Opinion ID: 2062677
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Partisan gerrymandering

Text: Petitioners Rynd and Dembrow asserted before the Special Master that the Governor's plan engages in impermissible partisan gerrymandering. Rynd argued that district 9B in Baltimore County evinced such gerrymandering because, as a single-member district, it contains a slightly higher proportion of registered Democrats than district 9 as a whole. Dembrow argued that the plan gerrymandered districts in Montgomery County to protect certain incumbents and to harm the prospects of other potential candidates. The Special Master rejected these claims. So do we. Before examining the petitioners' specific claims, we mention that general principles of legislative apportionment will usually cast doubt upon claims that a redistricting plan produces unfair political results. In Gaffney v. Cummings, supra , the Supreme Court observed that [p]olitics and political considerations are inseparable from districting and apportionment.... The reality is that districting inevitably has and is intended to have substantial political consequences. 412 U.S. at 753, 93 S.Ct. at 2331. We have noted that the districting process is a political exercise for determination by the legislature and not the judiciary. In re Legislative Districting, supra, 299 Md. at 688, 475 A.2d 428. Dembrow says that the Governor's plan gerrymanders districts in Montgomery County to protect incumbents. In Karcher v. Daggett, supra, 462 U.S. 725, 103 S.Ct. 2653, the Supreme Court specified that avoiding contests between incumbents is a permissible reason for states to deviate from creating districts with perfectly equal populations. Id. at 740, 103 S.Ct. at 2663. Obviously, it is therefore permissible for states to consider incumbents in crafting districts in the first place. Dembrow even concedes that [i]ncumbent residency is a factor which may legitimately be considered in redistricting negotiations and plans. Thus, his claim that the Governor's plan constructs districts with a view toward protecting incumbents states no redressable wrong. Dembrow's and Rynd's assertions that the plan gerrymanders district 9 and several Montgomery County districts to undermine certain candidacies, while legally redressable, are without merit. On the same day it handed down Gingles, the Supreme Court issued its major explication of the question of political gerrymandering in Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U.S. 109, 106 S.Ct. 2797, 92 L.Ed.2d 85 (1986). In Davis, only six justices found the question of partisan political gerrymandering to represent a justiciable controversy. Of these six, a four-justice plurality held that while the equal protection clause proscribes voting discrimination on the basis of political affiliation, plaintiffs must carry an extremely heavy burden to show a discriminatory effect. The Court wrote: [U]nconstitutional discrimination occurs only when the electoral system is arranged in a manner that will consistently degrade a voter's or a group's influence on the political process as a whole.... [E]ven if a state legislature redistricts with the specific intention of disadvantaging one political party's election prospects, we do not believe that there has been an unconstitutional discrimination against members of that party unless the redistricting does in fact disadvantage it at the polls.... The mere lack of control of the General Assembly after a single election does not rise to the requisite level. 478 U.S. at 132, 139-40, 106 S.Ct. at 2810, 2814. The plurality's rationale for creating such a high threshold was that a court cannot presume ... that those who are elected will disregard the disproportionately underrepresented group. 478 U.S. at 132, 106 S.Ct. at 2810. Davis quickly lays to rest the petitioners' gerrymandering claims. Neither Dembrow nor Rynd has come close to making the requisite showing that the districts in question will consistently degrade one party's or group's electoral prospects. Davis establishes that, absent flagrant partisan abuse of the redistricting process, the political consequences of that process will remain in the hands of the legislature and not the judiciary. The petitioners' partisan gerrymandering claims lack merit.