Why Geographic Electoral Districts Undermine Democratic Equality

Since the 1956 Voting Rights Act, legal battles are regularly fought in U.S. courts over the creation of race-conscious electoral districts. The geographic boundaries of these electoral districts are drawn so that a racial or ethnic minority is sufficiently numerous to elect its own representatives. Race-conscious electoral districts play a crucial role in the political empowerment of racial and ethnic minorities. They are meant to combat the ‘dilution of voting power’ of those groups’ members. But in what sense do geographic electoral district maps ‘dilute voting power’ and is it possible to create geographic district maps that can ensure equal voting power for voters across all social groups? This paper shows why geographically-defined electoral districts inherently undermine democratic equality, understood as equal voting power (cf. Wodak forthcoming, ‘One Person, One Vote’). To evaluate geographic electoral district systems, we often compare either single-member district systems with proportional representation systems or a particular geographic district map to randomly generated ones. The first comparison focusses on the district magnitude, while the second addresses gerrymandering. However, these comparisons do not assess the impact of the geographic definition of electoral districts on democratic equality. To fill this gap, I compare geographic electoral districts to random electoral districts, which are created by randomly assigning voters to districts. This allows me to side-step discussions on the majoritarian nature of most electoral district systems. Majoritarian systems can translate votes into seats in an egalitarian way without satisfying vote-seat proportionality (a minority’s share of legislative seats often does not match its share of the vote) but, instead, by satisfying a weaker requirement: vote-seat symmetry (groups with the same vote share must obtain the same share of legislative seats). However, I show that majoritarian systems with geographically-defined electoral districts fail to satisfy this requirement. As geographic electoral district boundaries must adhere to established boundaries, such as of administrative units and natural boundaries, and some groups are geographically concentrated or dispersed, it is impossible to create geographic district maps that equally efficiently distribute all equal-sized groups. Some groups will waste more votes than others and, consequently, equal-sized groups will not always have the same share of legislatives seats. The only way to ensure vote-seat symmetry is by randomly assigning voters to districts. Vote-seat asymmetry between groups across electoral districts results in unequal voting power. I show that voters from less efficiently distributed groups have less a posteriori voting power, which entails less decisiveness or chances of success given empirical evidence about vote distributions (cf. Abizadeh 2021). Unequal a posteriori voting power among voters of same-sized groups undermines democratic equality, as it means that the burdens of a majoritarian system are unequally allocated and some voters have less power than they could reasonably expect in a majoritarian system given their group affiliations (cf. Beitz 2018). The upshot is that race-conscious electoral districts provide a merely palliative measure. To ensure democratic equality for voters across all social groups in majoritarian systems, we must replace geographic by random electoral districts.