Gerrymandering

February 8th, 2018

Written by - Emily Moritz '18

As of early December the Supreme Court has taken up two major cases about Gerrymandering, Benisek v. Lamone which involves the state of Maryland and Gill v. Whitford which involves the state of Wisconsin. Their decisions of these cases could have a major impact on how state assembly maps are drawn and, quite definitely, the results of elections. With midterm elections coming up, some of you may hear something about gerrymandering.

So, I’m going to answer a question that many (or some) of you will have. What exactly is gerrymandering?? Before we get into the nitty gritty manipulation, here is a brief refresher about elections for those of you who didn't pay attention in class (this includes me by the way). Each state is divided into several congressional districts, the number of which is determined by its population. Each congressional district then elects a single person to serve as their representative in congress.

Now that that’s out of the way we can finally get on to learning about gerrymandering. A Gerrymander is when a political party purposefully manipulates a state’s congressional district map in order to cause the opposing political party to “waste” votes. A vote “wasted” is one that is above the amount needed to win or a vote for the defeated party. This can be done one or both of two ways, packing or cracking.

If party desires to pack, they draw a district in an area consisting mainly of people voting for a single party. An example of this could be re-drawing the Ohio’s district map so that the Cleveland metropolitan area counts as one district. Since voters located near to Cleveland tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat, this district drawing would cause a high amount of “wasted” Democrat votes.

Likewise, if a party desires to “crack”, they would draw districts so that their opponents votes are split among several districts that lean safely towards themselves. This can effectively dilute the opposing votes. Lets use Ohio for another example. If a party wanted to crack votes they would extend a district containing a comfortably large amount of their own voters to include the fringes of an area that contains a high amount of the opposite voters. A party would draw a district so that it has a large area in central Ohio, then snake it up to include the fringes of the Cleveland area to dilute any remaining Democrat votes.

Of course, I made these examples up off the top of my head. This is what I would do if I was to purposefully gerrymander Ohio to favor republicans and I highly doubt the actual congressional map of Ohio would be so obviously partisan.

I was wrong.

Bonus: send me your best analysis of Pennsylvania, one of the most gerrymandered states in the USA. Explain to the best of your abilities how the packing and cracking techniques have been used to manipulate the vote and I will give you some candy.