Remembering Norman Primus, who tried to tell us

Norman Primus spent the last decades of his life trying to warn us about the mess we find ourselves in now. It’s a shame he’s not better remembered.

I met Primus in the late ‘80s at a conference on the upcoming census and reapportionment, the sort of gathering where he was a regular. He was a World War II vet who’d had a successful career as a CPA, one of those people you meet now and then who don’t find their true mission until midlife. His was that messy combination of politics and maps called redistricting.

Primus considered gerrymandering, the misuse of redistricting for political purposes, to be a grave threat to democracy, with a fairly straightforward remedy. He believed the people, not the politicians, should be drawing the maps.

First in association with Common Cause and then on his own dime, Primus developed the idea of “Citizen Plans,” a grid-like system that made it possible for anyone to draw their own political maps. The best could then be chosen in a public contest, according to standards of fairness and compactness.

For a while, it seemed that ideas like his were gaining ground, with several states establishing citizen commissions to oversee redistricting. Today, even those modest efforts at reform are being severely challenged in both parties’ escalating drive to lock down as many U.S. House seats as possible. Texas and California are the biggest baskets of House seats that maps could change, but they are only the beginning of a long battle.

The U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled an October hearing in a Louisiana case that could lead to the weakening or overturning of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which specifically prohibits voting practices or procedures based on race. The case, which affects the districts of House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, involves the difficult question of distinguishing between political and racial discrimination.

A ruling loosening the framework of the Voting Rights Act could lead to even more efforts to squeeze partisan results from each state’s maps.
Primus was beginning his anti-gerrymandering crusade about the same time the first computerized TIGER maps were coming into use, transforming the process by which political maps are drawn. In the old days, map-drawing virtuosos like Congressman Phil Burton of California gerrymandered with a stack of phone books and a keen knowledge of where their votes were. With the new mapping technology, votes could be searched out and put together with scalpel-like precision.

But in addition to being inherently unfair, political maps drawn to the advantage of one side or another are inherently unstable, depending on how far they go. Maximizing the number of districts a party can win reduces the number of districts a party can win comfortably. This can put the interests of incumbents at odds with the interests of their party, or in this case, their president.

This principle was very accurately expressed by an Indiana Republican legislator interviewed by the New York Times after Vice President J.D. Vance and a delegation of White House officials recently visited the Hoosier State to convince Republicans there that they should redraw their congressional map, on which Republicans hold seven of the nine seats, so that they have the advantage in all nine.

“We have a saying: The pigs get fat, the hogs get slaughtered,” state Rep. Jim Lucas said. “We should be happy with what we have.”

Everywhere else you look, in the United Kingdom or Germany, Canada or Mexico, a consensus has been reached and some sort of nonpartisan body has been created to manage the apportionment of political districts based on population. There are complaints, but generally they are about technical, not partisan issues.

In the United States, creating a nonpartisan commission to settle just about anything seems out of the question.

Politics inescapably plays a role in redistricting, and the kind of system Primus dreamed about may never have been possible. But he was right. The people do deserve a place at the table where the lines they vote within are being drawn. They could do no worse than we’re doing now.