Berks Barrister Winter 2018 - 9

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Berks County residents have suffered more than most from
this disenfranchisement. From 1962 until 2002, all of Berks
County lay within a single district. The 2011 redistricting by
the Pennsylvania legislature fragmented Berks County into four
different congressional districts, the 6th, 7th, 15th, and 16th. Only
Montgomery County is worse, divided amongst five congressional
districts. Who does this benefit? It certainly doesn't benefit the
citizens whose communities, towns and counties are chopped into
separate, strangely-shaped districts.
Pennsylvania is one of the most gerrymandered states in the
country - and there are numbers to prove it. The Brennan Center
for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute dedicated to
improving our democracy, analyzed the 2012, 2014 and 2016
congressional elections using three separate quantitative measures
of partisan bias. 2 That quantitative analysis found Pennsylvania to
be one of three states with consistently extreme levels of partisan
bias. 3 The Brennan Center considers this level of gerrymandering
to be an alarming threat to democracy. 4
Without competitive elections, legislators pander to their
extreme base to stay in office. Compromise becomes impossible,
the important business of governing is mired in gridlock, and
our infrastructure, educational system, economy, and prosperity
suffer. A September 2016 report of Harvard Business School's
1
Chris Evans, It's the Autonomy, Stupid: Political Data-Mining and Voter
Privacy in the Information Age, 13 Minn. J.L. Sci. & Tech. 867, 883-84
(2012).
2
Brennan Center for Justice, Extreme Maps, published May 2017 (Efficiency
Gap Analysis, Seats-to-Votes Curve Analysis and Means-Median Difference
Analysis).

U.S. Competitiveness Project includes this key finding: "The
U.S. political system was once the envy of many nations...
Today, we believe that our political system is now the major
obstacle to progress on the economy..."5 How to fix that broken
political system? Harvard Business School alumni believe that
gerrymandering reform is the top priority.6

Democracy Turned on its Head
Our democracy is built on the belief that every person's vote
should count equally. Therefore, every 10 years, after the census,
both our congressional districts and our state legislative districts
are redrawn so that they contain roughly the same number of
voters in each district. Problematically, in Pennsylvania, it is our
self-interested legislators who draw the boundaries of their own
districts.
Congressional redistricting is accomplished in Pennsylvania
by legislative action. A bill must be introduced, pass both houses
and be signed into law by the governor. The findings of fact in the
League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania case, listed at the end of
this article, reveal a highly secretive redistricting process in 2011
which excluded not only citizens and advocacy groups, but even
the vast majority of legislators themselves.
Continued on page 10
Id. at page 15.
Id. at page 1.
5
http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/problems-unsolved-and-anation-divided.pdf, page 48.
6
http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/problems-unsolved-and-anation-divided.pdf, page 55..
3
4

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Winter 2018 | 9

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Berks Barrister Winter 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Berks Barrister Winter 2018