Sunday, November 11, 2012

Gerrymandering


Every decade, following the decennial census, the state legislatures of the United States are told how many representatives their state will send to the United States House of Representatives. Representation in the House is based on state population and there are a total of 435 representatives, so some states may gain representatives while others lose them. It is the responsibility of each state legislature to redistrict their state into the appropriate numbers of congressional districts.

-- Rosenberg
The epidemic of gerrymandering poses a growing threat to our democracy. The completion of the 2010 Census and start of the 2011 redistricting cycle makes this an especially important time for the Brennan Center's advocacy and public education efforts on redistricting and reapportionment. 
It's an open secret: more and more legislative districts reflect calculations by those in power about how they can best preserve that power, while fewer and fewer give meaningful representation to communities of voters. Incumbents carve the citizens of their state into districts for maximum personal and partisan advantage, and democracy suffers: neighborhoods are split, competing candidates are drawn out of contention, groups of voters are ‘cracked' or ‘packed' to manipulate their voting power. We like to think that voters choose their politicians-but in the redistricting process, politicians choose their voters.

Well-designed redistricting systems, in contrast, can help ensure that elected public servants actually serve their public. Moreover, they can inspire public confidence in both a process and an outcome recognized as fair.
-- Brennan Center for Justice
Gerrymandering, or redistricting, is the movement of political boundaries for the advantage of a political party. District borders are redrawn to maximize the chances of incumbents or the party's showing in future elections; sometimes it has been used to disempower particular population demographics based on race, religion, or other characteristics.
First printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was drawn in reaction to the state senate electoral districts drawn by the Massachusetts legislature to favour the Democratic-Republican Party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of a district in Essex County, Massachusetts as a dragon-like "monster.
The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced /ˈɡɛri/; 1744–1814). In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander. The term was a portmanteau of the governor's last name and the word salamander.
-- Wikipedia, Gerrymander 
Gerrymandering can be designed to carve more voters into a district that is assured of a win-- just rending their votes moot-- a process known as packing. Voters who would tend to vote for the opposition are packed into far fewer districts, meaning more districts will go to the gerrymandering party.

Gerrymandering can also carve out districts that follow demographics favorable to the gerrymandering party; this is known as cracking. Both types can lead to bizarre shapes on the map, as in both illustrations above-- or they can split districts, as with the map of Congressional District 4, below.

In 1985 the U.S. Supreme court ruled that manipulation of political borders to give advantage to one political party was unconstitutional. Earlier, in 1962, the Court ruled districts

In 1842 Congress passed the Reapportionment Act: districts must be contiguous, unlike Congressional District 4, above.

Nope, I take it back. Upon closer inspection, there's a tiny line at the left, connecting the two otherwise separate land masses. It's the median strip of an interstate highway.

Unlike in-person voter fraud, gerrymandering is a systematic way of affecting elections-- and an effective one, at that, which explains its long history. For more than 200 years, gerrymandering has been an assault on American voters by rendering their votes ineffective. The Supreme Court has declared it illegal-- wouldn't it be nice if those who do it were punished?

Sources

Redistricting. Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Read it here.

Rosenberg, Mark. Gerrymandering: How states create congressional districts based on census data. About.com. Read it here.

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