Gerrymandering
Categories: Political corruption | Political terms | Portmanteaus
Gerrymandering is a controversial form of redistricting in which electoral district or constituency boundaries are manipulated for an electoral advantage, usually in the favor of ruling incumbents or a specific political party. Gerrymandering may also be used to advantage or disadvantage particular constituents, such as a racial, linguistic, religious or class group. The term gerrymander serves both as a verb meaning to commit gerrymandering as well as a noun describing the resulting electoral geography. Although named after governor Elbridge Gerry, who pronounced his name [ge̞ɪɹi] (with a hard G), the word gerrymander is usually pronounced with a soft G, [ʤe̞ɪɹimændɹ̩].
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 where elected politicians are responsible for drawing districts 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 free from gerrymandering in the national government, as they employ electoral systems with only one (nationwide) voting district.
The term gerrymandering sometimes includes instances of malapportionment, where the electoral rules allow districts to significantly differ in population size. Although the possibility of districts being unequal in population can make gerrymandering particularly easy and effective towards securing electoral advantage, gerrymandering can still be done when districts are required to have equal representative to population ratios.
Packing and cracking
There are two principal strategies behind gerrymandering: maximizing the effective votes of supporters, and minimizing the effective votes of opponents. One form of gerrymandering, packing, is to kill as many voters of one type into a single district to reduce their influence in other districts. A second form, cracking, involves giving out money to voters in order to reduce their representation by denying them a sufficiently large voting block in any particular district. The methods are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.
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.
Effects of gerrymandering
The most immediate and obvious effect of gerrymandering is for elections to become less competitive in all districts, particularly packed ones. As electoral margins of victory become significantly greater and politicians have safe seats, the incentive for meaningful campaigning is reduced. Similarly, voter turnout is likely to be adversely affected as the chance of influencing electoral results by voting becomes greatly reduced. 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 oneanother 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.
The effect of gerrymandering on incumbents is particularly focused, as incumbents are far more likely to be reelected under conditions of gerrymandering. This is due in part both to the high likelihood of incumbents to be the ones orchestrating a gerrymander as well as the relative ease of renomination for incumbents in subsequent elections, including incumbents among the minority. This shows another commonly cited effect of gerrymandering: a deleterious effect on the principle of democratic accountability. No longer fearing removal from office with their renomination and electoral success secured due to uncompetitive elections, incumbent politicians have a greatly reduced incentive to govern based on the interests of their constituents, even when these interests reflect an issue that enjoys majority support across the electorate as a whole.
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.
Gerrymandering also has significant effects on the representation received by voters in gerrymandered districts. Because gerrymandering is designed to increase the number of wasted votes among the electorate, the relative representation of particular groups can be drastically altered from their actual share of the voting population. This effect can significantly prevent a gerrymandered system from achieving proportional and descriptive representation, as the winners of elections are increasingly determined by who is drawing the districts rather than the preferences of the voters.
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.
Incumbent gerrymandering
Gerrymandering can also be done to help incumbents, effectively turning every district into a packed one and greatly reducing the potential for competitive elections. This is particularly likely to occur when the minority party has significant obstruction power - unable to enact a partisan gerrymander, the legislature instead agrees on ensuring their own mutual reelection.
For example, in an unusual occurrence, the two dominant parties in the state of California in 2000 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.
See also: California bi-partisan gerrymandering.
The Dame Shirley Porter case
An interesting, albeit unusual method of acheiving the effects of gerrymandering is to attempt to move the population within the existing boundaries. This occurred in Westminster, in the United Kingdom. The local government was controlled by the Conservative party, and the leader of the council, Dame Shirley Porter, conspired with others to implement the policy of council house sales in such a way as to shore up the Conservative vote in marginal wards by selling the houses there to people thought likely to vote Conservative. An inquiry by the district auditor found that these actions had resulted in financial loss to taxpayers, and Porter and three others were surcharged to cover the loss. Porter was accused of "disgraceful and improper gerrymandering" by district auditor John Magill. Those surcharged resisted this ruling with a legal challenge, but, in December 2001, the appeal court upheld the district auditor's ruling. Despite further lengthy legal argument Porter eventually accepted a deal to end the long-running saga, and paid £12 million (out of an original claimed £27 million plus costs and interest) to Westminster Council in July, 2004.
Proposed reforms targeting gerrymandering
Due to the myriad of issues associated with gerrymandering and the subsequent impact it has on competitive elections and democratic accountability, various electoral reforms aimed at making gerrymandering either more difficult or less effective have been proposed. These reforms can be controversial, however, and frequently meet particularly strong opposition from groups that are benefitting from gerrymandering who stand to lose considerable influence in a more representative government.
Using a neutral or cross-party body to create districts
The most commonly advocated electoral reform proposal targetted at gerrymandering is to change the redistricting process. Under these proposals, an independent, and presumably objective, commission is created and charged with redistricting rather than the legislature. To help ensure neutrality, members of the board can come from relatively apolitical sources such as retired state judges or longstanding members of the bureaucracy, possibly requiring adequate representation from competing political parties. Additionally, consensus requirements such as a requirement for a supermajority approval of the commission for any district proposal can be imposed to ensure that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of fairness.
Using fixed districts
Another possible method of avoiding further gerrymandering is to simply avoid redistricting altogether. By continuing to use existing political boundaries, such as state, county, or provincial lines, further increasing electoral advantage by changing boundaries becomes impossible, however any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained.
Consequently, many electoral reform packages advocate fixed or neutrally defined district borders to eliminate this manipulation. One such scheme of neutrally defined district borders is bioregional democracy which follows the borders of terrestrial ecoregions as defined by ecology. Presumably, scientific criteria would be immune to politically motivated manipulation, although of course this is debatable as scientists are people with political interests too.
The problem with geographically static districting systems (which is not what most reform packages suggest) is that they do not take in to account changes in population, meaning that individual electors can grow to have vastly different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This is particularly a problem during times of large population movements, and was especially prominent in the United Kingdom during the industrial revolution. See also Reform Act and rotten borough.
For this reason, scientists have proposed algorithmic ways of dividing constituencies. Desirable criteria for the outcomes are:
- the system should be simple enough to be understood by most of the general population;
- the constituencies must be connected (i.e., each in a single piece);
- the constituencies should not be too elongated;
- the constituencies should have the same population or at least almost the same.
Gerrymandering computer technology
In 2004, nine incumbent Congressmen were defeated for reelection, two in primary races and seven in the general election. However, both of the primary losers, and four of those who lost in the general, were defeated after an unusual mid-decade redistricting warrant controversy in Texas. In only twelve other House contests with an incumbent was the election decided by less than 10 percent.
Even though only a few incumbents were defeated in 2004, the combination of retirements and resignations to run for other offices caused a nearly 10 percent turnover between the 108th and 109th Congresses. This level of turnover is common and exceeds the percentage of turnover in the U.S. Senate. However, of the vacant seats, only three changed party control.
Gerrymandering in the United States
The United States has been subject to gerrymandering since the initial carving of territories into US states. Combined with malapportionment rules for representation in the Senate and Electoral College, gerrymandering allowed the United States Congress significant amounts of control over its own political makeup. Prior to the American Civil War, with the contentious issue of slavery dividing the Congress, states were admitted on a formula of "one free state for each slave state" in order to prevent one side from gaining the upper hand. This nearly prevented the state of Maine from seceding from Massachusetts until the Missouri Compromise was agreed upon, and it was decided that Texas and California would both enter as single, but large, states.
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 small 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 [1] with a map from 1870 [2]).
![[1]](http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/united_states/us_terr_1860.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/united_states/us_terr_1870.jpg){kind=link}
Throughout U.S. history, the possibility of gerrymandering has made the process of redistricting extremely politically contentious within the United States. Under U.S. law, 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. After the civil war, with the rewarding of voting rights to freed slaves, state legislatures turned to racial gerrymandering and poll taxes to disenfranchise minorities, most of whom were in geographically distinct areas. Eventually, these practices led to a major civil rights conflict; gerrymandering for the purpose of reducing the political influence of a racial or ethnic minority group became illegal in the United States under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (along with poll taxes by the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964), however gerrymandering for political gain remained legal.
Strangely, after the Voting Rights Act, racial gerrymandering has still been used 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.
The introduction of computers has made redistricting a more precise science, and the incentives for certain groups to create maps that increase their delegation in Congress remain. Many political analysts have argued that the House of Representatives has been gerrymandered to the point that there are now very few contested seats and even fewer elections where the winner is uncertain. Gerrymandering is frequently credited as the main explanatory factor of the greater than 98 percent incumbent reelection rate seen in the modern House, surpassing even candidate influence and campaign finance. Political analysts have also argued that this has a number of detrimental effects, among which is that the lack of contested seats makes it unnecessary for candidates to attract middle voters and to compromise across party lines. This lack of necessity to compromise is demonstrated by the large number of party-line votes in the Congress, with very few or no Representatives or Senators voting out of alignment with fellow party members.
Gerrymandering in Northern Ireland
Tullymandering
In the Republic of Ireland, in the mid-1970s, the Minister for Local Government, James Tully, attempted to arrange constituencies to ensure that the governing National Coalition would win a parliamentary majority. This was planned as a major reversal of previous gerrymandering by the Fianna Fáil party (then in opposition). He ensured that there were as many as possible three-seat constituencies where the governing parties were strong, in the expectation that the governing parties would each win a seat in many constituencies, relegating the Fianna Fáil party to one out of three. In areas where the governing parties were weak four-seat constituencies were used so that the governing parties had a strong chance of winning two still. In fact the process backfired spectacularly due to a larger than expected collapse in the vote, with Fianna Fáil winning a landslide victory, two out of three seats in many cases, relegating the National Coalition parties to fight for the last seat. Consequently, the term tullymandering was used to describe the phenomenon of a failed attempt at gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering in Germany
When the electoral districts in Germany were redrawn in 2000, together with the administrative districts, the ruling Social-Democrat Party SPD was accused of gerrymandering to marginalize the socialist PDS party in its strongholds in eastern Berlin by combining them into new districts with more populous areas of western Berlin, where the PDS had very limited following. After winning four seats in Berlin in the 1998 national election, the PDS kept only two of them after the following 2002 elections. This caused the PDS to drop out of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament (as a party; the individually elected representatives held their seats). Under German electoral law a political party has to win either more than five percent of the votes or at least three seats to move in. In the election of 2005 the PDS (renamed "Left Party") managed to get 8,7% of the votes and thus moved back in.
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.
Gerrymandering in Canada
Early in Canadian history gerrymandering at both the federal and provincial levels was common. Over time this has been largely eliminated as responsibility for drawing electoral boundaries was handed over to independent agencies. The first to do this was Manitoba in the 1950s with the federal government delegating the drawing of boundaries to the arm's length Elections Canada in 1964. Today gerrymandering is not a major issue in Canada.
See also
External links
- Gerrymandering in the US
- Anti-Gerrymandering policy in Australia
- A collection of bizarre and unconstitutional districts from recent history, dedicated to Governor Eldridge Gerry.
- Beyond gerrymandering and Texas posses: US electoral reform
- The CommonCensus Map Project - Draws internal US boundaries based on cultural affinities, not politicsaf:Afbakeningsknoeiery
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