Many boundaries zig and zag east and west, north and south across city, township and county lines as if for no reason at all. Gerrymandering is the act of redrawing the lines of a congressional district to give one political party a voting advantage over another. The public is largely shut out of the process," wrote Erika L. Wood, the director of the Redistricting & Representation Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. To keep politics and the potential for gerrymandering out of the process, state lawmakers and public officials are prohibited from serving on the commissions. Gerrymandering is just one of the tools used by governments to give their parties a leg up against the competition. …rights is racial or partisan gerrymandering. Some states impanel special commissions. gerrymander. "A state may take race into account as one of several factors when drawing district lines—but without a compelling reason, race cannot be the 'predominant' reason for a district’s shape," according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Hakeem Jeffries is a classic example of political gerrymandering, what happened to him? The project, orchestrated by Republicans using sophisticated software and about $30 million, was called REDMAP, for Redistricting Majority Project. Gerrymander definition is - the act or method of gerrymandering. President Barack Obama, speaking in his final State of the Union address in 2016, called on both the Republican and Democratic parties to end the practice. The purpose of gerrymandering is to grant one party power over another by creating districts that hold dense concentrations of voters who are favorable to their policies. In states where they controlled the process of drawing congressional district boundaries, they captured seven out of 10 seats with only 56 percent of the popular vote. The term is derived from the name of Gov. The constitutional significance of the latter principle was set forth in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued in 1962, Baker v. Carr, in which the Court held that the failure of the legislature of Tennessee to reapportion state legislative districts to take into account significant changes in district populations had effectively reduced the weight of votes cast in more populous districts, amounting to a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gerrymandering is the act of drawing congressional, state legislative or other political boundaries to favor a political party or one particular candidate for elected office. The term "gerrymandering" was coined by a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry that was named because one of the districts looked like a salamander. gerrymandering and the constitutional norm against government partisanship Holder views gerrymandering , which manipulates district lines to benefit one party, as part of a broader struggle for voting rights, since it effectively diminishes the value of certain communities' votes. The purpose of gerrymandering is to grant one party power over another by creating districts that hold dense concentrations of voters who are favorable to their policies. Learn more. …must not be confused with gerrymandering—a form of arbitrary districting used to benefit the party that at a given time controls the apportionment process. The Court’s ruling, however, did not consider whether the efficiency gap amounted to the “judicially discernible and manageable” standard it had been waiting for. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Gerrymandering didn't save Elbridge Gerry's governorship, but it established itself as, if not the most partisan or fair strategy, a viable one for electoral victory. One year later, in Wesberry v. Sanders, the Court declared that congressional electoral districts must be drawn in such a way that, “as nearly as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.” And in the same year, the Court affirmed, in Reynolds v. Sims, that “the Equal Protection Clause requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis.”. The act, process, or an instance of gerrymandering. Omissions? The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in 1964, called for a fair and equitable distribution of voters among congressional districts, but its ruling dealt mostly with the actual number of voters in each and whether they were rural or urban, not the partisan or racial makeup of each: The federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 took on the issue of using race as a factor in drawing congressional districts, saying it is illegal to deny minorities their constitutional right “to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”. Regarding cases of gerrymandering based on race, the Supreme Court has held (in Thornburg v. Gingles, 1986) that such practices are incompatible with Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (as amended in 1982), which generally prohibits voting standards or practices whose practical effect is that members of racial minority groups “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to…elect representatives of their choice.” In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that electoral districts whose boundaries cannot be explained except on the basis of race can be challenged as potential violations of the equal protection clause, and in Miller v. Johnson (1995) it held that the equal protection clause also prohibits the use of race as the “predominant factor” in drawing electoral-district boundaries. 2. The physical impact of gerrymandering can be seen on any map of congressional districts. Imagine a geographical grid of one hundred voters with their political ideologies represented by the colors, blue and red. The states that allow their legislatures to perform the redistricting are: Independent commissions: These apolitical panels are used in four states to redraw legislative districts. Gerrymandering Gerrymandering; Gerrymandering Definition. He was running to represent his district and perceived to be a threat by the current district chair and effectively cut out of his district through gerrymandering preventing him from being able to represent that district. Pointing to the rapid development and routine use of computer-assisted districting, he argued that such technologies “may produce new methods of analysis that…would facilitate court efforts to identify and remedy the burdens” imposed by political gerrymanders, “with judicial intervention limited by the derived standards.”. But the political impact is much more significant. Gerrymandering -- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party -- is a difficult process to explain. A satirical cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale that appeared in the Boston Gazette graphically transformed the districts into a fabulous animal, “The Gerry-mander,” fixing the term in the popular imagination. Favoring one political party at the expense of another. The outline of one of these districts was thought to resemble a salamander. Corrections? "The process is marked by secrecy, self-dealing and backroom logrolling among elected officials. Both major political parties are responsible for the misshapen legislative and congressional districts in the United States. Politics is full of all different types of moves and manipulation to win. His subject areas include philosophy, law, social science, politics, political theory, and religion. Gerrymandering is the act of drawing congressional, state legislative or other political boundaries to favor a political party or one particular candidate for elected office. Gerrymandering, in U.S. politics, the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups (racial gerrymandering). The four states that employ independent commissions are: Advisory commissions: Four states use and advisory commission consisting of a mix of legislators and non-legislators to draw up congressional maps that are then presented to the legislature for a vote. Definition of gerrymandering : the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections To an untrained eye, the proposed boundaries look like the etchings of a mapmaker on heavy pharmaceuticals. Gerrymandering is used to give the majority party the greatest number of districts that they can reasonably win and the minority party the fewest number of safe districts. Go check out examples of political jargon. Interested in finding out more uniquely political concepts? A more rigorous definition of gerrymandering. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. [ ( jer-ee-man-duhr) ] To change the boundaries of legislative districts to favor one party over another. ‘This is a government that blatantly indulged in open gerrymander, for example the re-allocation of defence force votes among surrounding marginal seats.’ ‘He said the Government's electoral reforms would create a gerrymander, where electoral boundaries are created to give one party an advantage.’ Six states use advisory commissions to draw state legislative districts. Gerrymandering is the practice of dividing election districts to give special advantages to one group and usually to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the opposition’s voting strength in the fewest districts possible. Charles Ledyard Norton, writing in the 1890 book Political Americanisms, blamed Gerry for signing into a law a bill in 1811 "readjusting the representative districts so as to favor the Democrats and weaken the Federalists, although the last-named party polled nearly two-thirds of the votes cast.". The word is a combination of the words Gerry, for the state's governor, Elbridge Gerry, and salamander, as a particular electoral district was jokingly said to be shaped like a lizard. Gerrymandering is when a political group tries to change a voting district to create a result that helps them or hurts the group who is against them. The redistricting process begins soon after the U.S. Census Bureau completes its work and begins sending data back to the states. Norton explained the emergence of the epithet "gerrymander" this way: The late William Safire, a political columnist and linguist for The New York Times, made note of the word's pronunciation in his 1968 book Safire's New Political Dictionary: Tom Murse is a former political reporter and current Managing Editor of daily paper "LNP," and weekly political paper "The Caucus," both published by LNP Media in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. gerrymandering and the constitutional norm against government partisanship Instead the bureaucratic fat keeps growing, aggravated by an increasing trend toward congressional gerrymandering and the ever-growing number of party-list representatives, many of them with vague constituencies. Gerrymandering is the act of altering political boundaries in order to give an unfair advantage to one political party or group of people. The 10 states that use politician commissions are: The term gerrymander is derived from the name of a Massachusetts governor in the early 1800s, Elbridge Gerry. Apportionment and gerrymandering. The program began with successful efforts to regain majorities in key states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, and Wisconsin. In 1963, in Gray v. Sanders, the Court first articulated the principle of “one person, one vote” in striking down Georgia’s county-based system for counting votes in Democratic primary elections for the office of U.S. senator. Although siding with the plurality in rejecting the challenge to the political gerrymander in question, Justice Anthony Kennedy asserted that it had not been long enough since the Bandemer decision to conclude that no suitable standards could ever emerge (“by the timeline of the law 18 years is rather a short period”). Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Until the 1980s, disputes regarding political gerrymandering were generally considered nonjusticiable (not decidable by federal courts) on the presumption that they presented “political questions” that are properly decided by the legislative or the executive branch. [After Elbridge Gerry + (sala)mander (from the shape of an election district created while Gerry was governor of Massachusetts).] The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering By Alex Tausanovitch October 1, 2019, 9:01 am Once a decade, every state redraws its electoral districts, determining which … Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party. Just such a standard was proposed in Gill v. Whitford (2018), a challenge to a Wisconsin redistricting law enacted by the Republican-controlled state legislature following the 2010 decennial census. In the end, though, most cases of gerrymandering are legal. Countries such as the U.K., Australia, Canada and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies. Gerrymandering reduces the number of competitive congressional races across the United States by segregating like-minded voters from each other. What is gerrymandering? It is a way that governing parties try to cement themselves in power by tilting the political map steeply in their favor. Our latest episode for parents features the topic of empathy. Technically, gerrymandering is illegal, but it’s hard to prove. The states that use advisory commissions are: Politician commissions: Ten states create panels made up of state lawmakers and other elected officials to redraw their own legislative boundaries. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Key Concepts: Terms in this set (17) ... A belief that ultimately government power should reside with the people and that government policy should reflect the will of the people. The drawing of artificial lines to establish voting districts based on political motives rather than geographic boundaries in order to achieve favorable electoral results. The way congressional and legislative boundaries are drawn determines who wins federal and state elections, and ultimately which political party holds the power in making crucial policy decisions. In the 2012 congressional elections, for example, Republicans won 53 percent of the popular vote but carried three out of four House seats in states where they oversaw redistricting. https://www.britannica.com/topic/gerrymandering, gerrymander - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration enacted a law in 1812 defining new state senatorial districts. The plaintiffs argued that efficiency gaps of 7 percent or greater were legally significant because they were more likely than smaller gaps to persist through the 10-year life of a redistricting plan. How to use gerrymander in a sentence. Enter gerrymandering: A funny sounding word used to describe how congressional district boundaries are drawn to give one political party an advantage over the other—something the founders didn’t see coming. But not all. The Supreme Court followed up in 2015 by saying states could form independent, nonpartisan commissions to redraw legislative and congressional boundaries. From the Cambridge English Corpus In contrast, if local boundaries are respected, levels of malapportionment increase, while gerrymandering becomes more difficult to accomplish. One of the unique things about Gill v. Whitford is that, unlike many other gerrymandering cases, the Wisconsin Assembly districts do not have bizarre shapes. Some redistricting commissions are expected to resist political influence and act independently from the parties and the elected officials in that state. He continued: The most concerted effort to redraw political boundaries to benefit a political party in modern history happened after the 2010 census. The law consolidated the Federalist Party vote in a few districts and thus gave disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans. Gerrymandering often leads to disproportionate politicians from one party being elected to office. Here’s a breakdown of who is responsible for redistricting in each state: State legislatures: In 30 states, the elected state lawmakers are responsible for drawing their own legislative districts and in 31 states the boundaries for the congressional districts in their states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. -- is a classic example of political gerrymandering, the word you 're so. 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