My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

We have a long way to go to take our country back.

Democratic institutions must reflect the will of the people in order to function as they were meant to. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency, despite losing the popular vote is a vivid example of the majority being thwarted, but redistricting is also a large part of this story.

After the election in 2008, in which Democrats gave Republicans a drubbing, Chris Jankowski figured out that winning a handful of state legislative seats across a number of key states in 2010 would put redistricting from the 2010 census in the hands of Republicans.

Two winds would already be blowing in his favor: It would be a midterm election for the president’s party, which usually results in gains for the opposite party, and fewer Democrats vote in midterm elections.

He hatched a plan and pitched it to Republican donors. He called it the Redistricting Majority Project — or REDMAP — and with $30 million in backing he set about seeding money into state House and Senate campaigns.

The strategy was successful beyond his wildest dreams — Republicans won majorities in a bonanza of states, including key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa.

Aided by mapping technology that had become exponentially more sophisticated than what was available 10 years prior, Republicans had control over the new district lines in the majority of the 42 states in which redistricting is handled by legislatures. The widening partisan divide also made it possible to more accurately predict which party voters favor, down to the block level.

Lines are supposed to make sense — have a more or less regular shape like a circle or square — and apportion equal populations to each district within a state. When district shapes look obviously skewed, it’s called “gerrymandering.” The name comes from Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, who drew a district that looked like a salamander in 1812.

The motivation behind gerrymandering is to pack as many of the opposite party’s voters into as few districts as possible and make other districts more competitive (or even safe) for the party in power. Redistricting impacts at least 10 years of elections.

The craft is alive and well 200 years later, and many of the districts drawn after the 2010 census look like Rorschach inkblot tests and have descriptions like, “Donald Duck kicking Goofy,” “a broken-winged pterodactyl lying prostrate,” and “Is that a seahorse?”

These new lines proved astonishingly successful (and small “d” anti-democratic) in 2012. In Pennsylvania, which Obama won with 52 percent of the vote, Democratic candidates for the U.S. House also carried 51 percent of the vote. Yet Democrats only won five of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats. The five Democrats won by an average of 76 percent, while the 13 Republicans won their races by an average of only 54 percent. It was textbook gerrymandering.

In North Carolina, which Obama also carried, House Democratic candidates won a slim majority of the votes — 50.6 percent — but only won four of 13 seats. Across the country, Democratic candidates for House seats collectively won over a million votes more than their Republican opponents, yet the Republicans won 234 seats to Democrats’ 201, maintaining a solid majority in the U.S. House.

When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed recently that FBI Director James Comey’s letters about Clinton’s emails prevented Democrats from winning a majority in the House this year, she was barking up the wrong tree. Because of the redistricting hole they’re currently in, Democrats would have needed a landslide election to retake the majority of House seats.

Besides securing Republican majorities, gerrymandering makes all parties lean to the extremes, which results in more gridlock. Republicans, especially, have faced primary challenges from the right in safe Republican districts. As a result, they’ve been less willing to compromise and have moved right themselves. Congress has so many right-wing members that they were able to help Ted Cruz carry out an unpopular government shutdown in 2013, and last year they dislodged relatively moderate John Boehner as Speaker of the House.

Thus, gerrymandering is not just bad for the opposing party. It also subverts the will of the people and hijacks the reasonable function of government.

States with independent commissions or court actions tend to have the most compact (least gerrymandered) districts. Minnesota, whose lines are drawn by the Legislature and usually end up in court, ranks high for compactness, as measured by the Polsby-Popper ratio.

Because of how powerful mapping technology has become and how easily redistricting can be manipulated — by either Democrats or Republicans in charge — it’s vital to democracy that all states adopt nonpartisan commissions to handle redistricting every 10 years in the future. Minimum standards for compactness should be defined by law.

This is one key piece of voters “taking our country back” and having true representation.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.