The Electoral Innovation Lab will present a virtual Academic Talk with Edward Foley, the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law and Director of Election Law at Ohio State, and the former Solicitor General of Ohio. The talk, titled “Self-districting: the ultimate antidote to gerrymandering,” will take place at 1:30 PM ET on December 3rd.

Please RSVP to jrhode@princeton.edu 

While much of the anti-gerrymandering focus of the last decade was on measures of partisan bias (like the “efficiency gap”), the new post-2020 maps are showing the increasing lack of electoral competition as a consequence of extreme and efficient gerrymanders. What is most striking about the new congressional maps so far is just how few seats are competitive, and how the number of competitive seats is generally lower (and often significantly so) compared to previous maps. Given that the House of Representatives was originally intended to be the part of the federal government most responsive to the changing political preferences of the nation’s voters, the electoral rigidity emerging from the new maps is a cause for serious concern. ... This system of self-districting offers a way to maximize voter choice, while avoiding the partisan manipulation of district lines. It’s worth considering in the overall effort to combat gerrymandering, especially as this decade shows the anti-democratic effects of gerrymandering to be worse than ever.