Wikidworld (#154) / How The Office Manager At My Company Destroyed American Democracy
Today’s gerrymandered districts pustulate and blister into misbegotten projections that spike and grope and gyrate according to mutant design logics explicitly programmed to destroy democracy.
This is a story about a genial, unassuming man I met 25 years ago when I worked a start-up technology company outside Seattle called Partes Corporation. “Tom” worked as the office manager at our company. He was about 55 years old. His presence was difficult to account for — he did not fit any standard dotcom-era employee profile — but I learned in our first conversation that he was “temporarily out of pocket” (i.e., unemployed). Tom was a neighbor of our company founder and so, it seemed, a charity hire.
I liked Tom. He was chatty and affable, and because his office managerial responsibilities appeared to be minimal-to-nonexistent (as did mine), we had lots of time to chat. It turned out he had gotten a PhD in political science from Claremont Graduate School in southern California. Since I’d received my own worthless PhD in political science from Berkeley, we were able to talk some political science inside baseball without fear of boring ourselves to death (or, at the very least, we’d bore ourselves to death together).
Little did I know that 25 years later I’d be longing for such boredom, which I now remember elegiacally when compared to the terror-inflected political excitement this low-key guy, this Tom — like Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — was to unleash upon the teetering democracy formerly known as the United States of America.
Gerrymandering is a practice in representative democracies where, typically, state legislatures manipulate electoral district boundaries to create an undue advantage for a particular party, racial or ethnic group, or socioeconomic class within a constituency. The term "gerrymandering" is a portmanteau of the name "Gerry" and the animal "salamander", named after Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
Gerrymandering generally involves the deployment of "packing" and "cracking" strategies. The purpose of packing is to concentrate as many voters of one type – e.g., urban blacks or rural whites – into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. Packing inflates the "wasted" votes for the disfavored party, termed an "efficiency gap.” By contrast, cracking spreads out voters of a particular type among many districts to reduce their ability to influence an election.
Because gerrymandering results in less-responsive political systems, it weakens the incentive structures that representative democracy require. Politicians in gerrymandered districts know their seats are “safe,” that they are guaranteed to win elections by a comfortable margin, reducing any incentive to respond to voters' needs, and essentially eliminating accountability. We directly witness the consequences of gerrymandered districts in the election of congressional Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Mary Miller who evince zero interest in actually legislating.
Gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor specific political interests, has been a part of U.S. politics for more than two centuries. However, gerrymandering has intensified in recent decades, primarily through the efforts of Republican Party strategists to exploit changes in voting rights laws and court cases and advances in data analysis and mapping technologies.
Political parties can now precisely manipulate district boundaries to secure a partisan advantage. For example, the Republican State Leadership Committee's REDMAP initiative, launched in the late 2000s, exploited these technologies to gain control of vulnerable statehouses, lock in partisan advantage for Republicans, reduce electoral competition, and shrink the responsiveness of elected officials to the needs of voters. In some states, such as Illinois, Democrats also have deformed district maps with a zeal equal to that of Republican majorities elsewhere.
In our modern era, one might therefore more properly compare gerrymandered districts, not to salamanders, but to squamous cell cancers that conform to no known organically intact species, real or mythic. Like squamous cell carcinomas, today’s gerrymandered districts pustulate and blister into misbegotten projections that spike and grope and gyrate according to mutant design logics explicitly programmed to destroy democracy.
What happened after 2000? In a word, “Tom” happened.
My office manager friend, Tom, turned out to be a guy named Tom Hofeller, a Republican Party strategist and consultant who languished during the Clinton years, but who – apparently under my tutelage at Partes Corporation – reinvented himself in the 21st century as gerrymandering’s evil genius. According to the New York Times, Hofeller's "mastery of redistricting strategy helped propel the Republican Party from underdog to the dominant force in state legislatures and the United States House of Representatives."
A quantitative political scientist, conversant with the esoteric mathematical methods and computer programs behavioral political scientists employ, Hofeller secretly and single-handedly devised strategies to pack and crack the geography of elections, almost exclusively using race as the divisor.
Apparently, Tom had been at this for quite a while prior to his office manager stint at Partes. In the early 1970s, Hofeller developed a computerized mapping system for the California State Assembly. In the 1980s, he was behind a strategy to increase Republican power in the South by using the 1965 Voting Rights Act to create more majority-black districts. The effect was to pack African-Americans into fewer districts and make it easier for Republican candidates to win the remaining white districts. Memorably, Hofeller liked to say that "Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters."
Secrecy was always Tom’s watchword. He reportedly warned all who would listen that “emails are the tools of the devil” (and who can doubt him on that point). Hofeller left almost no paper trail and remained anonymous until more than a year following his death in 2018, when his estranged daughter made public papers and correspondence that disclosed the vast scope of his influence in reshaping the landscape of American elections and democracy.
In 2019, the New Yorker published an article entitled “The Secret Files of the Master of Modern Republican Gerrymandering.” The story detailed Hofeller’s work in North Carolina, focusing specifically on the congressional district line that vivisected the nation’s largest historically black college, North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, dividing this majority minority campus—and the city—"so precisely that it all but guarantees it will be represented in Congress by two Republicans for years to come.”
To achieve this outcome, Hofeller created giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students. He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students.
A federal court subsequently ruled that the congressional lines that he helped draw in 2016 were a partisan gerrymander, and hence unconstitutional and illegal. That decision was vacated in 2019, in a 5–4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Tellingly, in Rucho v. Common Cause the Court split across party and ideological lines. The Republican-appointed majority deferred to the political process to sort out the influence of gerrymandering, while the Democratic-appointed justices voiced deep concerns about democracy’s need for constitutional safeguards against its effects.
After his death, Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, made available computer hard drives that had been in her father's possession. Files on the hard drives showed that he also played a key role in the decision of the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, a decision that was challenged in the federal courts in the case Department of Commerce v. New York. Hofeller had conducted a study in 2015 which found that adding such a question would make it possible to draw district boundaries that "would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
Tom Hofeller’s Wikipedia biography tells us merely that he had been married to Kathleen Hofeller, that he had a daughter, Stephanie, and that he died in 2018 in his Raleigh, North Carolina home at the age of 75. Appropriately, given Tom’s penchant for secrecy, the biography does not mention his work as the office manager at Partes Corporation. It’s weird for me now think about Tom, because he really was just this genial guy – kind of like the serial killer next door who's out mowing his lawn and waving to the neighbors. His path of destruction is immense.