user: Input: Tilting the Scales of Justice
Every time we take a look at the United States attorney scandal, more evidence emerges that Alberto Gonzales politicized the Justice Department to the point where it sometimes seems like a branch of the Republican National Committee.

Yesterday, for example, Richard Thornburgh, a former Republican attorney general, told a Congressional hearing that his client, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a Democratic officeholder in Pennsylvania, was indicted on federal charges that should not be federal charges by a United States attorney who targeted Democrats.

At the same hearing, more evidence emerged that the prosecutions of Don Siegelman, the former Alabama governor, and Paul Minor, a prominent Mississippi Democrat, may have been political hits. And a University of Missouri professor testified that his statistical analysis showed that the Justice Department engaged in “political profiling.”

Dr. Wecht’s case has gotten little attention, but that may change. Mr. Thornburgh said prosecutors are using “unprecedented” legal theories to turn mostly “nickel and dime transgressions” into major federal felonies. He charged that while United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan went after Dr. Wecht and other Democrats, she ignored the offenses of Republican officials, including a congressman whose staff accused him of using government employees in his election campaign.

Mr. Siegelman’s lawyer, Doug Jones, said the investigation of the former governor was very limited until it turned around “180 degrees” in late 2004, after Washington officials told local prosecutors “to go back and look at the case, review the case top to bottom.” That is consistent with the account of Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who says she was on a phone call in which Republican operatives said Karl Rove was involved in the prosecution.
What was this article about?
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It's about: The American people have a right to know what happened at the Justice Department. Any wrongful prosecutions should be rectified.


Input: This is actually what America would look like without gerrymandering
In his final State of the Union address, President Obama spoke out against the partisanship involved in redistricting. (Reuters)

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called on lawmakers and the public to take a number of steps "to change the system to reflect our better selves" for "a better politics." The top item on that list was to end partisan gerrymandering: "we have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around," Obama said.

In most states, state legislatures draw the district boundaries that determine how many delegates the state sends to the U.S. Congress, as well as the general partisan make-up of that delegation. State legislatures are partisan beasts, and if one party is in control of the process they can draw boundaries to give themselves a numeric advantage over their opponents in Congress. This process is called gerrymandering.

Some state legislatures are more brazen about the process than others. Maryland's districts, drawn by Democrats, are one particularly egregious example. North Carolina's, drawn by Republicans, are another. Advocates of reform have proposed various solutions to the problem over the years. In some states, redistricting is put in the hands of an independent commission. In others, lengthy court battles are playing out to draw the districts more fairly.

But a fundamental problem with district-drawing still remains: as long as humans are drawing the lines, there's a danger of bias and self-interest to creep into the process. There is another way, however: we could simply let computers do the drawing for us.

From a technological standpoint it's fairly straightforward -- a software engineer in Massachusetts named Brian Olson wrote an algorithm to do it in his spare time. As I described it in 2014, Olson's algorithm creates "optimally compact" equal-population congressional districts in each state, based on 2010 census data. It draws districts that respect the boundaries of census blocks, which are the smallest geographic units used by the Census Bureau. This ensures that the district boundaries reflect actual neighborhoods and don't, say, cut an arbitrary line through somebody's house."

To see what this looks like in practice, compare this map of our current congressional districts (top) with one we stitched together from Olson's output (bottom).

Big difference, isn't it? You can check out a larger version of the compacted map here. Rather than a confusing snarl of interlocked districts, you have neat, trim boundaries that make intuitive sense. Here are some individual state comparisons I made back in 2014 that let you see some more of the detail:

Algorithms like this one prioritize compactness -- that is, ensuring that voters are geographically close together. One of the telltale signs of gerrymandering is dramatically non-compact districts that squiggle and squirm out in all different directions -- evidence of lawmakers trying to bring far-flung voters into a single district in order to achieve the partisan mix that best favors their party. Or, as Obama said: districts that let politicians pick their voters, rather than the other way around.

Many political scientists are skeptical about the merits of drawing districts based on compactness. Their general argument is that districts are ideally based on communities of interest -- people who share a common demography, culture, class, etc. There's no particular reason, they say, that grouping voters by geographic proximity ensures this coherent community any more than drawing lines according to any other metric. Moreover, algorithms can be biased too.

It's a point well-taken. But "community of interest" is an incredibly squishy term. You can define it pretty much however you want. As I wrote in 2014, if you're a politician in search of a figleaf justification for putting voters from disparate corners of the state into the same congressional district, you can always find one. Communities of interest are a great ideal, but in practice they're so fuzzy that they open the door to all manner of redistricting shenanigans, as we've seen.

The main obstacles to automated redistricting are legal. For starters, the Voting Rights Act mandates that in some states, race needs to be a factor in redistricting to ensure that minority voters are represented in Congress. Again: a nice idea. But there's a tradeoff: packing all your minority voters into one district diminishes their clout everywhere else. We've seen this in the real world in Florida: the 5th District was originally drawn as a majority-minority district by Democrats. But Republicans saw fit to keep it that way in subsequent years, because it gave black voters less power in the surrounding districts.

In the end, the prospect of an open, transparent algorithm drawing districts based on population and compactness may be an improvement upon the status quo, where politicians draw the boundaries that best serve their interests. Of course, the chances of this ever becoming reality are slim: doing so would require state legislators to voluntarily cede their redistricting powers to a computer program. And if there's anything lawmakers dislike, it's giving up power.

Laris Karklis contributed to this story.

The GOP scored 33 more seats in the House this election even though Democrats earned a million more votes in House races. Professor Jeremy Mayer says gerrymandering distorts democracy. (The Fold/The Washington Post)

Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.
What was this article about?
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It's about:

assistant: It would be easy enough to do. The only thing lacking is the political will.