“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places …” – Psalms 16:6

How hard is it to draw a few lines on a map? Incredibly hard, apparently, at least when it comes to drawing the district lines for Alabama’s seven U.S. congressional districts.

It sounds simple enough. The state legislature redraws the boundaries for the state’s congressional districts every 10 years after the U.S. Census releases its population statistics – a process known as redistricting. There are a few generally accepted guidelines when it comes to redistricting.

Some of these guidelines include compactness (having the minimum distance between all the parts of a district), preserving communities of interest (geographical areas, such as regions of a state, where the residents have common political interests) and maintaining borders of previous districts as much as possible.

In practice, more factors come into play and can take precedence over commonsense guidelines. These factors quickly muddy the process.

Districts are required to have populations that are almost exactly even based on the Census figures. This is to ensure a person’s vote for a candidate in an election in one district carries the same amount of power as someone voting in another district.

Whenever the people drawing the map make an adjustment – large or small – in one district’s boundaries, it can have a cascading effect in neighboring districts as their lines have to be redrawn to keep the district populations even.

Of course we cannot talk about muddying the process without politics entering the chat.

Many elected officials, especially those who expect tight contests in future primary or general elections, jockey to have the lines drawn in a manner which will best help their election chances. Political parties obviously want districts drawn that will give their party the best chance to gain as many seats as possible.

Finally, we also have court rulings to consider. Federal courts generally left redistricting to the states until the 1960s. By this time, several states’ haphazard redistricting processes had created drastically unbalanced populations while other states had stopped redistricting every 10 years altogether.

The U.S. Supreme Court made several rulings in the mid-1960s requiring states to draw districts with even populations to enforce a similar value for each voter’s ballot. Since this time period the courts have gotten involved in other issues involving redistricting including how much importance race should have when drawing political district lines.

Last summer the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling addressing Alabama’s congressional district boundaries which ultimately led to a map with Alabama’s 2^nd Congressional District joining the 7^th Congressional District as districts with a majority (or near majority) of their population being a racial minority.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall criticized the decision and this new map as an example of racial gerrymandering – in other words, drawing the districts with the main purpose of providing an advantage to a candidate from a racial minority group to get elected.

If you get a chance to look at the current district map, it is difficult to argue with his viewpoint as many of the guidelines listed earlier, particularly compactness, are not apparent in this new map. Some districts stretch from one side of the state to the other, and other districts have strange tentacles seemingly reaching into other districts.

What Marshall leaves out, though, is previous maps from the last few decades also looked odd and were hard to justify outside of saying the state legislatures of the past, both Republican and Democrat, tried to pack as many Black voters as possible into the 7^th District. This is a strategy called voter packing with the goal of keeping a particular voting bloc in one district so that bloc’s influence is limited to only that single district.

So what is your preference?

You can have the state legislature drawing your districts with a clear goal toward squeezing the political life out of the party not in power, or you can have federal judges drawing your districts with the laudable goal of righting historical racial wrongs but also with the possibility of their actions creating a huge political consequence due to the nearly even political split in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I am not a huge fan of either scenario. Maybe we should consider appointing an independent commission to draw the maps in the future. While this approach comes with its own flaws built in, the current way of doing things is looking more and more untenable.