The United States midterm Congressional elections, which include votes for state-level executive and legislative officials, will determine how the electoral map might be redrawn for the next 10 years, helping to give one party an advantage over the other. Congressional districts are redrawn roughly every ten years, when new official federal Census data (gathered every ten years) becomes available. The redrawing process is often politically controlled, according to the party leadership of each state, resulting in geographically irrational districts designed to maximize the governing party’s representation in Washington, DC.

The politically motivated distortion of Congressional district boundaries is known as gerrymandering. The name comes from an 1812 redistricting process overseen by then Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, which led to at least one district having the shape of a salamander. The process creates the irrational, convoluted geographical areas virtually anyone who has taken an interest in House campaigning has come to know as standard.

The Texas legislature became the scene of one of the most dramatic and extreme confrontations between Democratic and Republican politicians over the correct direction of the political process. Democratic state legislators actually fled to neighboring states to undermine a hostile takeover of the redistricting process by a political alliance of conservatives led by then Republican majority whip in Washington, Tom DeLay (currently on trial for alleged money laundering).

They fled to neighboring states, because without their presence, the state House could not achieve a quorum and could not vote any bill into law. Texas has a law that allows the governor to order truant legislators rounded up by state police and brought to work by force if necessary. But neighboring states like Oklahoma do not have such laws and have no “extradition treaty” with Texas on this score.

The scandal blew up in the Republicans’ face, when Tom DeLay allegedly called in a fake terrorist threat to the Department of Homeland Security, asking then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to scramble fighter jets to chase down a helicopter carrying state legislators. Progressives accused DeLay of filing a false terrorism threat complaint, a federal crime that can be treated as a terrorist act itself.

DeLay was trying to redraw the Texas Congressional district map for the 2nd time after the 2000 Census, which most Democrats and unaligned observers said was an unconstitutional act. Such struggles over the nature of the redistricting process have become common fare in state politics across the country, though most members of the House of Representatives keep their distance from the process, both to show respect for state-level politics and to avoid a conflict of interest.

In the 2010 elections, both parties are focused on who will control state legislatures and who will hold the most governorships, because one or both of those particular victories will help their party redraw districts in a manner favorable to their electoral interest. Many on both sides of the political spectrum view the tradition of gerrymandering as a threat to the integrity of democracy.

One answer might be to pass a constitutional amendment requiring that all Congressional districts adhere as closely as possible (given population — not population, conditioned by party affiliation) to the shape they would have if they were a circular or square shape built around a specific central location. The exact wording necessary to prohibit gerrymandering might be something like:

The drawing of Congressional district boundaries shall not follow any consideration other than geography and population density, and there shall be no consideration of party popularity in state-level redistricting processes.

That may be too much to ask, as both parties tend to be unwilling to relinquish their hold on a process that allows them to engineer their own electoral success many years into the future. A substantial movement to overturn the standard process of redistricting, which allows for gross distortions of the idea of a community-based local politics, would require a widespread understanding of the degree to which redistricting undermines the relevance of each individual voter’s choice. Redistricting is the hidden crucial issue that will dominate the political process at the state level leading into 2012, and could help decide the direction of the country for a generation to come.

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