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46 Cumb. L. Rev. 377 (2015-2016)
Escaping the Thicket: The Ranked Choice Voting Solution to America's Redistricting Crisis

handle is hein.journals/cumlr46 and id is 389 raw text is: ESCAPING THE THICKET: THE RANKED CHOICE VOTING SOLUTION TO AMERICA'S DISTRICTING CRISIS ANDREW SPENCER,t CHRISTOPHER HUGHES,* & ROB RICHIE: INTRODUCTION In the 1960s, new federal voting laws and a series of Supreme Court decisions dramatically changed the rules and norms governing redistricting. The new regime represented real progress, but the time has again come for change. Our elected leaders and the Court should act on a common understanding that equality in our elections should always be governed by how voters cast their votes rather than by how mapmakers draw district lines. Changing our voting rules to accom- plish this goal would largely extract courts from a political thicket that has become highly problematic in today's increasingly partisan, politi- cally polarized era. Without such reforms, judges will be regularly ac- cused of partisan motivations when adjudicating redistricting, because any change will inevitably improve one party's opportunities at the ex- pense of another's. From 1962 to 1964, the Supreme Court plunged into the political thicket of deciding how states turn votes into representation.1 Begin- ning with Baker v. Carr, the Court demanded that states reapportion their legislatures in keeping with changes in population.2 These rulings addressed the obvious injustice of vesting disproportionately high lev- els of political power in certain areas (rural ones, namely), yet compli- cated traditional districting processes and advantaged classes of voters more likely to live in areas with more ineligible voters.3 Redistricting t Legal Director, FairVote; J.D., University of Arizona School of Law. Legal Fellow, FairVote; J.D., New York University School of Law. Executive Director, FairVote; B.A. Haverford College. 1 See Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 556 (1946) (typifying the Court's former reluc- tance to intervene in redistricting matters under the political question doctrine: To sustain this action would cut very deep into the very being of Congress. Courts ought not to enter this political thicket.) (emphasis added). 2 See Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 563 (1964); Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 187-89 (1962). 3 The Court ruled on Evenwel v. Abbott in favor of defendants, maintaining the status quo of using total voter population. Evenwel v. Abbott, 578 U.S. _ (2016). Although plain- tiffs approach would have provided more voter equality district-by-district, it would have meant overall decrease in election of representatives of choice for already underrepresented racial minorities, absent changes to our winner-take-all voting rules.

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