The Legacy of Elbridge Gerry
In 1812, the governor, Elbridge Gerry, crafted a district for political purposes that looked somewhat like a salamander; the action resulted in the first known instance of gerrymandering in our country. The deliberate rearrangement of the boundaries of congressional districts is used to influence the outcome of elections and has become a norm in our election process. When redistricting, those in power either concentrate the opposition's votes into a few districts to gain more seats for the majority in surrounding districts -- called packing -- or to diffuse minority strength across many districts -- called dilution.
The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, transformed American politics by enforcing the principle of one man, one vote, and requiring that all legislative districts contain the same number of people. Before these decisions states had designed districts so that black voters had no meaningful say in Congress. In 1967, Congress passed a law requiring all U.S. representatives to be elected from single member districts; it is the system we use today.
Later in the decade, the Voting Rights Act established the principle that not only did blacks have the right to vote but they had to be placed in districts where black candidates stood a good chance of winning. The act, which was one of Lyndon Johnson's most important civil-rights initiatives, led to the election of many more black members of Congress-and was a classic demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.
Congress, in 1982, amended the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of protected racial minorities in redistricting. Within those laws, states have great leeway to draw districts, which often leads to gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering consistently results in the disruption of our representative system. It is a process that has become a standard in deciding districts, and somehow still remains perfectly legal. New computer software allows whatever party controls the state legislature to redraw districts so finely and accurately that of the 435 House seats only about 30 are actually contested.The result is that the entire election happens in primaries, attended mostly by hard-core party voters, who end up skewing candidates to the political extremes. When one party gets a lead in the House -- as the Republicans currently have -- it is almost insurmountable, even when the other party wins the Presidency by a wide margin.
The simplest solution is to take redistricting out of the hands of the partisan state Congress who, after all, have a pretty strong incentive in skewing the map to keep their jobs, and giving them to a non-partisan redistricting committee -- perhaps consisting of retired judges. Iowa did this after the 2000 census; afterwards, four of their five House races were competitive. Iowa has one per cent of the seats in the House, but they had 10% of all contested races.
All countries, in the interests of equal representation, adjust their electoral boundaries to reflect population changes. Most democracies hand over this job to independent commissions, which play with the boundaries of the voting districts in these countries. In America -- in all but a few states -- that idea sounds rather elitist and undemocratic, why were not sure. So every ten years, after the census, politicians in state legislatures meet to draw new voting maps which are approved by the state governor. Because America's population is both faster-growing and more mobile than that of other old democracies, and since the Voting Rights Act actually requires minorities to have special "majority-minority districts" in order to get an equal chance to elect candidates of their choice (i.e. based upon their race), redistricters end up producing an outcome a bit more serious then play.
With the entire furor over the Presidency, we often miss the importance of the House, especially in the aggregate like this. The President can't pass any law without the House approving it first, but the House can pass a law -- with a 2/3 majority -- even if the President doesn't support it. And it's not surprising that it's hard to get things done when this important body is filled with essentially tenured partisans whose only serious challenge comes from someone more extreme than they are.
The effects of partisan gerrymandering go well beyond the protection of incumbents and the guarantee of continued Republican control. It has also changed the kind of people who win seats in Congress and the way they behave once they arrive. Diluting the voting strength of the people provides something less then equal representation. Electoral divisions shouldn't be arranged so that one political party has more power the another. Gerrymandering is almost a legal practice of cheating or rigging a game.
It is this kind of government activity that makes the people believe their votes don't count. If you're the minority in the district that was drawn in your state, your vote really won't count. This is also the same kind of system that maintains the partisan system in this country. Even if other parties had some kind of following, they'd still be in the minority because of the gerrymandering that helped with the perpetuation of control and dominance of the two parties over the congressional districts across America. In a normal democracy, voters choose their representatives; in America however, this ideal is rapidly moving the other way.