From the Editor: Drawing district lines is a tricky business

We might as well face it. We’re addicted to dirt.
Here we are, a 247-year-old democratic republic, and we still pick most of our state and local legislative leaders and even U.S. House members based on the patch of soil where we lay our heads at night.
Of course, our votes on governor, senator and president are based on where we live, too. But we don’t have to change the boundaries of the state or country every 10 years the way we have to with the others.
And brother, doesn’t it cause trouble? Statewide, and in St. Mary, too.
Nearly all the trouble comes in the years immediately following each U.S. Census, when district boundaries must be redrawn so that each district stays roughly equal in population to the other districts for that office. The process is called redistricting.
Redistricting is supposed to be governed by ideas such as “contiguity” and “communities of interest.” But in the real world, redistricting is nearly always about two subjects: protecting incumbents and race.
The two subjects came together in the latest flap, which involves the way Louisiana is divided into U.S. House districts.
Before the 2020 Census, Louisiana’s six House districts included five safely Republican districts and one Black-majority district, the 2nd District represented by Democrat Troy Carter and centered on New Orleans.
After the latest Census, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards and others pushed for the creation of a second Black-majority district. Louisiana’s population is about one-third Black, they argued, so two of the six districts should have majorities likely to elect a Black representative.
But the Legislature passed a plan that maintained the 5-to-1 ratio and, by the by, extended Baton Rouge Republican Garret Graves’ 6th District into Assumption and east St. Mary.
Edwards vetoed the plan. The Legislature overrode the veto, putting the 5-to-1 plan into effect. And then the federal courts got involved, ordering the Legislature to find a second Black-majority district.
So the Legislature went into special session this month, basically to decide which of the two newest House members would get the congressional shaft: Julia Letlow or Graves.
Despite the fact that Graves had gained some clout working with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy — or maybe because of it — he drew the short straw. And beginning in 2026, his 6th District will cut northwestward from Baton Rouge to the Shreveport area. The Black majority in that district makes it possible, if not likely, that Louisiana will send a second Black Democrat to Congress in 2026.
Meanwhile, all of St. Mary will be in the 3rd District of U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, R-Lafayette, while Assumption goes into Carter’s New Orleans-based 2nd District.
This redistricting is tricky business.
Our new governor, by the way, got caught in a similar situation in 2012.
The 2010 Census numbers dictated that Louisiana would have to lose one of its seven congressional districts.
Jeff Landry had represented the old 3rd District, which had elected Billy Tauzin for years and then Charlie Melancon, for a single term. So he was low man on the Louisiana seniority list, and redistricting put him in the same district with four-term incumbent Charles Boustany, R-Lafayette. Boustany beat Landry in 2012.
But Landry had his revenge, first by being elected attorney general, then governor last October. Any real Louisiana politician would pass up the chance to be congressman, senator, president or pope to sit in Huey Long’s chair.
Also in October, Morgan City voters agreed to change the city charter to call for the election of City Council members from districts rather than at large. That may have seemed strange because council members had been elected from districts for more than two decades.
But a 2000 consent decree in a federal lawsuit brought council districts into being. That consent decree resulted in the creation of the Black-majority district now represented by the Rev. Ron Bias. The voters were merely asked to tidy up the paperwork.
Then there was the strange case of the St. Mary Parish Council at-large districts.
The council consists of 11 members. Eight are elected from traditional geographic districts. The other three are elected from at-large districts that together cover the whole parish. Each of the three at-large council members represents one of those three districts but is elected by a parishwide vote.
The idea seems to have been to create a parishwide constituency for the council chair and vice chair, who must by charter come from the at-large districts. In 45 years of covering local governments in three states, I’d never seen anything quite like this system.
The at-large districts got even stranger in the 2023 elections.
The council had voted on new district maps. Members had approved a new plan after being assured by the South Central Regional Planning & Development Commission staff, which had been hired to develop plans for the council to consider, that the at-large districts would be unchanged.
But they changed, at least enough to move the home of former Councilman Peter Soprano of Franklin out of At-Large District 10 and into At-Large District 9.
Soprano qualified to run against incumbent Gwendolyn Hidalgo of Bayou Vista in July. But, after learning about the district change, he had to qualify again to run against incumbent Rodney Olander of Franklin in District 3, one of the traditional districts. Olander won the election.
Tricky business.
Those are the things that happened here, and they happen elsewhere, too, notably in states where congressional districts are so gerrymandered that elections hardly seem worth the trouble.
But nobody has come up with anything better — except maybe science fiction writer Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein’s 1966 novel “The Moon of Harsh Mistress” is about a future in which residents of the moon have decided to start their own nation. When it comes time to pick a congress, they start to divide the moon into districts.
One character objects, asking why anyone would want a system in which anywhere up to 49.9% of voters get stuck with the representative they voted against.
Is that even representation at all?
The character suggests calling for volunteers instead, or picking representatives at random. Or, he says, why not pick representatives by petition?
Let anyone who gets enough signatures on a petition serve in the congress, he said. That eliminates the disgruntled voters and, back here on Earth, would do away with all the gerrymandering, while giving all minorities the voting strength their numbers warrant.
Sure, election by petition sounds weird. But is it any stranger than putting Bayou L’Ourse in a district created for a Black majority in New Orleans?
Bill Decker is editor of the Morgan City Review.