gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is slowly eroding our representative democracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently sent a case regarding a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin and a Democrat gerrymander in Maryland back to a lower court in Gill v. Whitford, a controversial ruling some called a delay in providing voters the power they deserve in choosing their leaders. Defined as the manipulation of the geographic boundaries defining electoral districts so as to favor a specific candidate or party, gerrymandering is practiced by both Democrats and Republicans to impinge on elections. This could be to bolster or undermine the voting power of a certain demographic or shield an incumbent politician from being ousted from office, but by every measure, it is an unconstitutional and unscrupulous tactic employed to artificially achieve certain electoral results. Every time a district is redrawn for political gain, elected officials begin to reflect the populace they represent with less and less accuracy. In most cases, a state's legislature maps out electoral districts, as mandated by the Supreme Court, which requires that the populations across districts are balanced through redistricting every 10 years. The process is overseen by the majority party, making it all the more susceptible to interference, but in other cases, partisan or non-partisan commissions are tasked with redistricting.

There are two primary methods through which gerrymandering is executed. Say that Candidate A and Candidate B both ran for a specific office. Candidate A represented the majority party, and had it not been redistricted, every one of the 100 constituents in a certain district would have voted for Candidate B. However, to ensure its success in elections, Candidate A's party split up the district into tenths, and attached each 10-person chunk to another district over which it holds sway. Because Candidate B's supporters were redistributed to districts where they form the minority, their voting power was diluted and Candidate A won the election. This is known as "cracking." Now imagine that had two districts not been gerrymandered, in both, 49 constituents would have supported Candidate A and 51 constituents would have supported Candidate B. To prevent this from happening, her party lumped together all of the opposing party's supporters into one district and all of its supporters into another, so that instead of losing in both districts, it would win one and lose the other. This is an example of "packing," and both cracking and packing are widely utilized to alter the course of elections.

The effects of gerrymandering manifested themselves clearly in this year's midterm elections. Earlier this year, federal courts declared congressional districts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to be partisan gerrymanders. However, only Pennsylvania was re-mapped, flipping from a Republican stronghold to an evenly split delegation. In North Carolina, even though the popular vote was almost 50-50, the GOP's silent gerrymandering ultimately decided the election. When the count of district-by-district wins is a gross misrepresentation of the popular vote, you know there's been some partisan meddling in the election.

Negative racial gerrymandering is also commonly practiced to disenfranchise minority groups. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government made it illegal to intentionally draw districts that dilute the voting power of demographic minorities, but it still remains prevalent, just carried out in more subtle and harder-to-call-out ways. The establishment of majority-minority districts, districts in which the majority of constituents belong to a racial or ethnic minority, was a court-ordered solution to the lack of minority representation in politics. However, this has been easily capitalized upon, and some legislatures have redistricted for political gain in the name of creating majority-minority districts.

So what can be done to halt this affront to democracy in all its forms? Creating politically neutral commissions to draw districts is a solution that has met with success. Researchers have come up with something called the "efficiency gap," which allows us to quantitatively measure how gerrymandered a state is - if we were to legislatively enforce a maximum efficiency gap to take in to account while redistricting, this could also prove effective. While it remains a long shot, another proposal to mitigate gerrymandering that has been brought up is the complete modification of our voting system to proportional representation or ranked-choice voting, which Maine has already implemented. Anti-gerrymandering initiatives were on the ballot in numerous states this year. Needless to say, we need to take legitimate action to prevent gerrymandering, the biggest constitutional obstruction still practiced today, from progressively chipping away at our democracy.