Gerrymandering is a controversial form of redistricting in which electoral district or constituency boundaries are manipulated for an electoral advantage. The word "gerrymander" is named for the American politician Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814) Gerry pronounced his name (with a hard G), and is a portmanteau of his name and the word "salamander," which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district Gerry created in order to disadvantage his electoral opponents. "Gerrymander" is used both as a verb meaning "to commit gerrymandering" as well as a noun describing the resulting electoral geography. Ideally, it is pronounced with a hard G, as with Elbridge Gerry's actual name, but ignorance of this has made the "jerry" pronunciation common.
Gerrymandering may be used to advantage or disadvantage particular constituents, such as members of a racial, linguistic, religious or class group, often in the favor of ruling incumbents or a specific political party. Although all electoral systems which use multiple districts as a basis for determining representation are susceptible to gerrymandering to various degrees, governments using single winner voting systems are the most vulnerable. Most notably, gerrymandering is particularly effective in nonproportional systems that tend towards fewer parties, such as first past the post.
Among western democracies, only Israel and the Netherlands are not susceptible to gerrymandering in the national government, as they employ electoral systems with only one (nationwide) voting district. Other countries, such as the UK and Canada, attempt to prevent gerrymandering by having the constituency boundaries set by non-partisan organisations such as the UK's Boundary Commission. Gerrymandering is most common in countries such as the United States of America where elected politicians are responsible for drawing districts.
Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect - by packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters now holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.
An additional effect of this reduction in competition is the increased importance of securing nomination rather than ultimate approval of the general electorate for a given district, as a general win once nominated becomes more or less guaranteed in a gerrymandered district. In 2004, for example, when California's 3rd Congressional District became an open seat after Republican Congressman Doug Ose ran for higher office, the state's three strongest Republican congressional candidates campaigned vigorously against one another for nomination in the district's primary election, even though several other districts remained uncontested with no Republican nominee making even a token campaign effort.
Gerrymandering can also have a more practical effect on the campaign costs for district elections. As districts become increasingly concave and oddly elongated, the difficulty of finding transportation and focusing campaign advertising across a district increases significantly, resulting in higher costs to run for office. When incumbents have an advantage at securing campaign funds (as is commonly the case), this further amplifies the advantage to incumbents that gerrymandering provides.
Sometimes, however, gerrymandering is advocated as a solution for improving representation amongst otherwise underrepresented groups by packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, and may lead to those groups remaining marginalized in the government as they become confined to a single district and representatives outside that district no longer need to represent them to win election. As an example, much of the redistricting conducted in the United States in the early 1990s involved the intentional creation of additional "majority-minority" districts where racial minorities such as African Americans were packed into the majority. Curiously, this "maximization policy" was supported by elements of both the Republican Party (who had little support among the minority groups) and minority representatives elected as Democrats from these constituencies, who then had "safe seats".
In an unusual occurrence in 2000, for example, the two dominant parties in the state of California cooperatively redrew both state and federal legislative districts to preserve the status quo, ensuring the electoral safety of the politicians from possibly unpredictable voting by the electorate. This move proved completely effective, as no State or Federal legislative office changed party in the 2004 election, with 53 congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats potentially at risk.
In the United States, however, these reforms remain controversial and frequently meet particularly strong opposition from groups that are benefitting from gerrymandering who stand to lose considerable influence in such a system.
In Iowa, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau (akin to the federal Congressional Research Service) draws the districts. Aside from the federally mandated contiguity and population equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities. Political factors such as location of incumbents, previous boundary locations, and party makeup are specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are mostly regularly-shaped polygons, the process has led to districts that follow county lines and thus appear more elegant. *
In the state of Ohio, Issue 4, a ballot proposition, was placed for the voters that created an independent commission whose first priority was competitive districts, a sort of "reverse gerrymander". A complex mathematical formula was used to determine the competitiveness of a district. The measure failed largely due to concerns that it would break up communities of interest. *
In contrast to proportional methods, if a nonproportional voting system with multiple winners (such as a form of bloc voting) is used, then increasing the size of the elected body while keeping the number of districts constant will not reduce the amount of wasted votes, leaving the potential for gerrymandering the same. Merging districts together under such a system, however, can reduce the potential for gerrymandering, but doing so also amplifies the effect of bloc voting's tendency to produce landslide victories, which has a similar effect in concentrating wasted votes among the opposition and denying them representation.
If a system of single-winner elections is used, then increasing the size of the elected body will implicitly increase the number of districts to be created. This change can actually make gerrymandering easier when raising the number of single-winner elections, as opposition groups can be more efficiently packed into smaller districts without accidentally including supporters, further increasing the number of wasted votes amongst the opposition.
The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however, in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in population and individual voters can therefore grow to have vastly different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This malapportionment, in turn, can have a particularly focused effect on representation after long periods of time or large population movements. The United States Senate, for instance, provides nearly 66 times the representation to voters in the state of Wyoming (the smallest) than voters in the state of California (the largest). In the United Kingdom during the Industrial revolution, several districts which had been fixed since the formation of the British Parliament became so small that they could be won with only a handful of voters (rotten boroughs).
One idea is to constitutionally define a specific minimum (Isoperimetric Quotient), or minimum ratio between the perimeter and area of any given congressional voting district. Computer technology could ensure that population districts were drawn in such a way so as to minimize (Isoperimetric Inequality) and effectively eliminate Gerrymandering. Although technologies presently exist to define districts in this manner, there are no rules in place mandating their use, and no national movement to implement such a policy.
The practice of gerrymandering the borders of new states continued past the Civil War and into the late 19th century, where the territories of the Rocky Mountains were split up into relatively low-population states to help the Republican Party maintain control of the Presidency - each new state brought in three electoral votes regardless of its population size (Compare a map of the United States in 1860 with a map from 1870 [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/united_states/us_terr_1870.jpg).
Throughout U.S. history, the possibility of gerrymandering has made the process of redistricting extremely politically contentious within the United States. Under the U.S. constitution, districts for members of the House of Representatives are redrawn every ten years following each census; it is common practice for state legislative boundaries to be redrawn at the same time. Intense political battles over contentious redistricting typically take place within state legislatures responsible for creating the electoral maps, however federal courts are often also involved. Sometimes this process creates strange bedfellows interested in securing reelection; in some states, Republicans have cut deals with opposing black Democratic state legislators to create majority black districts. By packing black Democratic voters into a single district, these districts essentially ensure the election of a black Congressman or reelection of a black state legislator, however due to the packed concentration of Democratic voters the surrounding districts are more safely Republican.
Ironically, this kind of gerrymandering along racial lines has been used to both increase and decrease minority representation in state governments and congressional delegations.
International election observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, who were invited to observe and report on the 2004 U.S. national elections, expressed criticism of the U.S. congressional redistricting process and made a recommendation that the procedures be reviewed to ensure genuine competitiveness of Congressional election contests*.
After the Voting Rights Act, racial gerrymandering was ironically "flipped around" to create "majority-minority" districts. Using this practice, also called "affirmative gerrymandering", these districts were created with the stated purpose of redressing previous discrimination to ensure higher ethnic minority representation in government. Since the 1990s, however, gerrymandering based solely on race has been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court under the Fourteenth Amendment first by Shaw v. Reno (1993) and subsequently by Miller v. Johnson (1995). The constitutionality of racial considerations in creating districts remains ambiguous, however; in Hunt v. Cromartie (1999), the Supreme Court approved a racially focused congressional gerrymandering on the grounds that the drawing was not pure racial gerrymandering but instead partisan gerrymandering, which is constitutionally permissible.
Some states have taken or at least considered steps to revoke and separate redistricting authority from politicians and give it to other more neutral commissions, in order to prevent the repeated abuse of process. Two major examples are the standing Washington State Redistricting Commission and Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission Rhode Island Reapportionment Commission [http://www.riredistricting.org" target="_blank" >* is ad-hoc, but was used in both of the past two reapportionments. The city of San Diego also uses such a system accoring to its municipal charter.
A particularly famous case of gerrymandering occurred in Northern Ireland, where the Ulster Unionist Party government created electoral boundaries for the Londonderry County Borough Council which ensured the election of a Unionist council in a city where Nationalists were in the overwhelming majority. The perceived and alleged discrimination of housing (which was later proven to be entirely inaccurate"in fact, in all but one income category, the proportion of Catholics in subsidized housing is slightly higher than that of Protestants. The difference, while consistent, averages only four per cent." (Rose 1971 p294)"The greatest bias appears to favour Catholics in that small part of the population living in local authorities controlled by Catholic councillors." (Rose 1971 p293)), combined with the electoral voting system carried over from the old Westminster system when the Northern Ireland government was set up of giving business and property owners more than one vote led to the creation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In Londonderry in 1967, 35% of the vote returned 60% Unionist seats and 27.4% of the vote returned 40% Nationalist seats. While the balance is obviously uneven, the real losers at the election were the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the various Independent candidates.
In 1929 the Parliament of Northern Ireland passed a Bill returning the local electoral system from the relatively proportional Single Transferable Vote (where seat numbers approximately equate to vote percentage) first introduced in Sligo in 1918 and throughout Ireland in 1919 to the less proportional First Past the Post or block voting systems (where the seat percentage does not always equate even closely to the percentages.) The only exception was for the election of four Stormont MPs to represent Queen's University of Belfast). The British Government was so opposed to the change, which it viewed as the abolition of the electoral safeguards provided in the Government of Ireland Act 1920, that it advised the King's representative in Northern Ireland, the Governor of Northern Ireland to withhold the Royal Assent from the legislation. After a major row the British government backed down and advised the Governor to sign the Bill into law.
Allegations have been made that the boundaries were gerrymandered to under represent Nationalists, though some geographers and historians (for instance Professor John H. Whyte [http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/hnihoc.htm) have strongly challenged allegations of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland-wide parliamentary elections, arguing that the electoral boundaries for the Parliament of Northern Ireland were not gerrymandered to a greater level than that produced by any single-winner election system and that the number of Nationalist MPs barely changed with the system. The change to single-member seats is generally acknowledged however as being a key factor in stifling the growth of smaller groups such as the Northern Ireland Labour Party and independent Unionists.
The Parliament of Northern Ireland and its government were suspended in 1972, and STV was restored for elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the following year. Currently in Northern Ireland, only elections to the Westminister parliament do not use STV, following the pattern in the rest of the United Kingdom by using First Past the Post.
When the electoral boundaries were updated to address the issue of gerrymandering, the result was better overall for Unionist candidates. However, when William Whitelaw announced his choice of successful candidates to serve on the power-sharing executive, nearly half the members appointed were Nationalist candidates, despite the fact that Nationalists only received 22.1% of first preference votes. This was seen by many as being a gerrymander.
However, the number of Bundestag seats of parties which traditionally get over 5% of the votes can't be affected very much by gerrymandering, because seats are awarded to these parties on a proportional basis. Only when a party wins so many districts in any one of the 16 federal states that those seats alone count for more than its proportional share of the vote in that same state does the districting have some influence on larger parties - those extra seats, called "Überhangmandate", remain.
There is some debate and minor controversy about gerrymandering at the provincial level in Quebec on the Island of Montreal where some Liberal Party members argue that the ridings (electoral districts) have been drawn to elect as few Liberals as possible, especially in the western part of the island.
In 2006, a controversy arose on Prince Edward Island over the provincial government's decision to throw out an electoral map drawn by an independent commission, and instead design two new maps; the third, which was adopted, was designed by the caucus of the governing party. Opposition parties and the media have attacked Premier Binns for what they see as gerrymandering. Among other things, the third map ensures that every current Conservative Member of the Legislative Assembly has a seat to run in, whereas in the original map several had been redistricted into the same ridings.
As the Elections Department is under the office of the Prime Minister of Singapore, it is able to draw polling districts and polling sites with pinpoint precision by alleged electorate engineering, which is speculated to be the secret of the ruling party's success. Hence the opposition parties allege battle for the next election is won or lost over the next few years with the seeming of redrawing and absorbing based on polling districts.
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