Gerrymandering Essay

Many Americans seem to be baffled by whether to praise the role of courts in the reapportionment of state legislatures, or to lament it. Reapportionment is the process of dividing the total number of seats, or memberships (435) in the House of Representatives among the 50 states. The passage from Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution is the foremost base for conducting a decennial census. In 1790, the first decennial census was conducted in direction of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State at that time. With the help of census data, the number of House seats each state is entitled to have over the period of next ten years is calculated (“Reapportionment and Redistricting”, p. 7).

Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating

space with the motive of facilitating racial, ethnic, political and regional interests and diminishing the others. The best known example of gerrymandering is partisan, where the goal is to obtain larger number of seats for your party than your vote warrant offers. Gerrymandering has several forms. Some popular gerrymandering techniques include dilution, packing (overconcentration), pairing or elimination and shoestringing (Morrill, 1991). The major intent of dilution is to separate centralizations of the other party that would have been sufficiently substantial to constitute majorities in some districts. Another gerrymandering technique is packing or commonly known as overconcentration which functions to waste the opposition party’s votes and settling them to win in as few districts as possible. Pairing or elimination is the most effective gerrymandering technique. It is designed such that the district boundaries are drawn in such a way that the incumbents of the other party are placed into the ‘revised districts’ and also placing a ‘majority of your party’s adherents’ to open districts having no incumbents. In addition, a gerrymandering technique known as ‘shoestringing’ is designed to acquire or keep up a seat in an area dominated by the opposition party (Morrill, 1991).
The heated discussion about gerrymandering has outraged in the recent years. Gerrymandering basically referred to benefitting a candidate or a political party by redrawing district boundaries. In 2015, a case filed in US court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Gill vs. Whitford contended that gerrymandering “is unconstitutional because it treats voters unequally, diluting their voting power based on their political beliefs, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection” (McLaren, 2017), “and because it unreasonably burdens their First Amendment rights of association and free speech” (Soronen, 2017). In 2015, a ruling held that Alabama had disregarded the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection by packing excessively numerous black voters into state electoral districts, diluting their impact in neighboring territories (The Economist, 2017).
In my personal opinion, gerrymandering is unethical because it makes the political system more partisan and the country gets more divided.

Since gerrymandering is the process of dividing legislative districts with a clear motive of attaining the most seats in legislature as possible, we can say that this is done for partisan gain and not for the good of the country and general people. In a sound democratic system, voters should be able to choose their representatives through elections. However, when representatives get the chance to draw their own legislative district lines, lawmakers have the power to choose their voters instead. When one political party has control over the state government, voters in the opposition party are unable to come up with an effective strategy within a reasonable time-frame. Everyone: Voters, representatives and our democracy all lose. Gerrymandering is not just the geographical division, but those lines can often lead to cut traditional legislative districts off from one another. For instance, if someone from a particular region is bounded to some cultural and traditional practices and if the area was gerrymandered in irregular manner, it would completely cut off cultural, traditional and historical communities from one another. This practice cripples the power of voters, has continued for a really long time and must come to an

end.
Moreover, political parties have used this practice to manipulate the people’s vote that turn into partisan advantage.

In the past couple of years, courts have over and again demolished maps that press down the voices of Americans based on race. Some maps that have been struck down by the courts include one in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia for unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. In my personal opinion, since the Supreme Court is the highest law governing body of the nation, it should intervene in such matters that has drawn concerns of huge proportion of the American population. This battle for equal representation of people all around the nation is extremely important for protecting the democracy and making the nation’s administration responsible to the general population. This broken framework needs to be settled and the Supreme Court plays the most significant role in achieving

it.

Works Cited
Bureau, Legislative Counsel. "Reapportionment and Redistricting." Bulletin No 1 (2001): 5.
“Is partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional?” The Economist, The Economist Group Limited,
22 June 2017, www.economist.com/news/united-states/21723858-supreme-court-case
-could-rejig-electoral-lines-2020-partisan-gerrymandering.
Morrill, R. "Gerrymandering." Focus, vol. 41, no. 3, Fall 91, p. 23. EBSCOhost,
https://ezproxy.uwgb.edu:2443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=aph&AN=9204061956&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
McLaren, Craig. “DOES GERRYMANDERING VIOLATE THE FOURTEENTH
AMENDMENT?: INSIGHT FROM THE MEDIAN VOTER THEOREM.” (2017)
Soronen, Lisa. "SCOTUS To Take On Partisan Gerrymandering." Naco, 2017,
http://www.naco.org/articles/scotus-take-partisan-gerrymandering.