Gerrymandering has been around since 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry utilized the tactic to draw up skewed Senate districts that opponents complained resembled a “salamander's forked tongue.” Since then, it’s been a favorite parlor trick in politics, especially among the GOP. "Redistricting Journal: Showdown in Texas—reasons and implications for the House, and Hispanic vote", "Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science", "How Computers Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science", "The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Racial makeup can be used as a means to create gerrymanders. Support Independent Journalism, get exclusive posts, and become a founding member of Rantt, Inc. $10 — Join The Team! Many early attempts failed to gain traction the court system, focusing more on trying to show how restricting maps were intended to favor one party or disfavor the other, or that the redistricting eschewed traditional redistricting approaches. The Top 10 Most Gerrymandered States In America. Although it is common for European states to have more than two parties, a sufficiently high election threshold can limit the number of parties elected.

Here are the surrounding districts that’ll be affected by redrawing those contested lines. We love and appreciate you!

In areas where some African-American and other minorities succeeded in registering, some states created districts that were gerrymandered to reduce the voting impact of minorities.

[7] The word gerrymander was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide during the remainder of 1812. And many won with enormous margins that captured 60–70% of the vote in seemingly lopsided campaign races. It’s a clear sign that democracy isn’t working in large sections of the country. And which state has the worst congressional gerrymandering overall?

Here's how the election played out in both", "Ending Gerrymandering Won't Fix What Ails America", "Drawing the line on the most gerrymandered district in America", "Name that district! Colorado (2002), Michigan (1966), Tennessee (2016) and Virginia (2013) have passed laws restricting counties and municipalities from (or allowing counties and municipalities to avoid) prison-based redistricting, and Massachusetts passed a 2014 resolution requesting the Census Bureau to end the practice of counting prisoners in their incarceration districts. The Voting Rights Act was amended by Congress in the 1980s, Congress to "make states redraw maps if they have a discriminatory effect. [36], The Pennsylvania Supreme court ruled that gerrymandering was unconstitutional, ruling that the districts drawn to favor Republicans violated "free and equal" Elections Clause of the Pennsylvanian constitution in League of Women Voters v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania[37] and redrew the districts after the state government failed to comply with the deadline in its order to redraw. A lack of compactness is a one standard for evaluating fairness since it usually indicates areas where the interests of a particular demographic are diluted by dividing those constituents up, or by condensing them into fewer districts so a party wins less seats overall. | Stronger NC. The following districts have large urban populations that have been cut out of other districts and attached to sprawling rural areas. [75], Bipartisan gerrymandering (favoring incumbents), Gerrymandering and the 2018 midterm elections, cite book=Campaigns and Elections|last= Sides|first=John|title= Campaigns and Elections|page 36|, Last edited on 29 September 2020, at 15:48, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, North Carolina's 12th congressional district, Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, Texas's controversial 2003 partisan gerrymander, North Carolina's 4th congressional district, United States congressional apportionment, Here are the most obscenely gerrymandered congressional districts in America, "How racial gerrymandering deprives black people of political power". [23]:783, The Supreme Court revisited the concept of partisan gerrymandering claims in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004). A strategy of continuing to cram growing urban populations into existing district boundaries has resulted in much of the lopsided representation. Some states have established non-partisan redistricting commissions with redistricting authority. When one party controls the state's legislative bodies and governor's office, it is in a strong position to gerrymander district boundaries to advantage its side and to disadvantage its political opponents. Ultimately, the goal in gerrymandering is to maximize the influence of supporters’ votes while minimizing the influence of opponents’ votes. Murtha won the election in the newly formed district.

Indeed, critics contend gerrymandering essentially allows elected officials to pick their constituents, rather than the other way around. That decision leaves it to states and to Congress to develop remedies to challenge and to prevent partisan gerrymandering. As such, a state not included among those at the top of the list might nonetheless possess districts that have been intentionally drawn to favor one political party over the other. Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party; the term "gerrymandering" was coined by a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry that was named because one of the districts looked like a salamander. Calling citizens of all parties or no party who want fair maps that allow the people to pick their representatives, rather than the other way around (as in Wisconsin and other Learn how your comment data is processed. Little Rock, home of Bill Clinton, is the seat of Southern democrats, yet the state retains a lockstep Republican majority in Congress. Although the study was not published, it was discovered after his death in 2018. We’ve listed each state along with an analysis of the districts and reps who may be in danger when battle lines are redrawn. The potential to gerrymander a district map has been aided by advances in computing power and capabilities. In the state of Ohio, a conversation between Republican officials was recorded that demonstrated that redistricting was being done to aid their political candidates. [19] Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. have refused to cooperate with an investigation into why the Trump administration added a U.S. citizenship question to the 2020 census and specifically whether it seeks to benefit Republicans as suggested by Hofeller's study.[20].

Enten points to studies which find that factors other than gerrymandering account for over 75% of the increase in polarization in the past forty years, presumably due largely to changes among voters themselves.

Brian Kurilla is a psychological scientist with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. In the United States, redistricting takes place in each state about every ten years, after the decennial census. [1] Since 2010, detailed maps and high-speed computing have facilitated gerrymandering by political parties in the redistricting process, in order to gain control of state legislation and congressional representation, and to potentially maintain that control over several decades even against shifting political changes in a state's population. Currently, 8 out of the 10 of the most gerrymandered districts in the United States favor Republicans. Gerrymandering has been sought as unconstitutional in many instances, but it has made many elections more representative. In Bush v. Vera (1996),[54]:983 the Supreme Court in a plurality opinion assumed that compliance with Section 2 or Section 5 of the Act constituted compelling interests, and lower courts have treated these two interests as the only compelling interests that may justify the creation of racially gerrymandered districts.[23]:877. [35] The District Court did subsequently rule the redistricting was unconstitutional, and that decision was appealed again to the Supreme Court, who have agreed to hear the case in the 2018 term as Lamone v. In fact, up until 2016, North Carolina was home to 3 of the top ten worst cases of congressional gerrymandering in the country. It ensured that a common community of interest will be represented, rather than having portions of the coastal areas be split up into districts extending into the interior, with domination by inland concerns. Kapanke did admit, though the state is rigged … for at least one Democrat. The practice of gerrymandering the borders of new states continued past the Civil War and into the late 19th century. In jurisdictions where incarcerated people cannot vote, moving boundaries around a prison can create a district out of what would otherwise be a population of voters which is too small. The following reps would be endangered by allowing districts in heavily populated urban areas to be drawn more fairly. [45], Bipartisan gerrymandering, where redistricting favors the incumbents in both the Democratic and Republican parties, became especially relevant in the 2000 redistricting process, which created some of the most non-competitive redistricting plans in American history. [28], The first major legal test of the efficiency gap came into play for Gill v. Whitford (2016).

America’s electoral system has been rigged. The Arizona State Legislature challenged the constitutionality of a non-partisan commission, rather than the legislature, for redistricting. Also, in keeping with the methodology employed by Ingraham in his 2014 Washington Post piece, I re-scaled the values obtained from my calculations just a bit to ease interpretation. The larger the gap of wasted votes between the two parties implied the more likely that the district maps supported a partisan gerrymandering, and with a sufficiently large gap it would be possible to sustain that gap indefinitely.

Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight argues that decreasing competition is partly due to gerrymandering, but even more so due to the population of the United States self-segregating by political ideology, which is seen in by-county voter registrations. Moving the Harris's from a Democratic, Milwaukee district into a larger Republican area was part of a strategy known as 'packing and cracking.' It revealed that partisan gerrymandering can often lead to adverse health complications for minority populations that live closer to United States superfund sites and additionally found that during redistricting periods, minority populations are "effectively gerrymandered out" of districts that tend to have fewer people of color in them and are farther away from toxic waste sites. In United States v. Hays (1996),[52] the Supreme Court held that only those persons who reside in a challenged district may bring a racial gerrymandering claim.