Gerrymandering ( , originally ), defined in the contexts of representative electoral systems, is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency.
The manipulation may involve "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins, a professor at Morgan State University, describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
The term gerrymandering is a portmanteau of a salamander and Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States until his death, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisanly-drawn district in the Boston area that was thought to be similar to the shape of a salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process.
The word gerrymander can be used either as an action verb or to describe the process of creating a gerrymander.
Etymology
The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander; a portmanteau of the name Gerry and the animal salamander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. This word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a salamander. Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting the oddly shaped district as a strange animal with claws, wings, and a dragon-like head.
The cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early-19th-century painter, designer, and engraver who lived in Boston at the time.No evidence has been found that famous American portrait painter Gilbert Stuart had any involvement with either the design, drawing, or naming of the cartoon or with the coining of the term. Detailed biographies and academic journal articles about Stuart make no reference to gerrymandering. The myth of Stuart's association with the original gerrymander has been reproduced and spread without verification or sources, from one reference book and Internet site to another. Modern scholars of Stuart agree that no proof has been found to credit him with the term or cartoon, and that he tended not to be involved with such issues. Tisdale had the engraving skills to cut the woodblocks to print the original cartoon. These woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress. The creator of the term gerrymander, however, may never be definitively established. Historians widely believe that the Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale and Benjamin and John Russell coined the term, but no definitive evidence shows who created or uttered the word for the first time.
The redistricting was a notable success for Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1812 election, both the Massachusetts House and governorship were comfortably won by Federalists, losing Gerry his job, but the redistricted state senate remained firmly in Democratic-Republican hands.
The word gerrymander was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide for the rest of 1812.The word gerrymander was used again in two Boston-area papers the next day. The first usage outside of the immediate Boston area appeared in the Newburyport Herald (Massachusetts) on 31 March, and the first use outside of Massachusetts came in the Concord Gazette (New Hampshire) on 14 April 1812.
The first use outside of New England was published in the New York Gazette and General Advertiser on 19 May. What may be the first use of the term to describe the redistricting in another state (Maryland) occurred in the Federal Republican (Georgetown, DC) on 12 October 1812. All in all, at least 80 citations of the word are known from March through December 1812 in American newspapers. This suggests an organized activity by the Federalists to disparage Gerry in particular and the growing Democratic-Republican Party in general. Gerrymandering soon began to be used to describe cases of district shape-manipulation for partisan gain in other states. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word's acceptance was marked by its publication in a dictionary (1848) and in an encyclopedia (1868).Simpson, J. A., Weiner, E. S. C. "Gerrymander", Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press. Since the eponymous Gerry is pronounced with a hard g as in get, the word gerrymander was originally pronounced , but pronunciation as , with a soft g as in gentle, has become dominant. Residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry's hometown, continue to use the original pronunciation.
From time to time, other names have been suffixed with -mander to tie a particular effort to a particular politician or group. Examples are the 1852 "Henry-mandering", "Jerrymander" (referring to California Governor Jerry Brown),Thomas B. Hofeller, "The Looming Redistricting Reform; How will the Republican Party Fare? ", Politico, 2011. "Perrymander" (a reference to Texas Governor Rick Perry), "Tullymander" (after the Irish politician James Tully), and "Bjelkemander" (referencing Australian politician Joh Bjelke-Petersen).
Tactics
Gerrymandering's primary goals are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and minimize the effect of opponents' votes. A partisan gerrymander's main purpose is to influence not only the districting statute, but also the entire corpus of legislative decisions enacted in its path. These can be accomplished in a number of ways:
"Cracking" involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. Political parties in charge of redrawing district lines may create more "cracked" districts as a means of retaining, and possibly even expanding, their legislative power. By "cracking" districts, a political party can maintain, or gain, legislative control by ensuring that the opposing party's voters are not the majority in specific districts. For example, the voters in an urban area can be split among several districts in each of which the majority of voters are suburban, on the presumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the suburban voters would be far more likely to get their way in the elections. "Packing" is the practice of concentrating a large number of similar voters into a single district, thereby limiting their influence in other districts. This approach can sometimes be used to ensure representation for a community, such as by creating a majority-minority district. However, it can also be used to diminish a group's overall electoral impact. When the party in control of redistricting holds a statewide minority, packing may be used strategically to concede a few districts while maintaining greater control over the remaining ones. "Hijacking" is a redistricting tactic that merges two districts, forcing two incumbents to compete for the same seat, ensuring that one of them loses. "Kidnapping" moves an incumbent's home address into another district. Re-election can become more difficult when the incumbent no longer resides in the district or faces re-election in a new district with a new voter base. This is often employed against politicians who represent multiple urban areas; larger cities are removed from the district to make it more rural.
These tactics are typically combined in some form, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type to secure more seats and greater representation for voters of another type. This results in candidates of one party (the one responsible for the gerrymandering) winning by small majorities in most of the districts, and another party winning by a large majority in only a few. Any party that endeavors to make a district more favorable to voting for it based on the physical boundary is gerrymandering.
Effects Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. Wasted votes are votes that did not contribute to electing a candidate, either because they were in excess of the number needed for victory or because the candidate lost. By moving geographic boundaries, the incumbent party packs opposition voters into a few districts they will already win, wasting the extra votes. Other districts are more tightly constructed, with the opposition party allowed a bare minority count, thereby wasting all the minority votes for the losing candidate. These districts constitute the majority of districts and are drawn to produce a result favoring the incumbent party.
A quantitative measure of the effect of gerrymandering is the efficiency gap, computed from the difference in the wasted votes for two different political parties summed over all the districts. Citing in part an efficiency gap of 11.7 to 13.0%, a U.S. District Court in 2016 ruled against the 2011 drawing of Wisconsin legislative districts. In the 2012 election for the state legislature, that gap in wasted votes meant that one party had 48.6% of the two-party votes, but won 61% of the 99 districts.
The wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, but 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 create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.
Effect on electoral competition
Some political science research suggests that contrary to common belief, gerrymandering does not decrease electoral competition and can even increase it. Some say that, 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 more races. (See scenario (c) in the box.) This may lead to increased competition. Instead of gerrymandering, some researchers find that other factors, such as partisan polarization and the incumbency advantage, have driven the recent decreases in electoral competition. Similarly, a 2009 study found that "congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences."
One state in which gerrymandering has arguably had an adverse effect on electoral competition is California. In 2000, a bipartisan redistricting effort redrew congressional district lines in ways that all but guaranteed incumbent victories; as a result, California had only one congressional seat change hands between 2000 and 2010. In response to this obvious gerrymandering, a 2010 referendum in California gave the power to redraw congressional district lines to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which had been created to draw California State Senate and Assembly districts by a 2008 referendum. In stark contrast to the redistricting efforts that followed the 2000 census, the redistricting commission has created a number of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.
Increased incumbent advantage and campaign costs