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Worse yet, said Heagarty, those with the safest districts are the ones who have the most seniority because they've been around the longest, so they end up running everything.
"That's like when they talk about how you would get this crazy liberal in charge of the armed forces if the House went over to the Democrats because of seniority -- because that's a guy who can keep getting elected time and time again because nobody can challenge him, and the district is carved out in such a way that even if you had another Democrat that wanted to challenge him, he's been an incumbent so long that you just can't lodge him out of there," said Heagarty. The state legislature works much the same way these days, he says.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but chief among them, political observers agree, is technology.
UNCC political science professor Ted Arrington has been drawing political districts for local government for decades. Just 15 years ago, Arrington, like other political cartographers across the country, drew districts using maps, crayons, voter registration numbers, a calculator and his best guess as to how people might vote. But in the early 1990s, GIS technology quickly began to change that. Computer programs began to emerge that for the first time allowed politicians to use geographic and census data to predict with stunning accuracy how voters in tiny areas no bigger than a block would vote. Reams of old voting pattern data for tiny areas could be loaded into these programs and produce instantaneous results. With this technology, the elected could manipulate voters as never before.
Davis remembers a conversation he had with state House Co-Speaker Jim Black about the technology, which state government legislative staffs now use to draw North Carolina's districts.
"He was describing it to me one day with the excitement of a child at Christmas," said Davis. "He was talking about how the mouse is one of these balls that you roll around with the palm of your hand and wherever you draw that district, you could do it blindfolded, and you could see an immediate printout of everything about the voters within those perimeters including how they would likely vote in Democrats versus Republican races," said Davis. "It is very sophisticated, but simplified to the point where everybody can purchase the equipment and the software and get involved in this game."
That level of sophistication is creating districts that are safer for incumbents.
"Before, when people had to sit down and do this by hand, they'd usually keep counties together and there might only be a handful of counties that were split," said Heagarty. "But now not only can you split counties, you can split townships, you can split precincts. It's amazing the level of detail they can get down to in carving out friendly districts."
The irony of this of course is that it takes partisan cooperation to draw slanted districts.
The way politicians of both parties see it, if they drew 10 districts in which voters are split 50-50 between the parties, they'd risk their party winning all ten, or winning closer to zero. But if they work together to draw five districts that favor one party and five that favor the other, they can create an incumbent protection system for almost everyone.
That works if neither side gets greedy. Problem is, someone often does. Then everyone winds up in court because each side is trying to capture a sixth safe district, and inevitably, the other side sues. In the last decade across the country and in North Carolina in particular, the final word on who will represent voters is increasingly being decided in court, where both sides hope judges friendly to their parties will be the ones who rule on redistricting cases and ultimately wind up redrawing the districts.
It's how the Republicans in North Carolina finally succeeded in drawing themselves into the political game in the state legislature, which had been controlled by Democrats. In recent years, NC's Republican legislators have sued 10 times over districts they felt favored Democrats. The result was the first set of districts drawn by sympathetic judges that favored Republican control of the state house and brought the control of the state Senate almost dead even.
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