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| Difference from malapportionment | |
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Gerrymandering should not be confused with malapportionment, whereby the number of eligible voters per elected representative can vary widely without relation to how the boundaries are drawn. Nevertheless the ~mander suffix has been applied to particular malapportionments, such as the "Playmander" in South Australia and the "Bjelkemander" in Queensland. Sometimes political representatives use both gerrymandering and malapportionment to try to maintain power.
[edit] Tags:Apportionment,Malapportionment,Playmander,South Australia,Bjelkemander, | |
| Etymology | |
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First printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was drawn in reaction to the state senate electoral districts drawn by the Massachusetts legislature to favour the Democratic-Republican Party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists. The caricature satirises the bizarre shape of a district in Essex County, Massachusetts as a vulture. Federalist newspapers editors and others at the time likened the district shape to a salamander, and the word gerrymander was a blend of that word and Governor Gerry's last name.
The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced /ˈɡɛri/; 1744–1814). In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander. The exact author of the term gerrymander may never be definitively established. It is widely believed by historians that Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale, Benjamin and John Russell were the instigators, but the historical record gives no definitive evidence as to who created or uttered the word for the first time.[1] The term was a portmanteau of the governor's last name and the word salamander.
Appearing with the term, and helping to spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head satirising the map of the odd-shaped district. This cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early 19th century painter, designer, and engraver who was living in Boston at the time.[2]
Tisdale also had the engraving skills to cut the woodblocks that printed the original cartoon.[3] These woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress.[4] The word gerrymander was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide during the remainder of 1812.[5] This suggests some organised activity of the Federalists to disparage Governor Gerry in particular and the growing Democratic-Republican party in general. Gerrymandering soon began to be used to describe not only the original Massachusetts example but also other cases of district-shape manipulation for partisan gain in other states. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, institutionalisation of the word became complete with its first appearance in a dictionary (1848) and first appearance in an encyclopedia (1868).[6]
Although the letter g of the eponymous Gerry is pronounced /ɡ/ as in go, the word gerrymander is most commonly pronounced /ˈdʒɛrimændər/, with a /dʒ/ as in gentle.
[edit] Tags:/,Essex County, Massachusetts,Boston Gazette,Massachusetts,Elbridge Gerry,Democratic-republican Party,Salamander,Nathan Hale,Portmanteau,Political Cartoon,Elkanah Tisdale,Library Of Congress,Oxford English Dictionary, | |
| Voting systems | |
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Gerrymandering is used most often in favor of ruling incumbents[7] or a specific political party. Societies whose legislatures use a single-winner voting system are the most likely to have political parties that gerrymander for advantage.[citation needed] Most notably, gerrymandering is particularly effective in non-proportional systems that tend towards fewer parties, such as first past the post.
Most democracies have partly proportional electoral systems, where several political parties are proportionally represented in the national parliaments, in proportion to the total numbers of votes of the parties in the regional or national elections. In these more or less proportional representation systems, gerrymandering has little or less significance.
Some countries, such as the UK and Canada, authorize non-partisan organizations to set constituency boundaries in an attempt to prevent gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is most common in countries where elected politicians are responsible for defining constituency boundaries. They have obvious self interest in determining boundaries to their and their party's interest.
[edit] Tags:Elections,Political Party,Voting,Voting System,First Past The Post,Uk, | |
| Packing and cracking | |
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The two aims of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes. One strategy, packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest, rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness. A second strategy, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. The strategies 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 holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.
While the wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can instead create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.
Examples of gerrymandered districts
North Carolina's 12th congressional district An example of packing. The district is predominantly African-American and liberal.
Designed to proportionality segment voters from the Democratic Party, California's 23rd congressional district, is confined to a narrow strip of coast, an example of the packing style of districting.
An example of "cracking" style of gerrymandering. The urban (and mostly liberal) concentration of Columbus, Ohio, located at the center of the map in Franklin County, is split into thirds, each segment then attached to—and outnumbered by—largely conservative suburbs.
California's 11th congressional district drawn to favor its then-Republican incumbent.
Bi-partisan incumbent gerrymandering produced California District 38, home to Grace Napolitano, a Democrat, who ran unopposed in 2004.
Texas' controversial 2003 partisan gerrymander produced Texas District 22 for former Rep. Tom DeLay, a Republican.
The odd shapes of California Senate districts in Southern California (2008) have led to claims of gerrymandering.
The earmuff shape of Illinois's 4th congressional district packs two Hispanic areas while remaining contiguous by narrowly tracing Interstate 294.
Utah's 2nd congressional district was redrawn after the election of Democrat Jim Matheson in 2000 to favor future Republican majorities. The predominantly Democratic city of Salt Lake was connected to predominantly Republican eastern and southern Utah through a thin sliver of land running through Utah County. This particular redistricting did not have the desired effect, as Matheson is still in office. In 2011, the gerrymandering continued. Each of the new congressional districts combined conservative rural areas with more urban areas to further dilute Democratic votes.
Another example of Illinois gerrymandering is the 17th congressional district in the western portion of the state. Notice how the major urban centers are anchored and how Decatur is nearly isolated from the primary district.
[edit] Tags:Columbus, Ohio,Franklin County,Grace Napolitano,Texas' Controversial 2003 Partisan Gerrymander,Tom Delay, | |
| Effects of gerrymandering | |
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How Gerrymandering can influence electoral results on a non-proportional system.
Example for a state with 3 equally sized districts, 15 voters and 2 parties: Plum (squares) and Orange (circles).
In (a), creating 3 mixed-type districts yields a 3–0 win to Plum — a disproportional result considering the state-wide 9:6 Plum majority.
In (b), Orange wins the urban district while Plum wins the rural districts — the 2-1 result reflects the state-wide vote ratio.
In (c), gerrymandering techniques ensure a 2-1 win to the state-wide minority Orange party.
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| Effect on electoral competition | |
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Political science research suggests that, contrary to common belief, gerrymandering does not decrease electoral competition, and can even increase it. Rather than packing the voters of their party into uncompetitive districts, party leaders tend to prefer to spread their party's voters into multiple districts, so that their party can win a larger number of races.[8] (See scenario (c) in the box.) This may lead to increased competition. Instead of gerrymandering, researchers find that other factors, such as partisan polarization and the incumbency advantage, have driven the recent decreases in electoral competition.[9]
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| Increased incumbent advantage and campaign costs | |
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The effect of gerrymandering for incumbents is particularly advantageous, as incumbents are far more likely to be reelected under conditions of gerrymandering.[citation needed] For example, in 2002, according to political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, only four challengers were able to defeat incumbent members of the US Congress, the lowest number in modern American history.[10] Incumbents are likely to be of the majority party orchestrating a gerrymander, and incumbents are usually easily renominated in subsequent elections, including incumbents among the minority.
This demonstrates that gerrymandering can have a deleterious effect on the principle of democratic accountability. With uncompetitive seats/districts reducing the fear that incumbent politicians may lose office, they have less incentive to represent the interests of their constituents, even when those interests conform to majority support for an issue across the electorate as a whole. Incumbent politicians may look out more for their party's interests than for those of their constituents.
Gerrymandering can have an impact on campaign costs for district elections. If districts become increasingly stretched out, candidates must pay increased costs for transportation and trying to develop and present campaign advertising across a district.[citation needed] The incumbent's advantage in securing campaign funds is another benefit of his or her having a gerrymandered secure seat.
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| Less descriptive representation | |
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Gerrymandering also has significant effects on the representation received by voters in gerrymandered districts. Because gerrymandering can be 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.
Gerrymandering may be advocated to improve representation within the legislature among otherwise underrepresented minority groups by packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, as it may lead to those groups' remaining marginalised in the government as they become confined to a single district. Candidates 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. This "maximisation policy" drew support by both the Republican Party (who had limited support among African Americans and could concentrate their power elsewhere) and by minority representatives elected as Democrats from these constituencies, who then had safe seats.
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| Incumbent gerrymandering | |
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Gerrymandering can also be done to help incumbents as a whole, 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.
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 unpredictable voting by the electorate. This move proved completely effective, as no State or Federal legislative office changed party in the 2004 election, although 53 congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats were potentially at risk.
In 2006, the term "70/30 District" came to signify the equitable split of two evenly split (i.e. 50/50) districts. The resulting districts gave each party a guaranteed seat and retained their respective power base.
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| Prison-based gerrymandering | |
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Prison-based gerrymandering occurs when prisoners are counted as residents of a particular district increasing the district's population with non-voters when assigning political apportionment. This phenomenon violates the principle of one person, one vote because, although many prisoners come from (and return to) urban communities, they are counted as "residents" of the rural districts that contain large prisons, artificially inflating the political representation in districts with prisons at the expense of voters in all other districts without prisons.[11] Others contend that prisoners should not be counted as residents of their original districts when they do not reside there and are not legally eligible to vote.
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| Changes to achieve competitive elections | |
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Electoral divisions: Sydney area
Due to the perceived issues associated with gerrymandering and its impact on competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous countries have enacted reforms making the practice either more difficult or less effective. Countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies.
In the United States, however, such reforms are controversial and frequently meet particularly strong opposition from groups that benefit from gerrymandering. In a more neutral system, they might lose considerable influence.
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| Redistricting by neutral or cross-party agency | |
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The most commonly advocated electoral reform proposal targeted at gerrymandering is to change the redistricting process. Under these proposals, an independent and presumably objective commission is created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the legislature do it. This is the system used in the United Kingdom, where the independent Boundary Commissions determine the boundaries for constituencies in the House of Commons and regional legislatures, subject to ratification by the body in question (almost always granted without debate). A similar situation exists in Australia where the independent Australian Electoral Commission, and its state based counterparts, determines electoral boundaries for federal, state and local jurisdictions.
To help ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be appointed from relatively apolitical sources such as retired judges or longstanding members of the civil service, possibly with requirements for adequate representation among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the board can be denied access to information that might aid in gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns of the population. As a further constraint, consensus requirements can be imposed to ensure that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of fairness, such as a requirement for a supermajority approval of the commission for any district proposal. Consensus requirements, however, can lead to deadlock, such as occurred in Missouri following the 2000 census. There, the equally numbered partisan appointees were unable to reach consensus in a reasonable time, and consequently the courts had to determine district lines.
In the US state of Iowa, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau (LSB, akin to the US Congressional Research Service) determines boundaries of electoral districts. Aside from satisfying federally mandated contiguity and population equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities. Consideration of political factors such as location of incumbents, previous boundary locations, and political party proportions is specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are chiefly regularly shaped polygons, the LSB process has led to districts that follow county lines.[10]
In 2005, the US state of Ohio had a ballot measure to create an independent commission whose first priority was competitive districts, a sort of "reverse gerrymander". A complex mathematical formula was to be used to determine the competitiveness of a district. The measure failed voter approval chiefly due to voter concerns that communities of interest would be broken up.[12]
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| Changing the voting system | |
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Because gerrymandering relies on the wasted vote effect, the use of a different voting system with fewer wasted votes can help reduce gerrymandering. In particular, the use of multimember districts alongside voting systems establishing proportional representation such as Single Transferable Voting can reduce wasted votes and gerrymandering. Semi-proportional voting systems such as single non-transferable vote or cumulative voting are relatively simple and similar to first past the post and can also reduce the proportion of wasted votes and thus potential gerrymandering. Electoral reformers have advocated all three as replacement systems.[13]
Electoral systems with different forms of proportional representation are now found in nearly all European countries. In this way, they have multi-party systems (with many parties represented in the parliaments) with higher voter attendance in the elections[citation needed], fewer wasted votes, and a wider variety of political opinions represented.
Electoral systems with election of just one winner in each district (i.e., "winner-take-all" electoral systems), and no proportional distribution of extra mandates to smaller parties, tend to create two-party systems (Duverger's Law). In these, just two parties effectively compete in the national elections and thus the national political discussions are forced into a narrow two-party frame, where loyalty and forced statements inside the two parties distort the political debate.
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| Changing the size of districts and the elected body | |
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If a proportional or semi-proportional voting system is used then increasing the number of winners in any given district will reduce the number of wasted votes. This can be accomplished both by merging separate districts together and by increasing the total size of the body to be elected. Since gerrymandering relies on exploiting the wasted vote effect, increasing the number of winners per district can reduce the potential for gerrymandering in proportional systems. Unless all districts are merged, however, this method cannot eliminate gerrymandering entirely.
In contrast to proportional methods, if a nonproportional voting system with multiple winners (such as block 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. While merging districts together under such a system can reduce the potential for gerrymandering, doing so also amplifies the tendency of block voting to produce landslide victories, creating a similar effect to gerrymandering by 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.
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| Using fixed districts | |
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Another way to avoid gerrymandering is simply to stop redistricting altogether and use existing political boundaries such as state, county, or provincial lines. While this prevents future gerrymandering, any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained. The United States Senate, for instance, has more competitive elections than the House of Representatives due to the use of existing state borders rather than gerrymandered districts—Senators are elected by their entire state, while Representatives are elected in legislatively drawn districts.
The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however, in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in population. Individual voters can come to have very different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This malapportionment can greatly affect representation after long periods of time or large population movements. In the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution, several constituencies that had been fixed since they gained representation in the Parliament of England became so small that they could be won with only a handful of voters (rotten boroughs). Similarly, in the US the state legislature of Alabama refused to redistrict for more than 60 years, despite major changes in population patterns. By 1960 less than a quarter of the state's population controlled the majority of seats in the legislature.[14] However, this practice of using fixed districts for state legislatures was effectively banned in the United States after the Reynolds v. Sims Supreme Court decision, establishing a rule of one man, one vote.
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| Objective rules to create districts | |
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Another means to reduce gerrymandering is to create objective, precise criteria to which any district map must comply. Courts in the United States, for instance, have ruled that congressional districts must be contiguous in order to be constitutional.[15] This, however, is not a particularly binding constraint, as very narrow strips of land with few or no voters in them may be used to connect separate regions for inclusion in one district.
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| Minimum district to convex polygon ratio | |
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One method is to define a minimum district to convex polygon ratio. To use this method, every proposed district is circumscribed by the smallest possible convex polygon (similar to the concept of a convex hull, think of stretching a rubberband around the outline of the district). Then, the area of the district is divided by the area of the polygon; or, if at the edge of the state, by the portion of the area of the polygon within state boundaries. The advantages of this method are that it allows a certain amount of human intervention to take place (thus solving the Colorado problem of splitline districting); it allows the borders of the district to follow existing jagged subdivisions, such as neighbourhoods or voting districts (someth Tags: | |
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