Mathematically Quantifying Gerrymandering and the Non-responsiveness of the 2021 Georgia Congressional Districting Plan
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While gerrymandering has been widely suspected in Georgia for years, it has been difficult to quantify. Using historic voting data, we compare the Georgia congressional redistricting plan enacted in 2021 with a large collection of randomly generated non-partisan maps. We find that the 2021 plan will likely be highly non-responsive to changing opinions of the electorate. The enacted map is structured so that it will reliably elect nine Republicans and five Democrats over a wide range of studied voting patterns. In contrast, for the non-partisan maps in our ensemble, only 0.12 the enacted plan over the seventeen elections considered between 2016-2020. We find the major cause of the non-responsive nature of the 2021 map is that it polarizes voters across the more competitive districts. Specifically, there are five districts that would be significantly more competitive under maps with our non-partisan considerations but have been shifted to become more Republican; similarly, there are three districts that have more Democratic voters than is typical. Utilizing a combination of our ensemble statistics and spatial analysis, we find evidence that the heavily Democratic 4th, 5th and 13th Congressional Districts and the heavily Republican 9th District contain an unrepresentatively large number of Democrats. The consolidation or packing of Democratic voters in the 4th, 5th, and 13th Districts creates significant numbers of wasted votes and dilutes their voting power. Furthermore, based on comparisons with the previously enacted 2011 map and the ensemble of plans, we find that a significant number of Democratic voters have been added to the solidly Republican 9th District, replacing Republican voters who have been moved to the 6th and 10th Districts. This redrawing substantially weakens, or cracks, the potential influence of Democratic votes in these districts.
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