Stephanopoulos and Greenwood gave an excellent talk covering their efforts to expose gerrymandering inequities, bringing statistical and symmetry metrics and the "efficiency gap", mathematical measures of districting fairness, into play.
Gerrymandering uses a combination of two techniques: cracking, where you disperse the other side's voters so that they don't have a majority in enough districts, or packing, where you pack them into one district. Stephanopoulos came up with a mathematical measure for this.
For the Wisconsin case of Whitford vs. Gill, Bill Whitford read Stephanopoulos' academic paper on mathematical fairness measures and called him to talk about the districting problem in Wisconsin.
People on the stand in court cases all over the country were outright lying about the reasons for their district boundaries. In 2016, courts started expressing interest in symmetry metrics. The trick for a court case was to prove that the metric showed that the district boundaries were bad enough to be unconstitutional. But standing is a problem: you have tp prove that the plaintiff(s) in a court case have suffered individual harm. That should be straightforward, since the metric can show that they don't have representation, but a lot of cases were thrown out because the plaintiffs didn't realize ahead of time that the courts would make the prove standing, and so didn't come prepared with the proof they needed. It just adds more hoops they have to jump through. The speakers were optimistic that the Supreme Court focusing on standing rather than throwing cases out on the merits of the case means that they're open to considering better prepared cases.
The Wisconsin case involves the state House map; another important ongoing case, in North Carolina, involves the congressional map. North Carolina is easier because there are "smoking gun" quotes proving that the district lines were drawn deliberately to disenfranchise voters of one party. "The maps we pass will determine who's here ten years from now." In another case, officials were caught trying to destroy hard drives containing documentation of their gerrymandering intent. The FBI got hold of the drives after they were deleted and was able to image them and restore at least some of the evidence. (I missed which state this was: Florida?) In Wisconsin, they just had a lot of different districting plans. Stephanopoulos was able to show that if you look at the plans chronologically, each one increases the partisan gap from the one that came before. It's very clear looking at the series that the gerrymandering was deliberate.
(They showed a series of graphs supposedly illustrating this, but the axes were mostly unlabeled, so and it was hard to tell what they were actually showing. Too bad!)
Other examples of "smoking guns": in LWVNM vs. Rucho, there's an official state document that says the intent of the districting is to keep the same Republican/Democrat ratio: to "maintain the current partisan makeup". And in Florida, they had some sort of a contest and invited the public to submit districting plans. The plan they used was supposedly submitted by a college student. Except that when someone contacted the student later, they had no idea what anyone was talking about, had never submitted a districting plan, and had no idea their name was being used in this way. That makes it easy to prove that the legislature was lying.
Other cases have been filed and are coming up in the next year or two, such as Michigan, Ohio, Utah, Missouri. In PA, the state court said that partisan gerrymandering is illegal, and the US Supreme Court said it was a state court matter. That's good because most states elect their Supreme Court justices.
Many other countries have solved gerrymandering, by switching to a commission system where the members aren't party officials.
The first step is a fair census.
Also good would be forums where people talk about their communities. That's important if the goal is to draw districts that keep communities together.
During the Q&A session, someone mentioned that Maryland also has a smoking-gun gerrymandering case going, and the speakers acknowledged that there were many states with interesting cases that they hadn't mentioned; Texas has a particularly complicated case going on, where the legislature adopted a temporary map.
...Akkana Peck