Hi
I don’t have any reliable information of whether gerrymandering is in fact a problem. I’d really welcome some hard facts on the matter. IO look forward to your feedback.
“Gerrymandering has completely broken our political system and I believe my best platform to help repair it is from the outside, by campaigning for independent redistricting commissions. Thank you for your kind messages and all of the support and I hope you’ll join me in my battle against gerrymandering with the same enthusiasm,” he added." (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
If a district is given an odd shape so that a city is not split up, and that forces a couple other districts to have odd shapes, is that gerrymandering?
If all districts are given odd, non-compact shapes in order to make them equal in population, is that gerrymandering?
If two towns have historically had close ties with one another, and do a lot of business with each other, and they are placed in one district with a thin strip connecting them, is that gerrymandering?
I’d say “no” to your examples because gerrymandering isn’t a one-time thing. If the electoral lines are odd but never move - big deal. Gerrymandering is an ongoing process to keep REdrawing the lines to maximize demographic advantage. Without the constant meddling, normal human migration will gradually shuffle election results.
It should be possible to measure the effect of gerrymandering, by comparing (a) the percentage of the vote, and (b) the percentage of the seats secured by each party, and then by correlationg discrepancies between the two with the party in control of the legislature which last revised the district boundaries.
I’d be reasonably optimistic that this work has in fact been done.
No doubt there are several mechanisms in play, but I’ll gladly reconsider my stance that gerrymandering is a significant one if you or any can present an argument why I should.
For gerrymandering to work, there has to be some reasonably sound evidence about the distribution of voters for different parties. For it to be responsible for squeezing out third parties, there has to be some reasonably sound evidence that such parties had support in sufficient concentrations that a different set of boundaries would have led to their winning elections that they didn’t under existing boundaries. What can’t be demonstrated is whether the organisation of boundaries somehow prevented that support from being won in the first place.
Almost always, gerrymandering is about doing down the known and actual opposition, not any unrealised potential opposition.
Has any court ever found that district lines were drawn up to split the Green or Reform party vote? I seriously doubt it. There’s a bunch of other far bigger hurdles to third parties like ballot access and media coverage.
Suppose an urban center with two seats is split 40%/60% between ethnic groups which favor party A and B respectively. It’s easy to imagine that a north-south cut would give each party 1 seat, while a west-east cut would give both seats to party B. Which is appropriate? In some cases, there are court orders that effectively mandate that districts be drawn (“gerrymandered” if necessary) to ensure a minority gets a seat. For example, Illinois’ 4th Congressional District was devised to ensure Chicago’s Hispanics had a seat in Congress.
Another factor which complicates the issue is that some disproportionate representation arises naturally due to geography or demographics. For example, many cities are overwhelmingly Democratic. If a 4-seat state with 72% D vote overall has half its population in the city (95% D), the logical division (2 districts for city, 2 for rest of state) will lead to 2 R seats, even though the D’s “should” get at least 3 seats with their 72% majority. (The only way to “fix” this problem is to gerrymander — giving the city three seats instead of two, with outlying areas incorporated to equalize populations.) Much of the Republican advantage in elections is due to this effect — urban Democratic votes are wasted.
A problem which may be as important as gerrymandering is incumbency advantage.(*) Many voters will vote for the incumbent unless there’s a major scandal; this inertial tendency makes it difficult for changing voter sentiment to be felt. And it can exacerbate the effects of gerrymandering. For example, after a gerrymandering in response to the 2010 census, the GOP won 9 out of 13 seats in North Carolina despite that Democratic candidates won more total votes than the GOP ! (Some of the D votes are wasted in the hugely Democratic and peculiarly shaped 4th District.) They increased this advantage to ten seats in the 2014 election (due to the retirement of a popular D incumbent). Finally a federal judge ordered the districting maps redrawn; but even though less favored then they were under the gerrymandering, the GOP retained its ten seats, due in large measure to incumbents’ advantage.
(* - I’ve previously proposed that, rather than hard term limits, incumbents be penalized, having a portion of their votes subtracted. I think this has near-zero chances of passage!)
Here’s a pdf paper claiming that the R’s would probably lose only one net seat in Congress without gerrymandering. But it ignores that, due to incumbency advantage, the R advantage is self-reinforcing. It also ignores gerrymandering in lower-level districts. In 2013 Sam Wang did a study concluding that the GOP enjoys a significant advantage in Congress due to its gerrymandering efforts.
One of the problems is that gerrymandering also affects the percentage of the vote. Minority parties often just don’t compete in safe districts, which drives their vote down beyond where it would be if there was universal competition. I live in a safe Republican congressional district in a state that is (or was until 2016) a swing state in presidential elections. The Democratic presidential candidate always outperforms the no-name Democratic congressional candidate by quite a lot.
Edit: For example, Hillary Clinton got 41% of my congressional district’s vote. That’s not good, but the Democratic congressional candidate who ran no campaign at all only got 30%.
I’m amazed that so many people don’t “get” gerrymandering.
The mechanisms are simple and straightforward. Each voting precinct reports their results . That’s how everyone learns which areas tend to vote in what manner, even though individual votes aren’t tracked. That data gets used to arrange so that the party in power, will end up with a majority in the state houses, by putting enough of “their” precincts into each district, that they end up with local majorities for each vote.
And it isn’t the SHAPE of the district that matters, either. yes, the historical reason why it’s called “gerrymandering,” goes back to an early political cartoon that protested it being done, and because the shape of the actual voting district was sort of like a dragon, and the cartoonist made up the name “gerrymander” for the dragon, it bears that name even today.
In real application, you can have functionally “gerrymandered” voting districts that are shaped like squares or circles. It isn’t the shape that matters, it’s the fact that the particular precincts in the district, were assigned together BY THE WINNING PARTY, in order to bias the voting in that district to be in their favor.
I would suggest that there is no reason to support the idea that “like-minded areas” should be grouped together because they are so, nor is there any valid reason to group economic units together. That would tend to support fascism, more or less, because policy decisions affecting EVERYONE, would be based on the business interests of the largest local industry, regardless of the concerns of the individual citizens.
Look at the election results. If Party A wins most of its elections (within a state) by 53 to 58 percent of the vote and Party B wins its elections by 65 to 80 percent of the vote, that’s a pretty good sign that gerrymandering has occurred.
You’ve got Democrats and Republicans being allowed to draw the lines. The incentive for them to do so as much as possible to their party’s benefit is obvious.
Simultaneously, the number of people elected to the House in the “Modern Era” (i.e. since 1949, as Wikipedia defines it, though I’m not sure on what basis) is… six, plus two nonvoting delegates.
If I compare the U.S. system to the Canadian one, which also has first-past-the-post voting but routinely seats members from other than the two largest political parties (currently more than 10% of the membership is non-Liberal, non-Conservative, and this rate has been higher in the past), then I look for differences in the systems, and gerrymandering is a big one. Frankly, the amount of control you guys let elected officials have over elections is quite astonishing and obviously corrosive to me. If you just went ahead and banned third parties by law, it’s not clear to me how your system would operate significantly differently.
Explain how the manner in which districts are drawn specifically makes it harder for third parties to arise.
I think the reality is more simple, while first past the post and single member districts dissuade third parties in Westminster systems like Canada and Britain (which both, despite having more minor party involvement than the United States, have largely always been ruled by one of two major parties of their day), in a Presidential first past the post single member district system, that dissuasion is far, far stronger. The goal of any national political party would be to win not only Congress but also the Presidency, and there’s no coalitions in the Presidency, one candidate must win. Fracturing votes on your “side of the political spectrum” just makes it more likely the other side wins in a landslide in the electoral college even if they’re only to get about 40% of the popular vote. Fracturing from both sides would just lead to the House deciding every Presidential election, which likely would enshrine the motivation to have two parties as much if not moreso than the current Presidential election norm.
If you’re going to coalesce into two coalitions for the purposes of Presidential elections, then for organizing, fundraising etc, there are just clear and immense advantages to doing so at the State level. There’s nothing about the way the districts are drawn that would make a regional party impossible, focused on regional interests (like the SNP in Britain or the BQ in Canada), except our Civil War in many ways kind of killed off “political regionalism” as an enduring force. You saw some flare ups and prominent independent party activity in the South in the 50s/60s, but it never materialized into a lasting regional movement.
Absent any actual mechanistic explanation as to how gerrymandering inhibits third parties, I’ll conclude that claim is without merit.
