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  • But in North Carolina, the election results were really weird.

  • These squares represent all the voters in North Carolina.

  • They were voting for these 13 seats in Congress.

  • About half voted for Republicans.

  • And about 48 percent voted for Democrats.

  • So you might think, of the 13 Congressional seats, maybe Democrats would've won 6 seats,

  • and Republicans would've won 7.

  • But no.

  • Democrats only won 3 of 13 seatsway less than half.

  • This imbalance was because North Carolina's Congressional districts had been "gerrymandered."

  • It means that these voters had been grouped into districts very strategically

  • with the goal of benefiting one party.

  • Gerrymandering has pretty much always happened in America.

  • That's because, every 10 years the political districts are redrawn.

  • And in most cases, those new lines get drawn

  • by whoever holds power in state governments at the time.

  • That's what happened in 2010.

  • Republicans won control of lots of state governments, and redrew the political lines to favor themselves.

  • And over the next few years, redistricting helped them hold onto almost all those states.

  • This shifted the balance of power.

  • And it turns out that behind a lot of this, was one guy.

  • This is Thomas Hofeller:

  • The mapmaker who helped Republicans gerrymander districts over the last decade.

  • When Hofeller died in 2018, his daughter found thousands of his emails and files, which she

  • shared with activists.

  • The files show that Tom Hoeffler's fingerprints are all over the way America's political

  • maps look today.

  • But North Carolina was his masterpiece.

  • And if you want to understand why gerrymandering is a such a big problem in the US,

  • that's a good place to start.

  • The basics of gerrymandering are actually pretty simple.

  • If you're a Republican trying to keep power, you want to do two things.

  • First, "pack" as many Democratic voters as possible into a single district.

  • If you have a district where almost everyone votes Democrat, that means almost half of

  • those votes are basically wasted.

  • You can also "crack" big Democratic areas into separate districtswhere there are

  • slightly more Republicans.

  • So even though an area has a lot of Democratic votes, they would actually lose in this district

  • and in this district.

  • These are the two elements of classic gerrymandering: Packing and cracking.

  • And Hoffeler employed these techniques masterfully in North Carolina.

  • In 2011 he was hired to redraw the state's political lines.

  • And for congressional districts, he came up with this map.

  • Now, I just want to focus in on District 12, this weird skinny shape.

  • In order to make sense of this shape, we have to look at another map.

  • This map shows the percentage of black people in each neighborhood.

  • The bluer areas are where more black people live.

  • Hofeller basically gathered up black people in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Charlotte

  • and packed them into one district.

  • So that's how District 12 happened.

  • Hoeffler also did this with North Carolina's state representatives and state senators.

  • For example here are the state senate districts.

  • Here, he packed Winston-Salem into one district.

  • And then packed Greensboro into its own district.

  • These new districts helped Republicans get a stranglehold on power in the North Carolina statehouse.

  • And over the next few years, they were able to pass crucial legislation.

  • A strict new voter ID law in North Carolina.

  • Which bathrooms transgender individuals can use in North Carolina.

  • In 2016 and 2017, federal courts ruled both of these maps were unconstitutional.

  • They said what North Carolina Republicans did wasn't just gerrymanderingit was

  • racial gerrymandering, done to deliberately dilute the political power of black people.

  • The courts said that the Republicans in the North Carolina statehouse now had to redraw

  • the lines without looking at racial demographics.

  • So they went back... to Tom Hofeller.

  • This time, Hofeller couldn't look at race.

  • Instead, he looked at which areas voted for Democrats and which areas voted for Republicans.

  • Instead of a racial gerrymander, it would be a partisan gerrymander.

  • Here's that map, using data from 2014.

  • The bluer an area, the more Democratic voters there are.

  • Now, if you zoom in here, to Greensboro, you can see one of the highest concentrations

  • of Democratic voters in the state.

  • Hoffeler drew a congressional district line to crack this community in half.

  • This meant Democrats here, were now the minority in their district.

  • And Democrats here were also the minority in their district.

  • Hoffeler employed these techniques all over the state to create North Carolina's new

  • political districts.

  • And the first big test for these new maps would be the 2018 election.

  • Democrats were expected to turn out in droves.

  • Democrats are vying for a potential blue wave.

  • The wave that Republicans fear is going to wipe them out.

  • So, how did the maps do?

  • For state representatives, Democrats got 51 percent of the vote.

  • They won only 46 percent of seats.

  • For state senate, they received half the voteand won just 42 percent of seats.

  • And for Congress?

  • You already know how that one turned out.

  • Democrats won nearly half the votesbut won only three out of 13 seats.

  • A year later, in 2019, the Supreme Court weighed in.

  • They said it was beyond their reachthat it wasn't their job to fix it.

  • All of this raised an existential question:

  • If Republicans could continue drawing the lines to stay in power, how could they ever

  • be elected out of office?

  • But the Supreme Court ruling left open the possibility for state courts to rule on partisan

  • gerrymandering.

  • And in September 2019, that's exactly what North Carolina's Supreme Court did.

  • The court found that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution.

  • In the court's decision, it was Hofeller's files that helped prove that North Carolina

  • Republicans drew these lines with the clear intention of benefiting themselves.

  • Ultimately, the court said North Carolina Republicans had to redraw the state house

  • and state senate maps one more time.

  • This new map approved by North Carolina legislators is much less biased toward one partyeven

  • though it took some extreme measures, and nearly a decade, to force politicians to draw

  • a fairer map.

  • In the last few years, the courts in several states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, have

  • made partisan gerrymandering much harder.

  • And now that's also the case in North Carolina.

  • Hofeller is gone now.

  • But in other states across the country, many maps he helped draw are still in use.

  • And while there's now a clearer strategy to challenge those maps in state courts...

  • many voters are still, effectively, not choosing their representatives.

  • It's like Hoeffler said:, the representatives are choosing the voters.

  • "... of course, redistricting is democracy at work.

  • Redistricting is like an election in reverse.

  • It's a great event."

But in North Carolina, the election results were really weird.

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B1 中級

操縱美國大選地圖的人。 (The man who rigged America's election maps)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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