Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the deliberate setting of political boundaries to provide unfair electoral advantage. The resulting political district is said to be a “gerrymander,” or to be “gerrymandered.” The term originated in the United States in the early 1800s, and is formed partially from the surname of the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, Gerry presided over a session of the state legislature that was charged with re-drawing the state’s congressional districts. In one specific instance, the borders of the resulting district were so convoluted that a political cartoonist for the Boston Weekly Messenger, a local newspaper, represented the region as an animal. According to legend, he described it as a salamander, but his boss remarked that it was more appropriately called a “gerrymander.” 

he newspaper used the term in an editorial, and it soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States. The United States employs a system of proportional representation for seats in the House of Representatives, and individual states are given the authority to redistrict after every census is conducted. The party in control of the legislature therefore has the ability to shape districts in a way that gives candidates from its side an advantage. Gerrymandering is a technique that can create “secure” seats for a party for the subsequent decade, thus greatly affecting the political landscape at the national level, especially if the state in question has a large population and therefore many seats in the House of Representatives. In many cases, gerrymandered districts have been legally challenged, and a 1985 Supreme Court ruling held that such districts were unconstitutional and unfair. 

Yet, with every census and subsequent redistricting, districts that are clearly gerrymandered are created in some states. There are numerous ways a political region may be gerrymandered. A common technique to dilute the voting power of a specific political, ethnic, or racial group is to divide them among various districts, thereby making them a minority in all. This is called the wasted vote strategy, because it renders the votes of this specific bloc effectively meaningless, as they are too dispersed to collectively elect a candidate. A second means of limiting the voting power of a specific group is to concentrate most of the members into a single district. 

This political geography enables the group to elect a candidate they favor, but also limits their representation to a single district, allowing candidates of the opposition party to win seats in the remaining districts, where competition has been minimized by the gerrymander. This is called the excess vote strategy. Finally, stacking is a strategy that relies on the creation of unusual, distorted boundaries that are drawn in an effort to concentrate voters based on party affiliation, race, or economic interests. Such districts may not even be contiguous, but rather may be broken into segments. There are many examples of such gerrymanders, but some of the more notorious resulting from re-districting after the census of 2000 are Illinois Congressional District 4, California Congressional District 38, and North Carolina Congressional District 12.