Gerrymandering in Michigan

I know I've said this before, but Pacific Standard magazine is excellent. The most recent issue contains a substantial story called Among the Gerrymandered: how redistricting in Michigan has disenfranchised voters and amplified the efforts of the right.

Like Wisconsin, Michigan's traditionally Democratic-voting areas were packed by a Republican-controlled legislature and governor after both the 2000 and 2010 censuses. They had a specific plan for the 2010 elections called (not making this up) REDMAP, where they targeted specific races in order to influence redistricting. Democrats received 53 percent of the votes in Michigan races that year, but won only 5 of 14 Congressional seats.

One way of demonstrating the result of that packing plus cracking (which is spreading your party's members out just enough to dominate more districts) in Michigan: smaller margins of victory for Republicans than Democrats, 21.6 vs. 40.6 percent. This is called an "efficiency gap," a term you may hear in media coverage of gerrymandering around the country.

The worst result of gerrymandering is that it leads elected officials to not care about the concerns of too many of their constituents. Combined with campaign finance that's heavily dependent on the 1 percent (often called the donor class), it results in something it's hard to call a democratic republic. It also contributes to polarization, because safe seats effectively get decided in the primary instead of the general election (or at the caucuses in states like Minnesota), which gives disproportionate power to the activists and highly motivated voters of each party.

In Michigan, which previously had a history (like Minnesota) of strong bipartisan work in its legislature, the 2011 session saw 323 bills signed into law, of which 307 were Republican-sponsored. The newly elected governor, Rick Snyder, had run as a moderate wonk, but among the bills he signed was a right-to-work law supported by only 40 percent of Michigan's population.

It gets worse

And all of that is terrible and worth writing about here, but I probably wouldn't have, except for the next parts of the article. We all know gerrymandering is bad in general, but the examples given kept getting worse.

Not only has it decimated Michigan's public education system (and given us privatizer billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary), it led to bankrupting and poisoning families. Yes, literally.

The 2011 legislature passed an anti-fraud bill that instituted an automated system called MiDAS (!), which allowed the state to lay off 400 workers in the unemployment department. Starting in late 2013, MiDAS scanned unemployment claims for the previous six years for discrepancies. When it found one, it assumed the employee was guilty with no human oversight and began garnishing wages and tax refunds, including fines as high as 400 percent of the original amount.

Some [people] never received the bills because they had moved. Many received no explanation of their alleged fraud, and the system kept piling on interest. People lost their homes went bankrupt, lost custody of their kids.... "I had a woman write the judge a letter saying she thinks about killing herself."

It took two years and a class-action lawsuit for legislators to respond, finally reducing the statute of limitations on old cases, requiring human oversight, and reducing penalties. As of last year, 48,000 fraud determinations were reversed entirely (85 percent of the accusations made without human oversight).

Another bill passed in those heady, gerrymandered days of 2011 strengthened the state's emergency manager law. That meant cities in financial trouble were almost completely controlled by managers appointed by the governor, rather than by the city councils or mayors elected by their citizens, including selling public assets, breaking collective bargaining agreements, and privatizing municipal services.

The law was so unpopular that a referendum rescinding it got on the ballot, and, in 2012, all but seven of Michagan's 83 counties voted to repeal it. A month after the law as revoked by popular vote, the legislature passed a new version of it. This time lawmakers attached an appropriation making it immune to reversal by referendum. In essence, they offered a middle finger to the electorate.

How's that for being responsive to the voters? Reactive is more like it.

All of this disproportionately affected black Michiganders. When the referendum passed, four cities were under emergency management, three of them majority-black. Detroit was added to the list in 2013, landing about half of the state's black population within these nondemocratic (small D) areas.  

And this leads us to the Flint water crisis and the poisoning of the citizenry, starting in 2013. To save money, the unelected city manager switched Flint's water source from the Detroit system to the Flint River without applying the anticorrosives that would be needed to make the change safe for human consumption. It took two years before it was switched back, in part because elected officials don't feel accountable to the people of Flint.

Meanwhile, Detroit was having its own problem with emergency management, which privatized many public services and quadrupled the school system's net deficit, creating opportunities for for-profit charters to sweep in.

The great irony of Detroit's bankruptcy is that the city's financial crisis was precipitated in part by the state. Since 1994, Michigan's legislature has diverted more than $5.5 billion in state sales tax away from cities and toward the state bureaucracy, according to...a non-partisan firm.... This is not normal state behavior.... from 2002 to 2012, 45 states increased revenue-sharing for municipalities by an average of 48.1 percent. Four states reduced revenue-sharing by around 10 percent or less. Michigan was the outlier, slashing state revenue-sharing by 56.9 percent. In essence, the state strangled its cities.

The good news for Michigan, from my point of view, is that voters just elected Democrat Gretchen Whitmer as governor and Jocelyn Benson as secretary of state (and she will be in charge of elections, if not the districting). Their House Congressional delegation is now 50–50 as well, but their gerrymandered legislature remains Republican-majority in both houses.

There's more work to do to get Michigan back to a bipartisan way of governing. Its voters also just approved a referendum that amends the state constitution, requiring an Independent Citizen’s Redistricting Commission and a bunch of public hearings on redistricting plans. I hope they can lead the way on restructuring government to better represent the people.