Gerrymandering in the United States

rdf:langString Gerrymandering in the United States

rdf:langString Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party. Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. The term "gerrymandering" was coined after a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry noted that one of the districts looked like a salamander. In the United States, redistricting takes place in each state about every ten years, after the decennial census. It defines geographical boundaries, with each district within a state being geographically contiguous and having about the same number of state voters. The resulting map affects the elections of the state's members of the United States House of Representatives and the state legislative bodies. Redistricting has always been regarded as a political exercise and in most states, it is controlled by state legislators and sometimes the governor (in some states the governor has no veto power over redistricting legislation while in some states the veto override threshold is a simple majority). When one party controls the state's legislative bodies and governor's office, it is in a strong position to gerrymander district boundaries to advantage its side and to disadvantage its political opponents. Since 2010, detailed maps and high-speed computing have facilitated gerrymandering by political parties in the redistricting process, in order to gain control of state legislation and congressional representation and potentially to maintain that control over several decades, even against shifting political changes in a state's population. Gerrymandering has been sought as unconstitutional in many instances. Typical gerrymandering cases in the United States take the form of partisan gerrymandering, which is aimed at favoring one political party while weakening another; bipartisan gerrymandering, which is aimed at protecting incumbents by multiple political parties; and racial gerrymandering, which is aimed at weakening the power of minority voters. Gerrymandering can also recreate districts with the aim of maximizing the number of racial minorities to assist particular nominees, who are minorities themselves. In some other cases that have the same goal of diluting the minority vote, the districts are reconstructed in a way that packs minority voters into a smaller or limited number of districts. In the 20th century and afterwards, federal courts have deemed extreme cases of gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, but have struggled with how to define the types of gerrymandering and the standards that should be used to determine which redistricting maps are unconstitutional. The United States Supreme Court has affirmed in Miller v. Johnson (1995) that racial gerrymandering is a violation of constitutional rights and upheld decisions against redistricting that is purposely devised based on race. However, the Supreme Court has struggled when partisan gerrymandering occurs (Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004) and Gill v. Whitford (2018)). A landmark decision, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), ultimately decided that questions of partisan gerrymandering represent a nonjusticiable political question, which cannot be dealt with by the federal court system. That decision leaves it to states and to Congress to develop remedies to challenge and to prevent partisan gerrymandering. Some states have created independent redistricting commissions to reduce political drivers for redistricting. The research department of the nonpartisan nonprofit anti-corruption organization RepresentUs issues a Redistricting Report Card which rates the level of gerrymandered distortion of congressional district maps within each state, and its research suggests that wide swaths of the public "across partisan lines" are dissatisfied with gerrymandering and are ready for substantive reforms.