Ground War

Courts, Commissions, and the Fight Over Partisan Gerrymanders

By: Nicholas Goedert

Narrated by: Kyle Tait

Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

In Ground War, Nicholas Goedert tackles the controversies, litigation, and effects surrounding partisan gerrymandering of Congress. He contends that the appropriate actors to address the fairness of a map are nonpartisan commissions within each state, not the US courts. Goedert illustrates how existing measures and legal standards are too narrow—while they are well-adapted to evaluating maps in swing states in close elections, they fail to properly address states or national electoral environments that favor one party. In turn, Goedert demonstrates that the bias and responsiveness of partisan maps is highly sensitive to both the make-up of a state's electorate and the ephemeral election conditions under which individual elections take place. But this does not mean that partisan gerrymandering must be excused as a dilemma without a reasonable remedy. Using multiple empirical approaches and a novel metric to measure the partisan fairness of maps, Ground War shows that nonpartisan commissions, adopted state-by-state, represent the best alternative to legislative districting.

A rigorous account that explains how our system works and provides practical solutions for improving it, Ground War is an essential work for all scholars of US elections.

©2022 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Kalorama

Interesting and Informative, However no PDF

Super interesting my only complaint is there is no PDF available. Graphis are often referred to but since there is no PDF with visuals it becomes more difficult to follow.