Gerrymandering occurs when voting districts are redrawn to benefit one party over another in elections forcing the other side to “waste” votes. Achieving this normally means dividing districts up along highly irregular lines to ensure that voters from each party are concentrated in the right areas and spread thin in others. Now, with the assistance of software, state legislators are able to control gerrymandering or who ends up in a particular district with more precision than ever before.
The name comes from Elbridge Gerry, a founding father, the fifth vice president of the United States, and the governor of Massachusetts. He signed a bill that created the first curiously misshapen district in the state designed to elect Democratic-Republicans over Federalists in 1812. Gerrymander is a combination of the governor's last name and the word salamander. Here are five reasons why you should care about the problem of gerrymandering (or redistricting):
1.
Gerrymandering is required, but hacking
democracy is not-In order to make sure that every vote has
equal worth; states have to redraw all of their legislative districts after
every census. This includes Congress and state legislatures. If population
changes result in one legislator representing 1000 people and another
representing 500 people, that is unfair because the votes of citizens in the
larger district are worth half as much. Redistricting is designed to fix that
imbalance by changing boundaries to reflect updated population information.
Politicians have
taken advantage of this process by using sophisticated mapping technology to
slice and dice communities so they or their friends can have an easy path to
victory on Election Day. Instead of just making sure that districts have equal
populations, legislators are packing certain types of voters into very few
districts to make sure they can’t influence surrounding districts or dividing
communities into many different districts to keep them from having much voting
power in any one of them. A process that was designed to ensure fairness has
been subverted to manipulate the system.
2.
Gerrymandering rewards extremism-When voters of
different parties are segregated into separate districts, politicians no longer
have to listen to citizens with different political viewpoints. This encourages
elected officials to appeal to political extremes by scoring points against the
other party rather than working with them to solve the problems that are most
important to Americans. Elected officials retreat to their partisan corners,
where sound bites trump statesmanship. As a result, the last Congress was one of the most polarized
of all time.
3.
In gerrymandering, legislators can’t help
themselves-Last year Common Cause, the League of Women
Voters of Florida and several Florida voters won a lawsuit against the Florida
Legislature because the congressional districts legislators drew were a blatant
partisan gerrymander. In Florida, voters passed state constitutional amendments
in 2010 that prohibited legislators from drawing their own districts and
congressional boundaries with the intent to favor a candidate or incumbent. Unfortunately,
the legislature did exactly that. The trial shined a light on how redistricting
works in Florida even when the law prohibits partisan games and undoubtedly
exemplifies how things work in states with no such restrictions.
4.
In gerrymandering, outcomes don’t match votes-The goal of
gerrymandering is to make sure that votes for the opposing party lead to as few
seats as possible for them. The results are indisputable. During the 2012
election, following an aggressive Republican gerrymander in the state, more
than half of North Carolina voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates for
Congress. Republicans took 70 percent of seats. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won
about half of all votes cast for Congress but won only a quarter of the seats
drawn by the Republican legislature.
In Maryland,
Democrats drew one of the most gerrymandered districts in America and succeeded in
winning 88 percent of the state’s congressional districts despite winning only
62 percent of votes. Illinois Democrats drew districts so effective at wasting
Republican votes that they won two-thirds of the state’s congressional
districts with only 54 percent of the vote.
5.
In gerrymandering, politicians are choosing
voters rather than the other way around-The most basic
requirement of a true democracy is that citizens have the ability to choose
their elected leaders by voting. Instead, gerrymandering allows politicians to
choose their voters. Giving legislator’s power over drawing their own districts
and congressional maps creates a conflict of interest that turns democracy on
its head. Professional athletes don’t get to redraw the sidelines because they
step out of bounds, so neither should politicians.
“We always look at gerrymandering and what it has done to voting in
America, but what I realized the other day is that the news has somehow become
gerrymandered and is continuing to be gerrymandered in America.” (Trevor Noah) [i]
[i] Sources used:
·
“5 Things You Need to Know
About Gerrymandering — Including the Definition” By Grace
Donnelly
·
“Five Reasons Why This Case
to End Gerrymandering Is Important” by Dan Vicuña
·
“Gerrymandering” from Wikipedia
·
“Portmanteau” from Merriam-Webster
No comments:
Post a Comment