In Texas, Democratic state legislators have flown the coup as Republicans try to manipulate the redistricting process to maximize Republican strength. Democrats elsewhere, including California, are threatening retaliation.
It’s the same old story where both sides of the aisle play games on redistricting to benefit themselves. It’s why reformers have been pushing for decades to get the process out of the hands of self interested elected officials whose only goal is to protect their incumbency.
In 2007, as county executive in Suffolk County, N.Y., I signed a landmark bill to take the task of redrawing our county legislature’s lines away from elected officials, placing it instead with an independent panel. It passed with great fanfare, with the governor even coming to to lend support as I signed it.
But, lo and behold, several years later, when it was about to kick in, a Democratic legislature abolished the reform and went back to the old system of having the legislature control the process. This was done, of course, because at the time the Democrats were in control.
Something similar would later play out later at the state level. In 2014, New York voters added an independent commission redistricting system to their state constitution. But during the 2022 election cycle, the Democrat-controlled legislature didn’t like the map it produced. So Democrats tried to override the independent commission and draw their own partisan map, only to be blocked by the state’s high court, the Court of Appeals.
The real issue here is that it’s just plain wrong for either party to manipulate this process.
The Republicans in Texas are throwing a new fly into the ointment by opting to implement the 10 year redistrict process — which usually coincides with the disclosure of the new census — five years earlier than normal. They’re doing this to get as many as five new seats for their party prior to the 2026 midterms.
Now governors from California to New York and elsewhere are warning that they will do the same to maximize seats for Democrats prior to the next census. But the Democrats don’t have clean hands here either.
We need independence in redistricting. But some complain that, even when you appoint good government groups and retired judges to do it, politics will always come into play.
Unfortunately, even well-intentioned attempts at reform often fail to produce the desired results. Take California, which in 2008 passed a referendum supported by then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to create an independent commission to draw the lines.
If its goal was to create fair districts that would create a better bipartisan balance, it was a failure. At the time of the referendum’s passage, there were 34 Democrats and 19 Republicans from the state’s congressional caucus. By 2012 the number grew to 39 Democrats and only 14 Republicans. By 2025, there were only nine Republican seats left throughout the state.
While much of this can be attributed to changing demographics and political issues of the day, some of it might be attributable to the biases of even those supposedly non-partisan appointees.
So why not have the lines redrawn by using artificial intelligence instead? Just key in that we want the fairest redistricting possible to create as balanced a map as possible from the perspective of demographics and political party registration. That would take the politics out of the system and make our races more competitive.
Best of all, it would ultimately make our elected officials more reactive to the center rather than the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum.
Of course the outcome of AI is only as good as the input. Care must be given to ensure that a balanced group of nonpartisan technocrats prepare the algorithms as opposed to party hacks.
To maximize the potential for delivering the fairest lines possible, take a grouping of five potential maps from the computer, throw them into a lottery barrel and pick a winning plan at random, as was once tried in North Carolina before partisan lawsuits marred the process.
There is no fool-proof solution, but AI may present the best of all the options available.
Steve Levy is president of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County executive, as a state assemblyman, and as host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.”
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