NYTimes Editorial -- Elections With No Meaning

Making Votes Count: Elections With No Meaning

This New York Times editorial urges judges to stop partisan gerrymandering before it destroys American democracy. That will be difficult as the GOP has been appointing judges to a large degree based on their activities for their party.

Using powerful computers, line-drawers can now determine, with nearly scientific precision, how many loyal party voters need to be stuffed into any given district to make it impregnable.

This sort of hyperpartisan line-drawing was evident in Texas last year, when Republicans pushed through a plan that, by aggressively packing and cracking Democratic voters, could unseat as many as 8 of the state's 17 Democratic members of Congress. Now a local prosecutor is investigating charges that a political action committee run by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, may have illegally used corporate contributions to help Republicans take control of the State House of Representatives — control that the party needed to have a free hand in redrawing new Congressional districts. The investigation is revealing just how much planning Mr. DeLay and the national party put into their Texas strategy, which seems to have involved every political player in the state except the voters.