Ground War: Courts, Commissions, and the Fight over Partisan Gerrymanders

Nicholas Goedert

Jun. 2022 · Highbridge Audio · Voorgelees deur Kyle Tait

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In Ground War, Nicholas Goedert tackles the controversies, litigation, and effects surrounding partisan gerrymandering of Congress. He contends that the appropriate actors to address the fairness of a map are nonpartisan commissions within each state, not the US courts. Goedert illustrates how existing measures and legal standards are too narrow-while they are well-adapted to evaluating maps in swing states in close elections, they fail to properly address states or national electoral environments that favor one party. In turn, Goedert demonstrates that the bias and responsiveness of partisan maps is highly sensitive to both the make-up of a state's electorate and the ephemeral election conditions under which individual elections take place. But this does not mean that partisan gerrymandering must be excused as a dilemma without a reasonable remedy. Using multiple empirical approaches and a novel metric to measure the partisan fairness of maps, Ground War shows that nonpartisan commissions, adopted state-by-state, represent the best alternative to legislative districting. A rigorous account that explains how our system works and provides practical solutions for improving it, Ground War is an essential work for all scholars of US elections.

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Nicholas Goedert is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech. He has served as an expert witness in redistricting law, a writer for the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, and a consultant for the FairVote voting reform advocacy group.

Kyle Tait is a professionally trained voice actor and narrator in Atlanta, Georgia. His first brush with a microphone came in sports radio, calling baseball in the Atlanta Braves' organization. He started voicing audiobooks during the off-season; a few years later, he left baseball to work as a narrator full-time.