It all started freshman year of high school when I had to find an application for a math project about statistical variance. After tumbling through a rabbit hole of articles about the electoral college and polling, I stumbled upon a Washington Post Article about “America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts“. Scrolling through the images, I was surprised to see the jagged, inkblot-shaped districts drawn to represent contiguous blocks of people meant to elect a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. However, I was even more surprised when I realized that Pennsylvania’s 7th district–the one in which I live– was ranked 4th! Dubbed “Goofy kicking Donald Duck,” the district spanned an area from the Philadelphia suburbs to Lancaster County, encompassing both where I lived in Delco to the Amish countryside. Although I had never heard of the concept of gerrymandering, this image inspired me to take a closer look at what redistricting is and how it can devolve into gerrymandering.
To understand gerrymandering, it is important to first understand redistricting. Redistricting occurs every ten years after the census. Representatives are split between states in a way that is proportional to the state’s population (since each state must have a minimum of one representative and the 435 representatives are split between 50 states with wildly different populations, this proportionality is not exact and is what leads to the imbalance in the electoral college). After reapportionment, the process falls to the states themselves. Each state can choose its method for drawing districts. For instance, in Pennslyvania, the state legislature passes a bill that sets the district map, but in California, they are created by an independent commission. Districts have to be equal in terms of population and usually have to be contiguous, but other than that, guidelines for drawing districts vary from state to state. These factors allow for levels of gerrymandering to differ depending on the state.
Today, gerrymandering is most often taken to mean when one political party draws the districts in a way that gives them an unfair advantage over the other party (historically, there have been other types such as racial gerrymandering, but this has been struck down by the Supreme Court). In the case of partisan gerrymandering, the party that has power over the process may use methods such as cracking or packing to stay in power.
In packing, voters from one party are concentrated into one district in order to make sure they have an overwhelming majority there but lack enough supporters in other districts to have a chance to win. In cracking, voters from the minority party are spread amongst a group of districts so they are in a slim minority in each, diluting their voting power. The above graphic shows how either method could be used to gerrymander an area with equal voting populations to favor either party.
Ultimately, gerrymandering is a bipartisan issue that undermines democracy. With the 2020 census and elections soon approaching, awareness of gerrymandering and the redistricting process is of high importance because the politicians you elect to your state legislature this year will most likely be the ones who draw the map that will last the next ten years.