Gerrymandering (by 1812) is where voting districts are drawn (redistricted) to favour one party (or race) over another in democratic elections. In the US, for example, Republicans got 49.9% of the vote in House races in 2016 but won 55.2% of the seats – a 23-seat advantage. At least 16 of those seats come from gerrymandering.
This post is about gerrymandering in the US.
In 1812 Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts approved a strange-looking voting district (pictured at top) that favoured his party. Some said it looked like a salamander. The Boston Gazette called it a Gerrymander and the name stuck.
In the 2010s it is way worse than ever, thanks to computers and the backlash against a Black president. The US holds a census count every ten years. The last one was in 2010, the same year as the Tea Party backlash against President Obama. That brought Republicans to power in state legislatures across the country just when voting districts had to be redrawn after the new census.
In 2017, Gill v Whitford, a case brought against gerrymandering in Wisconsin, has now reached all the way to the Supreme Court. It could become a landmark decision with profound effects.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws gerrymandering by race. But gerrymandering by party is allowed – mainly because the Supreme Court has no non-partisan way to determine what counts as partisan gerrymandering. But the line between party and race is often a thin one.
Whites will become a minority by 2042. The Republicans, who made themselves the Party of White People back in the 1960s (the Southern Strategy), now face demographic death. Instead of broadening their message, they have doubled down. Gerrymandering is one of the ways they can hold off demographic death. So are laws against voting, immigration and abortion. So is Citizens United v FEC (2010), which allows unlimited (heavily White) money into politics.
Computer precision: Thanks to computers, voting districts are no longer created out of counties, towns or city precincts, as in the days of Gerry, but are created street by street for maximum statistical advantage. Many of the computer-drawn districts look like ink blots or spiders not-even-from-Mars:
Some of the worst gerrymandered districts, 2014. (Via the Washington Post)
The computer-drawn districts work all too well: in the Wisconsin case, Republicans in 2012 got only 49% of the popular vote in state assembly races, but won 61% of the seats! States like Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina are so deeply gerrymandered that most of their Congressmen are Republicans even when Democrats get the most votes!
Note that computers can draw competitive districts just as easily as gerrymandered ones.
Gerrymandering is done through packing and cracking:
- packing: putting hostile voters into as few districts as possible.
- cracking: splitting up the remaining hostile voters among as many districts as possible to dilute their effect.
In Wisconsin, that is just what was done to Black voters in metropolitan Milwaukee. Suburban Black voters found themselves living in the same districts as White farmers who lived far away, districts where a White Republican would almost certainly win every time. By design.
The 2016 election for US president by Congressional district. Click to enlarge. Compare to the county map below:
The 2016 election for US president by county. Click to enlarge.
– Abagond, 2017.
Update (June 27th 2019): The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 today that it will not set limits on political gerrymandering. This comes courtesy of the new hard-right majority on the court. BBC.
See also:
- Gill v Whitford
- Voting Rights Act
- Republican
- Southern Strategy
- voter suppression
- immigration policy: deportation raids / DACA
- Citizens United
- abortion and race
- democracy
- computer
- The future of race in the US
- The 2016 election by county
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Abagond 
Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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..Ain’t that bout a bi#ch!?
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“In the 2010s it is way worse than ever, thanks to computers and the backlash against a Black president. ”
It’s all still about Obama! Greg Palast has been writing on this subject since 2000. Eight years before Obama.
“Palast’s investigation into the Bush family fortunes for his column in The Observer led him to uncover a connection to a company called ChoicePoint. In an October 2008 interview Palast said that before the 2000 Election ChoicePoint “was purging the voter rolls of Florida under a contract with a lady named Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They won a contract, a bid contract with the state, with the highest bid.”[8]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast
What took you so long to notice these practices? Oh, yeah, I forgot, Obama’s presidency meant, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, “We Were Eight Years in Power.”
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I started to compile the following data myself until I found a chart.
NOTE: The number of representatives in the House was growing during the whole time that chart shows zero Black members.
Also, the chart references Gerrymandering in 1992 that created Black-majority districts… I would argue that it was actually the undoing of previous Gerrymandering (which is technically re-Gerrymandering?) anyway, here’s an NYT article with some insight on that: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/03/us/1992-campaign-congressional-districts-redistricting-expected-bring-surge.html
I was actually looking into all that data while exploring the early growth, and immediate suppression of Black politicians that was being discussed by Thomas Miller in the original speech that led to the title of Coates’ book…
“We were Eight Years in Power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt jails and courthouses, rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the state and placed it on the road to prosperity…” – Thomas E. Miller
Later W.E.B. DuBois offered a response to Miller; “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than a bad Negro government, it was a good Negro government.”
That was 100 years ago… replace “South Carolina” with “White America” and you’d be talking about today.
Mostly off-topic, but this history of Miller contains some pretty interesting stuff: http://www.southcarolinahistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Winter-1996-Thomas-E.-Miller-Copy.pdf
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The ones from Maryland and Florida illustrated here in this post even jump over bodies of water to remain contiguous.
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@ Open Minded Observer
“We were Eight Years in Power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt jails and courthouses, rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the state and placed it on the road to prosperity…” – Thomas E. Miller
Thank you for clarifying the origin of that statement. The PDF you linked to was quite informative. Again, thanks.
P.S. Checked out your blog. Two thoughts: You have interesting things to say and should post more often. Can you change the “leave a reply” request so that it comes at the end of the post instead of the beginning?
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I added maps for the 2016 election for president, by both Congressional district and by county. Comparing the two maps gives you a rough idea of how gerrymandered things are in different states.
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Comparing the two causes a few things to look interesting.
– Central and northern and eastern Arizona looks like it should be mostly blue, presumably due in part to the Navaho nation.
But the congressional district is solid red as it includes a heavily populated red area.
– Similarly, many regions of South Dakota look disenfranchised.
– The blue counties of Alabama and Mississippi and South Carolina are scrunched into a single congressional district each (they look like the majority black counties)
– The reverse occurred in Delaware and Maryland. In Delaware, 2 of the 3 counties are red, but the state goes blue.
@Abagond,
Note: The county map has the caption: “The 2016 election for US president by Congressional district.” –> should be changed.
–
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@ jefe
Thanks.
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Vox has a good explanation on how setting an upper limit on the efficiency gap could help manage gerrymandering.
How the Supreme Court could limit gerrymandering, explained with a simple diagram
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/9/16432358/gerrymandering-supreme-court-diagram
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Update: The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 today that it will not set limits on political gerrymandering. This comes courtesy of the new hard-right majority on the court.
(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789838)
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