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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.
The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.
It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?
The solution here would be an arms length neutral body made up of experts from non-political backgrounds which deicdes on districts and isn't subject to the executive in who's on it. A bit like how the Judicial Appointments Comission decides on who to appoint as judges in the UK completely independent from whoever is in government at the time. All the gerrymandered angular districts would disappear in one fell swoop and things would look a lot more reasonable.
Perhaps nice compact districts like this.
Anyway, we lack angels in the form of neutral experts to redistrict us.
My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.
The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.
If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.
When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:
At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.
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