Professor Emeritus Wins Third in National Writing Competition

UNC Charlotte Professor Emeritus Ted Arrington has won third place in Common Cause’s second annual Gerrymander Standard Writing Competition.

Arrington’s paper presented criteria for determining when districting arrangements so distort the process of translating votes into seats in a legislature that the process or the redistricting plan rises to a constitutional violation.

Arrington retired in 2010 as professor of political science at UNC Charlotte. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Arizona. He served in the U.S. Army Military Police during the Vietnam War.

While at UNC Charlotte, Arrington took on leadership roles including faculty president, and for 18 years he was the chair of the Political Science Department. He has been an expert witness in over 40 voting rights cases in the United States and Canada, and he has been retained in voting rights litigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Voting Section. His testimony has been cited in several precedent setting cases such as Gingles v. Edmisten and United States v. Ike Brown et al.

Common Cause sponsored the second annual competition to generate measurements for partisan gerrymandering that could be used in court. In a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court case, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion stated that partisan gerrymanders could be challenged in court but that a judicially manageable standard for measuring them would have to be developed before a court could overturn such maps. This year’s contest applied measures of partisan gerrymandering to legislative maps citizens are challenging in specific legal cases out of Maryland and Wisconsin.

First place in the contest went to Wendy Tam Cho and Yan Y. Liu of the University of Illinois. Sam Wang of Princeton University received second place honors. The judging panel comprised Duke Law Professor Guy-Uriel Charles, UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Office of Congressional Ethics Board of Directors member Allison Hayward, Brennan Center for Justice Senior Counsel Michael Li, and Pepperdine University Law School Professor Derek Muller.

Winners will receive cash prizes and their papers will be published in Election Law Journal. The competition was conducted with the support of Emmet Bondurant, an Atlanta attorney and member of Common Cause’s national governing board.

Common Cause is a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. Its mandate is to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.

Words: Lynn Roberson | Image of Arrington: Wade Bruton; Vote image: Pixabay