Yeah, so the difficulty here is that technically speaking, gerrymandering
is already illegal.
The problem that we face is that it's difficult and
expensive to challenge uh the districting in court.
We have seen a few times in cases where this
has worked in the United States.
For example, in Wisconsin, they recently overturned uh a district
there for being unlawful.
However, whether or not a court case is successful in
rejecting a district depends on the metrics legally bound to
the districts and their thresholds.
For example, in Texas, on the redistrict website, you can
find that race and population are two metrics that are
recorded for each district.
Right?
In Texas, basically there's a rule that says each district
must roughly have the same amount of population as other
districts.
So, for example, for state house uh districts in Texas,
the population has to be around 200,000, and for a
Senate districts it has to be around 900,000.
Uh however, uh whether whether or not a district setup
can be considered legal or unlawful is based upon how
far away the proposed district's population is off from those
numbers.
And sometimes, unfortunately, the thresholds for how far off the
population can be can be can be quite lenient and
thus gives a lot of power to those who want
to draw a lines in the sand.
Now, in order to fix the problem of gerrymandering in
Texas, uh, we need to tighten these thresholds, right?
As well as I think uh we need to look
at and tighten other thresholds as well.
For example, we see a lot of uh black and
brown communities being divided up into uh two and sometimes
maybe even three different districts.
Uh that needs to be tightened.
In addition, I think there's another metric that we should
be looking at as well.
And I'm gonna bring up uh this metric called uh
looking at the standard deviation of land ownership.
Now that might sound a little bit confusing, but let
me let me try to paint a picture like this.
Draw a bar graph on how many acres of land
everyone owns in that district, and then add another bar
there for how many people uh have apartments or simply
live in a residential uh family home.
Now, if you do that, you'll find that in district
64, for example, there are a lot of people from
UNT, there's a little bit of suburb, and a lot
of farmers.
Now, the farmers, they're very rural.
Now, right, they they own a lot of land mass.
But again, we're batching in all of UNT, all those
students there, and a little bit of the suburbs, for
uh particularly uh northwest Denton County, and then uh HD
64 reaches far out to its western uh neighbor county.
So what you can tell from a human standpoint what
they're doing there is they're trying to mix the farmers
with UNT to try to you know uh weaken the
vote uh from those college kids out there and the
suburban people as well.
But if we were to establish a rule where we
had to look at the metrics of saying, hey, look,
if you have a wide standard deviation of land ownership
like that, then that would take care of this problem.
Because if we said if we establish a rules saying,
hey, look, the standard deviation cannot be that high, then
essentially that would force all the those kids in UNT
to be districted into the same district to the same
areas as those immediate suburbs and would not be able
to reach out to the more rural areas, and vice
versa, because in the end of the day, these districts
are supposed to be uh really drawn around uh cultural
uh cultural similarities, right?
So you would expect those in rural areas to be
part of their own district, you would expect those in
city areas to be their own district, you would not
see districts reaching back and forth between ultra-rural and ultra-suburban,
andor even like college kids near city life.
You you wouldn't see that if the lines were drawn
fairly, and I think the only way to establish a
rule or a law to make sure that that is
actually upheld is absolutely to look at the standard deviation
of land ownership and how many acres each uh each
individual owns versus those who live in a residential
home versus an apartment.