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Professor Lutes

11 Oct 2021

GSPV 302

Zane Cox

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a practice of establishing district lines manipulatively in favor of a

certain political leader or political party during an electoral process. It is a political ploy and

particularly a destructive one that hinders effective democracy. One of the most unfortunate

impacts of gerrymandering is that political leaders get reelected despite their failure in

undertaking their duties. This failure has implications and citizens are the ones that suffer the

most.

Gerrymandering has been around for a long time dating back to 1815. This is a long time

for using ways to redistrict areas for one political party’s positive outcome. In elections it is

based on the vote of the people for the most part until it gets down to the presidential election.

Gerrymandering shouldn’t be allowed in elections or in any type of vote involving the people.

The reasons behind this will be discussed in this research paper and show how the effects of

gerrymandering are unfair to the peoples vote and district.

There are many forms of Gerrymandering and ways people can influence their parties

win in a deceitful but hidden way. The main form of Gerrymandering is partisan

gerrymandering. This is the act of redistricting in a favorable way for one party to get the

majority vote in that area (Bernstein and Moon, 1021). Although there are new types of

gerrymandering and ways that it is done it had to start somewhere. Well, it started in about the
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18th Century in England. In England they would create these things called “Rotten Boroughs”

where that area would only have a certain number of eligible voters so that the political leaders

would win a seat in parliament. As this moved on into the United States and kept spreading and

getting bigger and more prevalent every election. Black men eventually got the right to vote and

at that point it got even more intense for redistricting where they would intentionally make it to

where the south districts would redraw their districts to help the Democratic Party win. This term

is now considered “Racial Gerrymandering”. Including drawing lines in an unfair way so that

black voters were suppressed, poll taxes which blacks couldn’t play, and lynching tactics.

The effects of gerrymandering are more profound in states where the practice has laid

solid grounds. In such states, a party’s candidate wins following the ruling of the majority votes

but the other party even so wins majority of the seats in congress and legislature. States such as

Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are facing this unfortunate anti-democratic practice.

Gerrymandering has significantly denied citizens in the affected states their rights and ability to

choose and use the programs that would fit their living standards. In North Carolina for instance,

polling results from a two different polling firms presented that a higher number of the state’s

citizens prefer spending more funds on K-12 education. By recognizable margins, the state’s

voters prefer expanding pre-K, developing Medicaid schemes, and increasing teachers’ salaries.

However, despite the massive popular support, these policies have constantly been opposed by

the state legislature.

As several reports present, Governor Roy Cooper (D) roots for programs that supports

children and families. The North Carolina General Assembly, however, has constantly been

against Cooper’s efforts. Governor Cooper suggested increasing monetary support for the K-12

education, with an aim of raising teachers’ salaries by 9% and channeling more funds towards
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constructing and expanding schools (Herschlag et al., 34). In 2019 the state legislature passed a

budget that did not fully fund Cooper’s proposals and priorities. The budget was also unable to

expand North Carolina’s Medicaid scheme. The governor rejected the budget and hence no

budget was passed. North Carolina’s government is currently financed through an automatic

continuation policy.

In 2013 the Supreme Court took down some sections of the voting rights act of 1965

creating room for more acts of gerrymandering. This decision gave 9 states particularly in the

south, freedom to transform their election policies without critical consideration and approval

from the federal government. Texas immediately took advantage of this decision and brought

back the voter identification law and announced that the district maps in the state would no

longer undergo federal vetting. Political scholars and researchers all over predicted that the

consequences of the decisions might influence all the political laws in Texas and the entire

nation. The high court ruled electoral-redistricting to be a sole responsibility for states run by a

single party. Due to this ruling, Rafael Anchia, a Democratic state representative of Dallas

claimed that the Republican partisan gerrymandering had clearly rendered general elections in

Texas insignificant. Anchia claimed that the Republicans vying for political positions had only to

appeal to the sovereigns in the party in times of the primary election.

Partisan gerrymandering or partisan favoritism or as now commonly known as racial

gerrymandering has now laid grounds in almost all electoral processes in the United States.

Despite the federal government’s attempts to put an end to gerrymandering through employing

independent commissions to come up with district margins for voting, a significant number of

states lack control over partisan gerrymandering in the redistricting process. In such states
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political leaders sit behind computers devising ways in which they can exploit and restructure the

district lines to box out the election and increase the strength of their political parties.

It is more than a decade now since the 2010 redistricting process, and still many states

are reckoning with the resulting consequences. In May 2019, a report published by the center for

American progress presented that the partisan- based congressional districts conveyed, primarily,

“a whole 59 seats in the nation’s House of Representatives in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 electoral

processes” (Tausanovitch, 2019). That implies that 59 political leaders who would not have been

elected following the overall voter support for them and their party still won because the lines

were established in favor of them and their parties mostly by their companions in the

Democratic or Republican coalitions.

To understand this better, a shift of 59 seats is higher than the overall count of seats

allocated to the 22 states in the country considered to be the smallest by population. This number

is also higher than that of representatives for the country’s largest state, California . The state has

a total of 53 representatives for a population of more than forty million citizens.

From the 59 positions that were conveyed per every electoral process due to that particular case

of gerrymandering, 20 seats shifted in support of the Democarts while 39 positions conveyed in

support of the Republicans. This implies that from the 2012 election process to the one in 2016,

the overall two-party influence resulted to a total addition of 19 Republican positions per ever

electoral process, which is considerably higher than the total seats for mor than ten states in the

country.

The impact of the partisan gerrymandering can also be understood using the population

viewpoint. On average, a congressional district is supposed to have a total of vaguely 700,000

people. This means that a shift of 59 positions corresponds to representation of about 42 million
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citizens. Furthermore, the 19 additional Republican seats are equal to a representation of about

14 million citizens.

The overall unfortunate impact is that partisan gerrymandering is denying millions of

citizens their ability to vote fairly (Stephanopoulos, 3) . This should be put under complete

consideration. If for instance citizens from even one of the above states were to back down from

the voting process, this would cause a national crisis; with an overall impact corresponding to the

exclusion of 12 states, the most significant need to put an end to gerrymandering should be

pointed out.

The process of putting an end towards gerrymandering is not so hard to achieve. The

initial step is for each state to establish districts that precisely mirrors the political ideas of the

citizens. Such ‘voter-established districts’ are found on the stand that, despite the extent to which

voters in the state are separated by the major parties, the districts divisions should be similar.

Therefore, if the voters in a state are divided in an equal ratio of 50-50 between the Democrats

and Republicans, the representatives would also be split correspondingly.

Following the total number of districts, and where citizens stay, aligning the total

population precisely to its representation may prove to be a difficult task. However, the primary

role of the ‘voter-established districts’ is to try to make this alignment as appropriate as it can be.

The map-drawing software has provided basis for district map-drawers to perform this rather

complex tax. The initial tools used in the few past decades to gerrymander were considerably fair

and states can simply employ them to draw effective and fair district maps. in order to ensure

minimal manipulation of the redistricting process in favor of any political leaders or parties

whatsoever, map drawing should be conducted by independent commissions rather than elected

officials.
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Redistricting of U.S states should also put into consideration the fair and equal

representation of minority groups i.e. communities of color. For a long stretch of time, these

communities continue to battle with underrepresentation in Congress and state legislatures.

Furthermore, the established districts should be reasonably competitive, so that voters can be

able to change their representative in case they change their minds. That’s actually what

democracy is- political leaders elected by the citizens and are accountable to them. A number of

reports present that representation in the U.S is unfair, but with genuine policy transformations

Americans can have fair maps and districts.

Democratic policy makers ascertain that policies on gun control, education policies, and

health care policies such as Medicaid are just some of the indicators of the impact of

gerrymandering. As you can see so far Gerrymandering can be used in many ways unfair. At one

point the “redistricting revolution” started making it where the districts that would be voting

would have to be equal in population. Even though they tried to go away with it came back due

to the improvement in technology and making it easier for political leaders to redistrict in an

unfair way easier than before. This gerrymandering is still used today and in a much faster way

than before and a way more split redistricting.

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Works Cited

Bernstein, Mira and Moon, Duchin. "A formula goes to court: Partisan gerrymandering and the

efficiency gap." Notices of the AMS 64.9 (2017): 1020-1024.

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201709/rnoti-p1020.pdf

Herschlag, Gregory, et al. "Quantifying gerrymandering in north carolina." Statistics and Public

Policy 7.1 (2020): 30-38.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2020.1796400

Stephanopoulos, Nicholas, “The Causes and Consequences of Gerrymandering.” Public Law and

Legal Theory Working Papers. 2018. Pp 1-8.

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2119&context=public_

law a nd_legal_theory

Tausanovitch, Alex. “The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering.” Washington: Center for

American Progress. 2019.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/news/2019/10/01/475166/impact-

partisan-gerrymandering/