7. Not a single one changed party hands. Conceivably, you might think, there'd be one seat that would switch from a Democrat to a Republican, or visa versa. But no. Nada. Not a single seat. The same inertia was seen in the 2004 elections. No seats changed party hands. Until last week, there was a faint chance that Republican Lynn Dauscher would buck the trend and defeat Democrat Lou Correa in the 34th Senate District, a seat vacated by a termed-out Democrat. But Correa's lead...

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.) WASHINGTON -- Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power. The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to the type of backlash from traditionally Republican-leaning independent voters that unfolded this week. That...

The principle of democracy is that electors get to choose their representatives. The principle of gerrymandering is that representatives get to choose their electors. This can lead to some absurd distortions. It is designed to do so. Let us look at a few examples. First, let us dispose of one. A few weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Texas Democrats against a mid-decade redistricting in that state. The argument was partly that redistricting should not take place mid-decade, that it ‘disenfranchised’ minority voters, but mostly that it cost the Democrats six seats they felt entitled to hold....

EVERY few years, California lawmakers take aim at term limits, which have swept out the Sacramento fossils who held office for decades, ushering in fresh faces and more minorities. Legislators hate term limits. They want to cling to six-figure jobs, full staffs, fat per diem expense accounts and personal prestige that few lawmakers could ever earn in private life. Journalists who cover politics hate term limits. They must cozy up to a new bunch of lawmakers every time the old bunch is forced out. They have to develop new sources and — horrors! — update their Rolodexes. Both the pols...

With Congress poised to extend, for another quarter-century, certain "temporary" provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it's worth pondering some of the political mischief taking place these days in the name of "voting rights." Take New York's 11th Congressional District, a safe Democratic seat covering several neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The seat is currently occupied by Major Owens, a black Democrat who has held it since 1983 and is retiring this year. One of the four candidates to replace him is David Yassky, a white Democrat who represents some of the same Brooklyn neighborhoods as a city councilman. Mr. Owens...

Voters may have rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's scheme to redraw the state's 173 legislative and congressional districts in mid-decade, but the bipartisan gerrymander of those districts in 2001 remains a stain on democracy - and one that worsens the Legislature's chronic inability to function. The aim of the gerrymander was to fix the party ownership of every district, thus eliminating competition for seats, and it has been 98 percent successful in the two election cycles since. None of the 53 congressional districts has changed partisan hands and voters have ignored the gerrymander in just three of the 120 legislative districts....

POINTS OF VIEW "The effort to deliver a new congressional map was founded in the belief that a history of gerrymandering efforts by Democrats in Texas had resulted in an unfair representation of Texas voters." --Kevin Madden, spokesman for former House Majority Leader DeLay -snip- "I think it's gone overboard. We have such a manipulation of the democratic rules of the game by people determined to stay in power that it diminishes American democracy ... ." --Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution FACTS Seven states don't have to draw congressional districts because they qualify for only one seat in the House: Alaska,...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court may be ready to ask: When is politics too political? At what point has a voter lost his or her voice? The Texas redistricting case poses tough questions to a court that has historically shied from purely partisan skirmishes over congressional map-making. But in agreeing on Monday to review four challenges to the 2003 Texas remap, the justices will have plenty to consider – from the rarity of a mid-decade push to redraw districts to allegations of excessive partisan maneuvering. By taking the Texas cases on an expedited basis – arguments are set for March...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would decide the validity of the much-disputed Congressional map that Texas Republicans pushed through the State Legislature two years ago in a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting that led to the loss of five Democratic Congressional seats. The court agreed to hear appeals brought by four groups of plaintiffs representing Democratic, Hispanic and black voters as well as the city of Austin and its surrounding county. The justices will hear the cases on an expedited basis on March 1, in time to issue a decision by the end of...

SACRAMENTO -- Voters in an area of Orange County known as Little Saigon played a key role last year in electing the first Vietnamese-American to serve in the California Legislature. But some advocacy groups worry that the Asian voters who helped elect Assemblyman Van Tran, like minorities in other communities, could lose that type of clout if Californians approve Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's redistricting measure on Nov. 8. "We support reform, but it has to be the right reform," said Eugene Lee, an attorney for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, a civil rights organization that serves the Asian and Pacific...