Source: https://www.pulj.org/the-roundtable/the-end-of-gerrymanderings-good-ol-days
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 19:00:13+00:00

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​However, the Supreme Court did not draw a distinct line in the sand for when a redistricting plan violates Equal Protection. The best guidance the Court has provided is that a redistricting plan must reflect traditional redistricting criteria such as equal population, communities of interest, and compactness. The Court now rules that if the plan does not conform to traditional criteria and political discrepancies appear to be controlling the configuration, this would trigger the presumption of a constitutional violation; essentially, it would reign in the Court’s jurisprudence from the open-range Gaffney decision and back to the more restrictive Reynolds precedent. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will continue to corral gerrymandering back towards the precedent set in Reynolds.
Preceding Cox and Wake County, Reynolds v. Sims in 1964 required that all electoral districts must be of the same size. In that case, state legislative districts were the question at hand.  Moreover, state legislative districts must be as nearly equal in population as possible, despite the United States Senate’s example. However, in 1973, Gaffney v. Cummings, the Court relaxed the strictness of the holding in Reynolds. The Court in Gaffney essentially gave state legislatures free-reign to create a districting plan with up to a 10 percent disparity between districts.  This loosening of restrictions on the reapportionment of districts has left present jurisprudence in an increasingly awkward position of determining which direction to take on redistricting law. The cases of Larios and Wake County have established and solidified that the Court is returning American election law to a stricter direction, similar to the guidance of Reynolds.
In the modern jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court, the Court has decided to steer precedent back towards the stricter standard handed down in Reynolds and reeling back in the precedent set in Gaffney. The Court no longer enforces that plans with less than 10 percent deviation among districts are automatically acceptable, per Gaffney. The Court now rules that “traditional districting criteria” must inform the vast majority of decisions when drawing boundaries; first and foremost, equal population, per Reynolds. If Larios and Wake County are any indication, we might be witnessing the end of the “good ol’ days” of partisan gerrymandering.
Reynolds v. Sims, 383 U.S. 533 (June 15, 1964).
Gaffney v. Cummings, 412 U.S. 735 (June 18, 1973).
Cox v. Larios, 542 U.S. 947 (June 30, 2004).
Raleigh Wake Citizens Association v. Wake County Board of Elections (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit May 27, 2015).

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