Students seek to flex political muscles in the face of gerrymandered districts

As co-leader of Ram The Vote in 2012, Amani Walker remembers the challenges in getting her fellow students at Virginia Commonwealth University to cast ballots in that year’s presidential election.

As co-leader of Ram The Vote in 2012, Amani Walker remembers the challenges in getting her fellow students at Virginia Commonwealth University to cast ballots in that year’s presidential election.

Out-of-town college students must change their voter registration address or file a request for an absentee ballot. It can be confusing to find your polling location – especially at VCU, where campus dormitories are dispersed among several voting precincts.

And then there’s apathy: A lot of students may not believe their vote will make a difference.

“At the heart of Ram The Vote was the belief that youth voices matter in shaping our country,” said Walker, who graduated from VCU last year with a degree in international studies and political science.

Since 2000, there has been an increase of 5.7 million students attending American colleges and universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The student vote could have a massive influence on local, state and national elections. So why haven’t we seen the impact of student voting power?

Part of the problem lies with students – and part lies with institutions that seem to discourage them from voting, experts say.

“Rather than a student just having to worry about figuring out the issues and learning about candidates and getting registered and going and voting, there are these extra hurdles that are constantly being put in place that students have to navigate,” said Jacob Wilson, regional director for the Campus Election Engagement Project.

CEEP is a nonprofit organization that partners with universities to promote electoral engagement on campus.

“And when I say electoral engagement, I mean anything that is related to helping students to get registered to vote, educated on the issues at hand, opportunities to volunteer and kind of engage or campaign with issues, and finally to actually cast their ballot and have their voices heard,” said Wilson, who works with universities in Virginia North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania.

CEEP encourages universities to create a nonpartisan central organization involving students, faculty and staff. Such a group could sustain an ongoing campaign to register students to vote – and it could even push for an on-campus polling location to make voting especially accessible to students.

VCU doesn’t have an organization like that, said Walker, now a graduate student in international education at New York University. That is why she and several other key players started Ram The Vote. To increase the number of student voters in 2012, they:

· Held a campuswide voter registration drive

· Organized a panel discussion with state and local public officials on the importance of students’ staying informed on political issues

· Coordinated with VCU Police to provide shuttle buses to and from the polls on Election Day

The efforts paid off that year: The four polling places that include VCU dormitories saw a combined 45 percent increase in the number of votes cast in 2012 versus 2008.

In the gubernatorial election in 2013 and the U.S. Senate election last year, however, turnout fell off dramatically. One reason might have been a new requirement that voters show a photo ID at the polls. Although a VCU ID would suffice, there might have been confusion among some students.

Wilson noted that Virginia is among several states across the country that have imposed stricter ID requirements. Some states also have reduced opportunities for absentee voting.
“We know that those barriers disproportionately hurt the elderly, low income, students and also minorities,” Wilson said.

Even if students don’t face procedural obstacles to vote, they might be discouraged by the thought that their vote doesn’t really matter, said Brian Cannon, executive director of OneVirginia2021.

Cannon said the biggest issue regarding elections is gerrymandering of political districts – the practice of manipulating electoral boundaries to favor one party or class. Gerrymandering has been a long-running problem from local to state to federal elections. Many districts are drawn so that they are overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic – making the election a foregone conclusion.

Cannon said that until redistricting is done in a fair way, nobody’s vote really matters – whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

As a group, college students often suffer from the effects of gerrymandering. Campuses frequently are divided into several political districts, diluting students’ voting power.

“There are plenty of laws on the books trying to prevent fraud/suppress voter turnout – whatever you want to argue it is,” Cannon said. “And even if all of those laws were removed from the books and voting was as easy as it possibly could be, I’m still not sure it matters.”

Gerrymandered districts have made it almost impossible for students to flex their political muscles in certain districts, even with the efforts of organizations like CEEP, Cannon added.
“The only thing that would matter is if we could get voter turnout of presidential years all the time, and even that’s sad,” Cannon said. “That’s lower than it should be. But if we could get to 70 percent, that would be different, and then it would be a real conversation.”

The Constitution of Virginia has three requirements for political districts, such as seats in the House of Delegates or the state Senate: Districts must be approximately equal in population; they must be compact, not sprawled; and they must be contiguous.

Virginia also falls under the jurisdiction of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1964 because the state has a history of discriminating against African Americans. Therefore, redistricting plans developed by local and state officials must be submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

District lines are redrawn to adjust for population every 10 years following the U.S. census. The next redistricting will be 2021 – hence the name of Cannon’s organization, OneVirginia2021.
The Virginia General Assembly draws the lines for state legislative and congressional districts; local governments, such as the Richmond City Council, draw the lines for their districts.

The City Council districts have had a particular impact on college students. VCU dormitories are split among four different polling places and three different council districts. If you include the University of Richmond and Virginia Union University, Richmond’s college students are dispersed among the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th City Council districts.

Cannon said Virginia Senate districts are also split without any real congruency. He noted that Richmond has about 200,000 residents – approximately how many constituents it takes for one Senate seat. But instead, Richmond is divided among five Senate seats, and none of the senators lives in the city.

Image via Swingstateproject

Gerrymandering often protects politicians from competition, Cannon said.
Over the past 12 years, members of the House of Delegates have been up for re-election 600 times – and only 19 incumbents have lost in a general election, Cannon said. He said incumbents are more likely to retire or be bumped to the Senate than to lose a re-election bid.
In an ideal system, voters pick their representatives. But in a gerrymandered system, “it’s politicians picking their voters,” Cannon said.

The boundary lines of Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, D-Newport News, were declared unconstitutional by three federal judges last October, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling in March. The judges said Virginia legislators had packed African Americans into the 3rd District as part of a plan to keep other districts predominantly Republican.

The General Assembly has until Sept. 1 to redraw the congressional districts.