Gerrymandering

Based on Wikipedia: Gerrymandering

The Salamander That Ate American Democracy

In 1812, a Boston newspaper published a political cartoon that would give a name to one of democracy's most enduring problems. The image showed a grotesque creature with claws, wings, and a dragon-like head, supposedly representing a Massachusetts voting district. The district had been twisted into this monstrous shape for one reason: to help one political party win more seats than their actual support warranted.

The creature was called a "Gerry-mander," a mashup of "salamander" and the name of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who had signed the redistricting bill into law. Ironically, Gerry himself disapproved of the practice. He signed it anyway.

Two centuries later, the word has become "gerrymandering," and the practice has become far more sophisticated. Politicians no longer need to eyeball maps and guess where voters live. They have voter databases, demographic modeling software, and algorithms that can draw districts with surgical precision. What was once an art has become a science—the science of ensuring that voters don't pick their politicians, but politicians pick their voters.

How the Game Is Played

Gerrymandering works because of a simple mathematical reality: in a winner-take-all election, it doesn't matter whether you win by one vote or one million. A vote beyond what you needed to win is wasted. A vote for the losing candidate is wasted too.

This creates an opportunity for mischief.

The two main techniques have names that sound almost playful: "cracking" and "packing." But there's nothing playful about their effects on democratic representation.

Cracking means splitting up a group of voters who would otherwise form a majority and spreading them across multiple districts where they become minorities. Imagine a city where sixty percent of residents support Party A. If the city is one voting district, Party A wins easily. But what if you draw the lines so that the city is divided among three districts, each of which also contains enough suburban and rural voters to outnumber the urban residents? Suddenly, Party A wins nothing, despite having more supporters in the area.

Packing is the opposite approach: cramming as many of your opponents' voters as possible into a single district. They'll win that district overwhelmingly—perhaps eighty or ninety percent of the vote—but all those extra votes are wasted. Meanwhile, your party wins the surrounding districts by comfortable but not wasteful margins.

The most effective gerrymanders combine both techniques. You pack some of your opponents into a few districts they'll win by landslides, then crack the rest across districts where they'll lose by just enough. The result? One party might win sixty percent of the seats with only forty-five percent of the votes.

There are cruder tactics too. "Hijacking" redraws district lines to force two incumbent legislators from the opposing party into the same district, guaranteeing one of them loses. "Kidnapping" shifts an incumbent's home into a different district entirely, forcing them to either move or run in unfamiliar territory. These techniques are particularly effective against urban politicians, whose cities can be carved up and distributed among multiple rural-dominated districts.

The Efficiency Gap: Measuring the Unfairness

For years, gerrymandering was easy to recognize but hard to quantify. You knew it when you saw those bizarre, tentacle-shaped districts on a map, but proving that the shapes were unfair—rather than just odd—was difficult.

Political scientists eventually developed a metric called the "efficiency gap." The concept is elegant: count up all the wasted votes for each party across all districts, then calculate the difference. A perfectly fair map would have both parties wasting roughly equal numbers of votes. A heavily gerrymandered map would show one party wasting far more.

In 2016, a federal court used this metric to rule against Wisconsin's legislative districts. The efficiency gap was between 11.7 and 13 percent—meaning one party was systematically wasting far more votes than the other. In the 2012 state legislature election, Democrats won 48.6 percent of the two-party vote but captured only 39 percent of the seats. The math didn't add up because it wasn't supposed to.

The Pronunciation Problem

Here's a detail that somehow captures the absurdity of American politics: nobody can agree on how to say the word.

Elbridge Gerry pronounced his name with a hard "G," like "Gary." So the original word was "Gerry-mander," rhyming with "salamander." But over two centuries, the soft "G" pronunciation—like "Jerry"—has become dominant. Residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry's hometown, still insist on the original pronunciation. Everyone else says it wrong.

The word has proven remarkably productive. Whenever a politician becomes associated with creative redistricting, their name gets the "-mander" treatment. California had its "Jerrymander" under Governor Jerry Brown. Texas produced a "Perrymander" under Rick Perry. Ireland contributed the "Tullymander," named for politician James Tully. Australia offered the "Bjelkemander," commemorating Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

The Original Gerrymander: A Brief History

The 1812 Massachusetts redistricting that gave us the word was not an isolated incident but part of an escalating partisan war. Governor Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party had redrawn the state senate districts to maximize their advantage. The Federalist Party—which included Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and most of New England's establishment—was furious.

The political cartoon that appeared in the Boston Gazette was probably drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, a painter and engraver who had the skills to cut the woodblocks needed for printing. Those original woodblocks still exist, preserved in the Library of Congress. But historians have never definitively established who invented the word itself. The best guess is that Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale (a distant relation of the Revolutionary War hero) and Benjamin and John Russell coined it, but no smoking gun survives.

What happened next reveals gerrymandering's peculiar power. In the 1812 election, the Federalists won the Massachusetts governorship handily, costing Gerry his job. They also won the state House of Representatives. But the gerrymandered state senate? It stayed firmly in Democratic-Republican hands. The district lines had been drawn too well.

The Federalists reprinted the "Gerrymander" cartoon in newspapers throughout Massachusetts, New England, and eventually the entire nation. They made Gerry's name synonymous with political manipulation. It worked as propaganda, but it didn't undo the gerrymander. Within a few years, politicians in other states were using the same techniques—and within a few decades, "gerrymandering" had entered the dictionary.

Does It Actually Work?

The evidence on gerrymandering's effectiveness is, surprisingly, complicated.

The conventional wisdom holds that gerrymandering reduces electoral competition and locks in incumbent advantages. And there's substantial evidence for this view. In 2002, only four challengers defeated incumbent members of Congress—the lowest number in modern American history. When districts are drawn to be safe, they become safe.

But some political scientists argue that the picture is more nuanced. Gerrymandering to maximize seats requires spreading your voters thin, creating narrow margins in multiple districts. This is efficient in terms of seats won, but it's also risky. If voter preferences shift even slightly, or if turnout changes unexpectedly, those narrow margins can flip. A gerrymander designed for a six-point partisan advantage might collapse if the political environment shifts by seven points.

Politicians know this, which creates a tension. Party leaders might want aggressive gerrymanders that maximize seats. Individual incumbents might prefer safer districts with larger margins, even if it means fewer seats overall for their party. The result is often a compromise that serves incumbents' interests more than the party's.

There's also the question of what actually causes reduced competition. Some researchers argue that partisan polarization—the fact that Democrats and Republicans increasingly disagree on everything—matters more than district lines. When voters are sorted by geography, with liberals concentrated in cities and conservatives spread across rural areas, even neutrally drawn districts can produce uncompetitive results. The gerrymander might just be amplifying trends that would exist anyway.

California's Experiment

California offers a natural experiment in what happens when you take redistricting away from politicians.

After the 2000 census, California's legislature redrew congressional districts in a bipartisan gerrymander—not to favor one party, but to protect all incumbents from both parties. The lines were drawn so carefully that between 2000 and 2010, only one congressional seat changed hands in the entire state. California, with its 53 House seats, had become a museum exhibit of frozen democracy.

Voters noticed. In 2008, they passed a referendum creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission to draw state legislative districts. In 2010, they extended the commission's authority to congressional districts. The commission included Democrats, Republicans, and independents, with rules designed to prevent either party from dominating.

The results were dramatic. Districts that had been safe for decades suddenly became competitive. Politicians who had coasted to reelection found themselves in genuine races. Some lost. The commission didn't try to create a partisan advantage for either side—it just tried to draw sensible districts that kept communities together. That alone was revolutionary.

The Paradox of Minority Representation

Not all gerrymandering is done for purely partisan purposes. Sometimes districts are drawn specifically to ensure that minority communities can elect representatives of their choice. These "majority-minority" districts concentrate African American, Hispanic, or other minority voters into single districts where they form a majority.

This creates a genuine paradox.

On one hand, majority-minority districts have dramatically increased the number of minority representatives in Congress and state legislatures. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent court decisions, many Southern states had no Black representatives despite having large Black populations. The votes were there, but they were cracked across multiple white-majority districts. Creating majority-minority districts fixed this.

On the other hand, packing minority voters into a few districts can actually reduce their overall political influence. If African American voters are concentrated in one overwhelmingly Democratic district, candidates in surrounding districts no longer need their votes to win. A community that could have been a swing constituency in three districts becomes a guaranteed vote in one district that was already going to elect a Democrat anyway.

This math explains a strange political alliance that emerged in the 1990s. Republicans supported creating more majority-minority districts because it concentrated Democratic-leaning minority voters, making surrounding districts more Republican. Some minority representatives supported it because it gave them safe seats. The losers were often the minority communities themselves, whose influence in neighboring districts evaporated.

Michigan's 2011 redistricting illustrated how these techniques work in practice. A Republican legislature drew congressional districts that split cities like Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Kalamazoo among multiple rural-dominated districts. Democratic voters in those cities found themselves outnumbered by conservative rural voters in every district. The urban vote was cracked; the rural vote was dominant.

Pennsylvania's Impossible Math

The 2012 election in Pennsylvania produced a result that perfectly illustrates gerrymandering's effects. Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 83,000 more votes statewide than Republican candidates. Democrats won the popular vote.

Republicans won 13 of 18 seats.

This wasn't an accident. The district lines had been drawn by a Republican legislature after the 2010 census, and they were drawn with precision. Democratic voters were packed into five heavily Democratic districts and cracked across the others. The result was a congressional delegation that looked nothing like the state's actual partisan split.

Pennsylvania's situation was extreme but not unique. Similar patterns appeared across states where one party controlled the redistricting process. The cumulative effect was a systematic bias in the House of Representatives that persisted for an entire decade until the next census.

The Downstream Consequences

Gerrymandering doesn't just affect who wins elections. It affects how winners govern.

When a district is drawn to be safely Republican or safely Democratic, the general election becomes a formality. The real contest happens in the primary, where voters tend to be more ideologically extreme. A Republican incumbent in a safely Republican district doesn't need to worry about appealing to moderate or Democratic voters—but they need to worry about being challenged from the right by someone even more conservative. The same dynamic pushes Democratic incumbents leftward.

The result is increased polarization. Legislators from safe districts have no incentive to compromise because compromise is a liability in a primary. They have every incentive to take extreme positions because that's what primary voters reward. The center hollows out.

Gerrymandering also affects the relationship between legislators and constituents. A representative from a safe district knows they're unlikely to lose their seat regardless of how well they serve their constituents' interests. The fear of electoral consequences—the fundamental accountability mechanism in a democracy—is weakened. Why listen to constituents when your reelection is guaranteed?

There are even practical consequences for campaigning. Gerrymandered districts are often bizarrely shaped, stretching across multiple media markets and disconnected communities. Candidates may need to run ads in several different cities, attend events in communities with nothing in common, and somehow craft a message that resonates across wildly different constituencies. The costs add up. Incumbents, with their fundraising advantages, can afford this. Challengers often cannot.

The Original Sin of American Elections

Here's the fundamental problem: someone has to draw the district lines. Maps don't draw themselves. And whoever holds the pen has power over the outcome.

In most states, that power belongs to the state legislature—which means the politicians who benefit from gerrymandering are the same politicians who control redistricting. It's like letting students grade their own exams. The incentives are obvious; the results are predictable.

Some states have tried to solve this by creating independent redistricting commissions, like California's. Others have turned to courts, which have sometimes ordered districts redrawn when gerrymandering becomes too egregious. But courts have been reluctant to establish clear standards for when partisan gerrymandering crosses the line from normal politics into unconstitutional manipulation. The Supreme Court has essentially thrown up its hands, declaring partisan gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable—meaning federal courts won't hear them at all.

The result is a patchwork. Some states have competitive districts drawn by nonpartisan commissions. Others have districts so gerrymandered that election outcomes are predetermined for a decade at a time. Whether your vote matters depends partly on which state you live in.

The Technology Arms Race

Modern gerrymandering bears little resemblance to Elbridge Gerry's crude district manipulations. Today's map-drawers have tools that would have seemed like science fiction even a few decades ago.

They have voter files containing information on every registered voter: their address, party registration, voting history, and often much more. They have census data down to the block level. They have consumer data that can predict political preferences from shopping habits, magazine subscriptions, and car ownership. They have software that can generate thousands of possible maps and evaluate each one's partisan impact in seconds.

The precision is remarkable. Map-drawers can predict with high accuracy how each district will vote under various scenarios—and they can fine-tune the boundaries to achieve exactly the outcome they want. A district that's 55 percent Republican can be made 52 percent Republican or 58 percent Republican with small adjustments. The guesswork is gone.

This technology also makes gerrymandering harder to detect. Districts no longer need to look like salamanders. Sophisticated algorithms can create reasonably compact, normal-looking districts that are nevertheless devastatingly effective at skewing outcomes. The visual absurdity that made the original gerrymander so mockable has been replaced by something subtler and more pernicious.

What Would Fair Look Like?

If gerrymandering is the disease, what's the cure?

Independent commissions are one answer, though they raise their own questions. Who chooses the commissioners? What criteria should they use? How do you prevent the process from becoming politicized anyway? California's commission has been relatively successful, but it operates in a state where one party dominates so thoroughly that partisan advantage wasn't really the goal. Whether such commissions would work in genuinely competitive states is less clear.

Another approach is algorithmic redistricting: have computers draw the maps based on neutral criteria like compactness, population equality, and keeping counties and cities intact. This removes human discretion—but someone still has to choose which criteria to prioritize, and those choices have partisan implications. A map that prioritizes compactness will produce different results than one that prioritizes keeping communities together.

Some reformers argue for abandoning single-member districts entirely in favor of proportional representation, where seats are allocated based on each party's statewide vote share. This would make gerrymandering impossible because there would be nothing to gerrymander. But it would require fundamental changes to how Americans think about representation, and it would sever the traditional link between a district and its representative.

The simplest reform might be the most powerful: require that district lines be drawn before anyone knows who will benefit. If maps must be finalized before the census data comes in, or before candidates declare, or under some other veil of ignorance, the precision that makes modern gerrymandering so effective becomes impossible. You can't manipulate what you can't see.

The Salamander's Long Shadow

More than two centuries after that Boston newspaper cartoon, Elbridge Gerry's legacy endures in the worst possible way. The practice he reluctantly endorsed has become a permanent feature of American politics, more sophisticated and more consequential than he could have imagined.

The word itself has become a verb, a noun, and a political accusation. Politicians denounce gerrymandering while practicing it. Reformers propose solutions while courts defer to legislators. Voters express frustration while continuing to live in districts designed to make their votes meaningless.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about gerrymandering is its persistence. Despite being widely recognized as a corruption of democratic principles, despite being named and shamed for over two hundred years, despite the availability of technological and institutional solutions, it continues. The incentives are simply too strong. Politicians who benefit from gerrymandering control the process of redistricting. Asking them to give up that advantage is asking them to make their own jobs harder.

Gerry himself might appreciate the irony. He disapproved of the practice but signed the bill anyway because his party wanted it. That calculation—principle versus partisan advantage, with advantage winning—has been repeated countless times since. The salamander keeps eating democracy, one district at a time.