Gerrymandering: Distribution of Political Power

Gerrymandering is a practice of drawing voting districts in a way that creates unfair advantages to whoever happens to be drawing the lines. Gerrymandering is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an angel in the house representatives. In Pennsylvania, 44% of voters chose Democratic candidates in 2014 but 13 of the 18 districts were represented by Republicans. In Ohio, about 40% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives but 12 out of 16 seats 3/4 of them are represented by Republicans. Whoever draws the district has a lot of power and thanks to technological advances it’s possible to use that power and very precise ways. And the age of computers you can gerrymander with scientific precision you can run him out of alleys and up and down the street so carefully to include or exclude whichever voters you want in the district or not. 

Politicians would engage in gerrymandering to disadvantage voters based on race or political party or to shore up seats for incumbents and sometimes even within a party. There is nothing inherently wrong with re-drawing if your industry is actually necessary they need to have around the same number of people in them in population shift over time. That is why every 10 years we have a census after which Lyons are we drawn for both the US House and state legislatures. The problem is in most states the lines are drawn by politicians in fact in 37 states The drawing of state legislative districts are controlled by the legislator themselves. If your party holds the redistricting pen they have substantial power and there are multiple techniques as disposal. There are a couple of ways that you can reapportion people and put them in the district and there’s a technique called packing and another called cracking. Packing is cramming as many opposition voters as possible into just a few districts. Cracking is spreading them family over a bunch of districts so they can’t gain a majority in any way. 

Either way, it dilutes their impact. Now one might wonder if all of this could be illegal, that answer is complicated. If you gerrymandering to disadvantage minorities, then yes that is illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you were gerrymandering to disadvantage voters of an opposing party that has generally been allowed so racial gerrymandering is no, but Pardison gerrymandering that’s legal. In 2016, North Carolina their congressional map was thrown out in federal court because of racial gerrymandering. So they had to redraw the map. This all had the map to be drawn so that it will disadvantage the democratic of voters. After this map, which was clearly impious was approved The spy Republicans only won 53% of the vote in house races, they wound up controlling 77% of the state seats. While it is tempting to see something suspicious and odd-shaped district there are pretty good arguments against prioritizing more tidy lines above all else. Drawing a bunch of squares, like a grid, seems like a good idea and that there wouldn’t be any sort of manipulation in the process but most Americans don’t live and squares, our communities are irregular and random. 

There is no one right way to draw a district, regional people will disagree some may prioritize districts being politically competitive, the other is my favorite compactness, and others might want to keep communities of interest together The problem is it may be physically impossible to all three of those in one place. For example, if you were to look at the earmuff district in Illinois, in between the two halves is just a single road that connects them. This district is drawn like your muffs for a good reason is though because the northern and southern parts or two Latino communities in the district in the middle are predominantly African-American. Now both are democratic so it’s not about Pardison's advantage it’s about ensuring that both communities have representatives serving their interests. Not all weird shape districts are bad and not all normal shape districts are good.

The large non-partisan issue here is that in a democracy the question of who gets to drive all the lines on the map should not have as much significance as it currently does. Many believe we should simply take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and give the task to indication commissions, which is a pretty good idea. In fact, a handful of states already do that. This method is not perfect, it is tough to completely remove partisan bias, which is why some politicians are against this idea. While independent commissions might not be perfect they would definitely be better and it is honestly quite hard to have a worse system than what we have now. Lawmakers should not be allowed to that blue our votes by drawing their own lines and picking their own voters. The foundation of Democracy is built on the idea that everyone’s vote counts equally. Election results should not be the fault of lawmakers' outlandish lines, they should be the result of every American's individual vote.