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Georgia's new voting district maps are out. As expected, they were gerrymandered by the Democrats. Nothing new there. But before we sigh a collective "oh well," shrug our shoulders, and consider it business as usual, we need to consider the matter more deeply. There actually is something new here, something unprecedented about this partisan product.

Gerrymandering is a political habit almost as old as our country, but it's never benefited from the kind of fantastic computer technology we possess today. Even the redistricting of 10 years ago is no comparison - not in an age when the average home PC is easily 200 times more powerful than its 1991 predecessor. What's new is that the Democrats were able to plug the 2000 census data into a computer, and then run programs that quickly calculated the most mathematically advantageous districts conceivable for their party.

The governor wanted to use this very map, but horse trading in his own party intervened, blunting it somewhat. Still, these extra demands were met by just plugging them into the programs, and cranking out a new, optimized result. The programs took into account existing voting habits, as well as emerging trends. They created Democrat leaning districts with populations up to 5% smaller than the average, then stuffed the remaining Republican leaning areas into equivalently overlarge districts. So much for one man, one vote.

Even more interesting is that they didn't instruct these programs to respect communities as they did their work. Indeed, looking at the maps, counties appear as if they had been thrown into a blender, and the "frappe" button pushed. For the most part, only lightly populated and politically homogeneous counties survived intact. Otherwise, communities are fractured all over, with a veritable blizzard of voting precincts being split (yes, there's a fair chance you'll have to vote someplace else). Many districts are long strings of bits and pieces, leaving legislators to wonder, almost seriously, if they'll have to turn sideways to pass from one part of their district to the next. Of course, lots of these little strings were drawn to ensure that Republican incumbents are pitted against each other.

Look at our local situation. Newton and Rockdale are split among 4 state senate, 5 state house and 4 congressional districts. Popular state senators Mike Crotts and Bob Guhl have been shoehorned into the same district, covering parts of both counties. The rest of Rockdale gets lumped in with a hunk of DeKalb in the 43rd senate, and Newton's remains get split among the insanely meandering 18th and 25th senate districts. In the state house, Barbara Bunn's 63rd is fairly cohesive, though split across both counties. The remainder of Rockdale is divided as bit pieces of the 60th and 62nd districts. Newton's core (Covington and vicinity) is made a co-equal part of Jim Stokes' 72nd district, which stretches to include Monroe as its other half. The balance of Newton gets paired with a big chunk of Morgan and pieces of 3 other counties in the 73rd, a district whose main commonalities lie in being an I-20 corridor, and having the 4 county industrial park as a potential heart. The multiple congressional districts make no sense whatsoever, considering that the two counties combined would make but a fraction of a single district.

All this slicing and dicing means that any close tie between a legislator and a community is unlikely. But this was intended: it means communities must rely far more heavily on (ruling) party politics to get anything done. They won't be able to look to individual legislators and expect them to focus exclusively on their needs.

So here's the bottom line: a marvelous new tool has been misused for partisan ends. Instead of being used to create perfectly equal districts based on existing boundaries, computers have been pressed into extending the dominance of a party that is already receiving a minority of statewide votes. And this abuse is walking hand in hand with another new thing - namely a willingness to blithely shatter yet one more facet of our fleeting sense of community, merely for callous political gain.

Copyright ã, Douglas Holt, 2001