Gerrymanding is the practice of manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor a party or class. There are two principal tactics used in Gerrymanding are “cracking” and packing”. Cracking is when the voting power of a certain political party or class is diluted by spreading the party’s supporters over multiple districts. Packing is when a certain party or class is concentrated into a certain district to reduce the voting power of the political party in other districts. In most states, the state legislatures have the power to redistrict states for both the state legislative districts and the congressional districts. Therefore, the state legislature has the power to give their party an unfair advantage.
To better understand gerrymandering in action, the graphic below depicts how many different ways one can divide a district, resulting in many different outcomes. The graphic shows that out of fifty people, 40% are red and 60% are blue. Graphic #1 depicts a perfect representation of a group of people with those beliefs. Graphic #2 shows that people of the blue “political party” would be separating the red voters into different districts in such a way that there would be no district voting in favor of the red party, even though they make up 40% of the people. Graphic #2 shows a practice of cracking; The blue party separated the red voters in a way making their vote useless. Graphic number three is another graphic showing cracking, however this time, the red party is cracking the blue vote. The red party is able to divide the blue vote in such a way that even though the blue vote is a majority, they are divided to have less districts than red voters.
Why does gerrymandering matter?
Gerrymanding is used as a political tactic to silence others opinions and voices. The divides can happen along party, class, racial, ethnic, and religious lines. What this essentially means is that political leaders are able to draw their own districts in favor of their own party instead of representing the actual political leanings and preferences of the electorate. This practice undermines the one-person one-vote concept because it dilutes or overpowers the weight of certain votes based on how people are divided into districts. The biggest problem with this practice is that politicians no longer have to listen to citizens with different political viewpoints encouraging politicians to appeal and lean toward more extremist political beliefs. This practice undermines democracy and only increases the partisan divide in America.
What does this look like in practice?
In 2012, Pennsylvania had an election for the House of Representatives. The Republicans were able to take 13 of the 18 seats even though the Democrats received more votes. If this partisan gerrymandering were outlawed, then allocating Electoral College votes by congressional district in the four states would actually disadvantage the Republican candidate for President.
It is clear that districts were drawn with an intent to pack Democrats into “supermajority” districts in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the Scranton area and distribute Republicans among the remaining districts. In addition, the many smaller to medium sized cities which comprise parts of the state outside of the three cities mentioned with higher concentrations of Democrats were meticulously cracked. This was done in an effort to split any concentration of Democratic voters that could present a threat to the continued election of Republicans. The boundaries are not compact nor fair, leading to an unfair Republican victory. For example, just look at district 17, the district stretches out in various different directions becoming really thin and protruding into distinct 10 and 15. The goal of making districts in this fashion is to take big towns or cities of the other voting party and either pack or crack them so their vote has no power. The problem with this is that the Supreme Court often does not rule on cases of gerrymandering if done along political lines because the Supreme Court can not rule on political issues. Essentially, what this means is that states can continue this unfair process without being stopped.
Comments