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Gerrymandering

Since the dawn of our democracy, politicians have gone to great lengths to manipulate the outcomes of elections. But the most powerful tool at their disposal is a legal and largely unknown technique that poses a threat not just to Democrats or Republica...

Since the dawn of our democracy, politicians have gone to great lengths to manipulate the outcomes of elections. But the most powerful tool at their disposal is a legal and largely unknown technique that poses a threat not just to Democrats or Republicans, but to Democracy as a whole. Gerrymandering is the act of drawing electoral district lines for political advantage. Mount Holyoke Professor Douglas Amy explains: "Most Americans believe that who wins political races is decided on Election Day by the voters. But in a single-member district electoral system, that is frequently not true. Who wins is often determined before the voters even go to the polls – sometimes even years before. The outcome is decided by those who draw district lines. If they decide to create a district that is 70 percent Republican, there is little chance that a Democratic candidate will win. And Republican candidates will usually lose if a district is drawn so that it is predominantly Democratic. Voters go to the polls confident in the illusion that they control the fate of the candidates. But in reality they are often only participating in the last act of a political play whose ending has already been written.” (Amy, Douglas J., “How Proportional Representation Would Finally Solve Our Redistricting and Gerrymandering Problems.”) Gerrymandering isn’t always about party politics. Often, it’s about race. Even after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, politicians continued to use gerrymandering to suppress the minority vote. The Supreme Court and the Department of Justice have attempted to prevent this with mixed results. Gerrymandering continues to be an issue today, with Tom DeLay's 2003 Texas redistricting resulting in the 2006 Supreme Court case LULAC v. Perry. Both California Governor Schwarzenegger and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer addressed gerrymandering in their recent state of the state addresses. And numerous non-profit organizations, including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP Legal Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, FairVote.org and other are hard at work on the issue. Find all the latest information on gerrymandering here.