Gerrymandering Essay

Gerrymandering
Steven Howell
Florida International University

Section 1
What is gerrymandering? According to Christina Greer, assistant professor of political science at Fordham University, it is the process of giving one political party the advantage over another political party by re-drawing district lines, a practice intended to establish a political advantage. Each party wants to gain as many districts as possible so that they can control different things such as the budget, and other ongoing policies, or to set their party up to gain more districts in the future.
Gerrymandering has three potential goals; one goal is achieved by partisan gerrymandering which is to help one party win more seats in the House of Representatives,

the second goal is achieved by an incumbent-protection gerrymandering which can help both parties be safer, the third goal is to target political officials who have fallen out of favor. Gerrymandering has two successful practices to go about protecting their own political party. The first one is packing a district, which is the process of drawing district lines and packing your opponents into as few districts as possible. The second one is cracking, which is taking one district and cracking it into several pieces, this is done in many districts to separate your opponents supporters to deny your opponent many votes ("Just The Facts: Gerrymandering", 2015).
Gerrymandering was created in 1812 by Elbridge Gerry, who was the governor of Massachusetts.

Elbridge Gerry supported and signed into law a plan for dividing the legislative districts in his state so that it would benefit his political party, the Democrat-Republican party which no longer exists. The word gerrymandering was created from his last name and the word salamander due to the strange looking district lines in his state which formed a shape of a salamander. For the past 200 years, many state legislatures have used their line re-drawing to map out districts to support their political advantage to help them in their political run. This policy has given the politicians the power to alter their districts every ten years to favor their political party to gain more seats in elected

positions.
Section 2
According to Mark E.

Rush, professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University, a consequence of gerrymandering is that representation is denied to the voters. Meaning that the true desire of the voters is not fulfilled and that their votes essentially end up wasted, rather than supporting the politicians they vote for during a political run. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the proportions of votes received by a political party do not result in an equal proportion of legislative seats. As a result of gerrymandering “the fate of specific representatives of a political party is of only secondary importance…and [results in] denial of representation” (1992). Overall, evaluations of voters on government and the overall trust in government is a determining factor whether they would cast a ballot for their candidate. Christopher Anderson and Andrew Lotempio’s study has shown that voters whose presidential candidate has won have higher levels of trust in government as opposed to those voters whose presidential candidate who has lost

(2002).
On the other hand, gerrymandering has been able to break “unbreakable locks on the house of representatives” by giving parties the opportunity to eliminate bias via redrawing of district lines (Goedert, 2015). By “cracking” constituents and bringing them into unrepresentative districts, gerrymandering relegates voters by rendering their ballot meaningless and reduces confidence in the democratic process. This is the competitive view, in which districts should have a more competitive election so that the winner is more moderate.
Section 3
Gerrymandering should not be legal. Gerrymandering is a way of cheating the system by creating an outweighed balance of votes for one political party and for many voters, and the way the party redrawing wants the voter’s vote to count. It is a problem because politicians are able to alter their district lines, this eliminates the voters from electing the politicians they want because this system allows the politicians to pick the voters they need. The altering of districts can potentially change for the worse which is sometimes a big advantage to either the Republican Party or Democratic Party. In a democracy, voters want to know that their vote will make a difference in who they elect and know that for the next few years there is someone in office forming policy on issues that are important to them. As a voter, you would like to see that your vote makes a difference for your political party. Unfortunately, gerrymandering does not give voters that confidence in today’s elections, because at times they can render a voter’s ballot meaningless. According to researcher Kristin Eberhard, “single-winner districts and the gerrymander sap voters’ power by wasting their votes in two ways” (2017). One way voters’ votes get wasted is by predetermining winners in safe districts and a second way is denying many voters the power to elect a representative.
Also, gerrymandering tears apart communities. For example Summit County, the home of Akron and four other congressional districts, it is one of the most divided counties in the state of Ohio (Marozzi, 2016). You also have Cuyahoga County which is another county that is divided into four districts where voters share one councilman. Dividing cities and neighborhoods defeats the purpose of voting and erodes democracy. Not only does gerrymandering tears up communities but it also brings out partisan extremes. This unfavorable effect of gerrymandering has our political system leading to polarization predictably. Due to this unfavorable effect, it pushes incumbents to the extremes of the political spectrum when trying to manipulate and stretch congressional districts. Gerrymandering should be illegal, party officials should not be able to redraw district lines for their benefit or for the harm of another party.
Section 4
Instead of Gerrymandering, many states have passed referenda that would give an independent agency the responsibility of overseeing or determining to district in their states ("Just The Facts: Gerrymandering", 2015). Citizens can also promote a more crystal clear and public system within their states so that elected officials are held accountable. Also, there is the support to use a system that creates districts based on geography alone, rather than party officials drawing their own districts as they desire. Reliability is how districting could eliminate hesitation and with oversight can better assess and elect political candidates in every district that gerrymandering occurs. Over the years many solutions have been proposed to solving gerrymandering but most have failed to gain any forward movement. In September of 2017, a team of data scientist from the University of Illinois published a paper that presented a novel solution to gerrymandering; letting an algorithm draw the maps. According to researchers King, Jacobson, and Sewell, a geo-graph contiguity assessment algorithm can reduce the average number of edges visited during contiguity assessments by at least three orders of magnitude in every problem instance when compared with simple graph search (2017). These assumptions are easily adapted to the irregular census block geography with only superficial impact on the solution space. The results show that the model and its associated algorithms proved a powerful constraint to political officials during their political party run.

References
Anderson, C. J., & Lotempio, A. J. (2002). Winning, Losing and Political Trust in America. British Journal of Political Science, 32(02), 335-351. doi:10.1017/s0007123402000133
Eberhard, K. (2017). Slaying the Gerrymander, Part 2: Make More Votes Matter. Sightline Institute.
Goedert, N. (2015). The case of the disappearing bias: A 2014 update to the “Gerrymandering or Geography” debate . SAGE Journals, 2(4). doi:10.1177/2053168015622474
Greer, Christina. [TED-Ed]. (2012, Oct 25). Gerrymandering: How drawing jagged lines can impact an election [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUDBgYodIE
Just The Facts: Gerrymandering. (2015, November 30). Retrieved December 8, 2017, from https://www.nolabels.org/blog/just-facts-gerrymandering/
Marozzi, C. (2016, June 16). Four Reasons Gerrymandering is Killing Democracy. Retrieved December 11, 2017, from http://www.fairdistrictsohio.org/blog/four-reasons-gerrymandering-is-killing-democracy
M. King, D & H. Jacobson, S & C. Sewell, E. (2017). The geo-graph in practice: creating United States Congressional Districts from census blocks. Computational Optimization and Applications. 1-25. 10.1007/s10589-017-9936-3.
Rush, M. E. (1992). The Variability of Partisanship and Turnout. American Politics Quarterly, 20(1), 99-122. doi:10.1177/1532673x9202000105