Redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives is not a unified process, as is the case for most national legislatures, but rather the result of the cumulative actions in the states that have more than one representative. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the entire House to see how the decisions in the states combine to form a fair or biased playing field for the parties. …
Recently a new method for determining bias has been developed. It is called the “efficiency gap” and is being used in several partisan gerrymandering cases now before the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g. Gill v. Whitford). The efficiency gap is a measure of the percentage difference in the “wasted votes” for each party. Votes are wasted when a party has more votes in a district than are needed to win the district or where the party has votes that they receive in a district they cannot hope to win. CONT.
Theodore S. Arrington (UNC), Sabato’s Crystal Ball