This is the best explanation of
gerrymandering you will ever see
How to steal an
election: a visual guide
Gerrymandering
-- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage
over an opposing party -- is a
difficult process to explain. Suppose we have a very tiny state of
fifty people. Thirty of them belong to the Blue Party, and 20 belong to
the Red Party. And just our luck, they all live in a nice even grid with the
Blues on one side of the state and the Reds on the other.
Now,
let's say we need to divide this state into five districts. Each district will
send one representative to the House to represent the people. Ideally, we want
the representation to be proportional: if 60 percent of our residents are Blue
and 40 percent are Red, those five seats should be divvied up the same way.
Fortunately,
because our citizens live in a neatly ordered grid, it's easy to draw five
lengthy districts -- two for the Reds , and three for the Blues.
Voila! Perfectly proportional representation, just as the Founders
intended. Now, let's say instead that the Blue Party controls the state
government, and they get to decide how the lines are drawn. Rather than draw
districts vertically they draw them horizontally, so that in each district
there are six Blues and four Reds. You
can see that in grid 2 above, "compact but unfair."
With a
comfortable Blue majority in this state, each district elects a blue candidate
to the House. The Blues win 5 seats and the Reds don't get a single one. Oh
well! All's fair in love and politics.
In the
real world, the results of this latter scenario are similar to what we see
in New York, though there are no good examples of where a majority party gives
itself a clean-sweep. In 2012, Democrats received 66 percent of the popular
House vote. But they won 21 out of 27 House seats, or three more than you'd expect from the
popular vote alone. And from a purely geometric standpoint, New
York's congressional districts aren't terribly irregular -- at least not
compared to other states.
Finally,
what if the Red Party controls the state government? The Reds know they're at a
numeric disadvantage. But with some creative boundary drawing -- the type you see in grid 3, "neither compact nor
fair" -- they can slice the Blue population up such that they
only get a majority in two districts. So despite making up 40 percent of the
population, the Reds win 60 percent of the seats. Not bad!
In the
real world, this is similar to what we see in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Democrats
won 51 percent of the popular House vote. But the only won 5 out of 18 House
seats -- fewer than one third.
This was because when Pennsylvania Republicans redrew the state's Congressional
districts, they made highly irregular districts that look like the one below,
PA-7, one of the most geographically irregular districts in the nation.
Now,
this exercise is of course a huge simplification. In the real world people
don't live in neatly-ordered grids sorted by political party. But for
real-world politicians looking to give themselves an advantage at redistricting
time, the process is exactly the same, as are the
results for the parties that gerrymander successfully.
The
easiest way to solve this issue, of course, would be to take the redistricting
process out of human hands entirely. There is already
software capable of doing just that -- good
luck getting any politicians to agree to it, though.
The process of re-drawing district lines to give an advantage to
one party over another is called "gerrymandering". Here's how it
works. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
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