Texas Gerrymandering

Originally Tuesday, October 18, 2005

One of the reasons that Tom DeLay has been targeted by a rabid democrat DA in Travis County is that DeLay was proactive Texas redistricting so that more republican US House members could be elected. This effort so angered Texas democrat congressmen that they left the state instead of being in session. They left the state to avoid being apprehended by the Texas Rangers.

This certainly sounds like a brave and righteous act until you consider some of the facts. Until recently, the Texas state congress has been controlled by the democrats. Having that control, they established the US congressional districts in favor of their own party. They claimed the republicans wanted to gerrymander the districts so as to give them more representatives. That is all true. But has anyone asked the question why? Did any news network question that the state of Texas was gerrmandered in favor of the democrats? No.

First of all, an unbiased judge would have to admit that if any party gets say 55% of the vote for congressmen, they should get approximately 55% of the representatives all things being equal. Texas has 32 seats in the house, so if democrat candidates recieve 55% of the vote, they should expect approximately 18 seats (32 X .55) in the US house and visa versa for any other party.

If you go to the Texas voting records of 2002, you will find that approximately 55% of all votes for Texas US house seats went to republican candidates. However, based on democrat gerrymandering of Texas state districts, the republicans only got 15 seats (47%). There is an 8% discrepency between the percentage that voted for republicans and what the party actually recieved in representatives to the US Senate, an advantage of 3 representatives, a 20% descrepency.

So, based on voting records and the democrat gerrymandered districts, one can see that the republicans had valid complaints about how the state had previously been gerrymandered.