Month: December 2016
Cumulative Voting for School Board Ordered By Federal Court in Missouri
Missouri – Late last month a federal district court ended a two year challenge to the Ferguson-Florissant School District’s use of at-large elections for its seven member school board. The court ruled in August, that at-large elections for board members did violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The court’s order requires the school district to… Read More ›
NPR and Scotusblog Recap Oral Arguments in Racial Gerrymandering Case
Wash. DC – NPR’s Nina Totenberg recaps Supreme Court oral arguments in , Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections and McCrory v. Harris; the racial gerrymandering claims arising from the Virginia state legislative and the North Carolina congressional map, which were heard on Monday. Click below for audio. Read Scotusblog’s analysis here.
Duke University Team Dabbles with Its Own Algorithm for Measuring Partisan Gerrymandering
North Carolina – It isn’t Efficiency Gap Analysis, but a team of mathematicians at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy have applied its own model (Markov Chain Monte Carlo method) to measuring the extent of partisan gerrymanders. The algorithm produces maps with districts that have proven to be comparably more competitive than the actual… Read More ›
NPR Talks with Law Profs About Racial Gerrymandering in the Supreme Court
Wash. DC – NPR’s Nina Totenberg discusses the North Carolina racial gerrymandering claim to be heard today before the U.S. Supreme Court. Totenberg chats with Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily and Richard Hasen of University of California Irvine about the two congressional districts in dispute and how the court has dealt with similar claims in… Read More ›
Packing Minorities Into Districts. When Is That Ever Okay?
Washington DC – The Supreme Court will tackle that question today as it hears oral arguments in two redistricting cases. Both cases are alleged racial gerrymander claims; one orginating from Virginia’s state legislative map and the other from North Carolina’s congressional district map.
