Cracking and Packing

About this Episode

When you have election law and constitutional law scholar Lori Ringhand on your show, you start, of course, by talking about the problem with email, the uses of texting, and apps like Periscope. Lori thinks Christian should read more novels. Fueled by listener Bunny’s small-batch, home-roasted, fine coffee, we move on to the much easier topics of race, voting, and gerrymandering. What do you do when the Supreme Court’s color-blindness understanding of the Equal Protection Clause collides with the Voting Rights Act? And why do geographic voting districts with single winners make sense anyway? Voting’s hard to make fair amirite?

This show’s links:

• Lori Ringhand’s faculty profile and writing
• Periscope
• About Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
• Lori’s last appearance on the show
• The SCOTUSblog page for Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (which includes links to briefs and oral argument)
• Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama
• About the Voting Rights Act, including a brief outline of its major provisions
• Shelby County v. Holder
• About cracking, packing, and other redistricting shenanigans; see also more on this in ProPublica’s Devil’s Dictionary
• About multiple-winner voting methods and single-winner voting methods (which distinction roughly tracks some of the issues we raised)
• Shaw v. Reno, which was followed by Miller v. Johnson
• Partisan gerrymandering cases: Davis v. Bandemer (1986), Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006)
• Christopher Elmendorf, Representation Reinforcement through Advisory Commissions: The Case of Election Law
• Links to the oral argument in the Arizona case
• Smiley v. Holm and Bush v. Gore (and it was Justice Rehnquist’s concurrence)