In Matthew Mimnaugh’s (ex-Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chief Counsel, among other such positions) Wall Street Journal op-ed, he decried the Republican Party’s lack of success, apparently due to lack of effort, in gerrymandering Red States compared to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s success at gerrymandering Blue States to gain Federal House of Representatives seats. After all, he noted,

In 2000, the House GOP earned its thin majority of 221 while outpolling Dick Gephardt’s Democrats nationwide by less than 0.05 percentage point. In 2024, despite a nearly 4-point popular-vote advantage, Speaker Mike Johnson has a majority of only 220.

Mimnaugh’s solution is for Republicans to become better gerrymanderers. Gerrymandering, he noted, is a tradition almost as old as our republic. It’s also, it seems to this average American denizen of flyover country, unconstitutional, for all its long-standing nature. Here’s Art I, Sect 2, of our Constitution on the matter of Congressional representation:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about divvying up that sectioning in order to favor this or that party—or this or that race, come to that. It’s certainly the case that standing on ceremony and insisting on a maximum constituency of 30,000 per Representative, which with a national population of 340 million would result in a House of some 11,333 Representatives, would be politically and practically…impractical.

The gerrymandering bit, however, is easily corrected, and the correction better done than by competing gerrymander schemes every 10 years. The obvious solution is to divide each State by the number of Representatives to which it is apportioned every 10 years, thereby arriving at the number of Congressional districts into which the State would be divided. This is the current procedure. However, instead of drawing district boundaries explicitly to favor this or that party and this or that race, divide each State into substantially equally populated districts, and starting at the State’s geographic center, draw the districts as squares with the first four districts having one corner each anchored on that center. Then work in concentric “circles” around those four until the requisite numbers of districts are drawn.

For States with three Representatives, divide them into three substantially equally populated triangles anchored on that center with straight lines marking their mutual boundaries. For States with two representatives, divide each into two substantially equally populated districts with a straight line marking their mutual boundary. The reductionist case of one Representative is obvious.

In all cases, the only deviation from straight line district boundaries allowed would be at a State’s boundary with a neighboring State or neighboring nation, or in Hawaii’s case, the ocean shore line.

We are, after all, all Americans, all equal under law, and all voters, each with an equally valid and valued vote, without regard to party or race. Americans under law and as voters are as well party-blind and color-blind.

Recall, in the late runup to the Presidential election last month, the Des Moines Register published a poll by the once-respected pollster Ann Selzer that had Progressive-Democrat Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three percentage points, which represented a significant swing from a month prior poll that had Trump leading by a significant margin. Selzer’s early November poll was a definite outlier; all of the other polls of the time had Trump leading by a little.

Now President-elect Donald Trump (R) is thinking about suing the Register and Selzer for election interference in publishing that poll. This time, I side with the news outlet. The Register only published the poll. If there was election interference being attempted, it would have been by Selzer through her poll. Selzer is the only one who should be the target of any sort of election interference beef here.

Santa Ana, CA, has a referendum, Measure DD, that would allow noncitizens to vote for a variety of city offices, including mayor. One argument in favor of that is

noncitizen residents (including longtime green-card holders) pay local taxes and send their children to local schools, they should get a voice in city government. “About 1/4 of Santa Ana residents currently don’t have a say in city elections just because of their immigration status,” proponents argue. “Many have lived here for decades and contribute greatly to the local economy.”

Yeah, and? Nothing is preventing those green-card holders and other city residents present legally from changing their immigration status and working to become citizens. If they don’t care enough to do the work, they don’t need to become citizens, but they also show themselves not to care enough to vote. The work they do on the job and the taxes they pay are nice, but those are benefits and obligations of being here legally, and nothing more.

Another problem with this sort of move—not universally common, but present in the vast majority of such initiatives—is that such franchise-granting efforts make no distinction between immigrants and illegal aliens. Those who came here illegally have already shown their disdain for American law, regardless of their claimed motive for coming in illegally, and so are unfit to vote for representatives who will be impacting American law, including local ordinances. That they might work and contribute to the local economy is wholly irrelevant to their intrinsic lawlessness.

Then, too, as the WSJ asks,

[W]hat’s the limiting principle? If noncitizens paying taxes to Santa Ana deserve to vote for mayor, why don’t noncitizens paying taxes to California deserve to vote for Governor?

And on up to include our Federal government.

I’m writing this on Election Day, so I have no idea whether Measure DD will pass. Pass or not, though, my point remains: noncitizens shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If immigrants want to vote, they need to become citizens. Illegal aliens shouldn’t have the vote under any circumstances; they should be sent back. And: the lack of a limiting principle in such franchise-granting efforts remains and dangerously so.