Gerrymander

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Gerrymandering is the deliberate manipulation of political borders (in many countries, specifically the "electoral district/constituency boundaries") for short-term electoral advantage, usually of incumbents. The word gerrymander serves both as a verb meaning to perpetrate the abuse and as a noun describing the resulting electoral geography.

Overview

Gerrymandering is most effective in electoral systems with districts that elect a single representative. In these elections, the district boundaries can have a crucial impact on the number of persons elected by a party or group to a legislature.

One form of gerrymandering occurs when the boundaries of a constituency are changed in order to eliminate some area with a high concentration of people who vote in a similar way (e.g for a certain political party). Another form occurs when an area with a high concentration of similar voters is split among several districts, ensuring that the party has a small majority in several districts rather than a large majority in one. Often, such gerrymandering is held to redress a long-overlooked imbalance, as when creating a black majority district.

The problem with any geographically static districting system is that it does not take in to account changes in population, meaning that individual electors can grow to have vastly different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This is particularly a problem during times of large population movements, and was especially prominent in the United Kingdom during the industrial revolution. (See: Reform Act and rotten borough)

The origins of the term

The term is named for an early Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry. Two reporters were looking at the new election map and one commented that one of the new districts looked just like a salamander. The other retorted that it looked like a Gerrymander. The name stuck and is now used by political scientists everywhere.

The Dame Shirley Porter case

Yet another method is to attempt to move the population within the existing boundaries. This occurred in Westminster, in the United Kingdom. The local government was controlled by the Conservative party, and the leader of the council, Dame Shirley Porter, conspired with others to implement the policy of council house sales in such a way as to shore up the Conservative vote in marginal wards by selling the houses there to people thought likely to vote Conservative. An inquiry by the district auditor found that these actions had resulted in financial loss to tax payers and Porter and three others were surcharged to cover the loss. Those surcharged resisted this ruling with a legal challenge, but, in December 2001, the appeal court upheld the district auditor's ruling and Porter remains liable for the amount of the surcharge and legal costs.

Gerrymandering in Northern Ireland

A particularly famous case occurred in Northern Ireland, where the Ulster Unionist Party government created electoral boundaries for local councils which, coupled with restrictions on voting rights based on economic status, ensured the election of unionist candidates in electoral areas where nationalists were in the overwhelming majority. This policy, coupled with a policy that gave council houses to unionists at the expense of nationalists (in one famous case, giving a council house to an unmarried protestant woman rather than a large catholic family), to ensure unionist control of electoral wards, produced the Civil Rights Movement. The battle for civil rights in local government, and an end to gerrymandered discrimination, led to The Troubles.

Though many dismiss the gerrymandering of the Northern Irish Assembly to be popular myth, saying that the electoral boundaries for the Parliament of Northern Ireland were not gerrymandered to any great extent. The electoral system used for this body (multi-winner Single Transferable Vote) makes it difficult to successfully gerrymander. This is not true, as after the creation of Northern Ireland in 1922, the system of proportional representation was abolished in favour of a first-past-the-post system. The Single Transferable Vote system was restored only recently. (See Tullymandering below.)

Gerrymandering in the United States

Others realized that gerrymandering was cutting minority populations in half to keep all minorities in the minority, in as many districts as possible. This led to a major civil rights conflict; Gerrymandering for the purpose of reducing the political influence of a racial or ethnic minority group is illegal in the United States under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but redistricting for political gain is constitutional.

The possibility of gerrymandering makes the process of redistricting extremely politically contentious within the United States. Under U.S. law, districts for members of the House of Representatives are redrawn every ten years following each census and it is common practice for state legislative boundaries to be redrawn at the same time. Battles over contentious redistricting take place within state legislatures, which are responsible for creating the electoral maps in most states, as well as federal courts.

The introduction of computers has made redistricting a more precise science, but the incentives for elites to create maps that increase their delegation in Congress remain. Many political analysts have argued that the United States House of Representatives has been gerrymandered to the point that there are now very few contested seats, and have also argued that this has a number of detrimental effects, among which is that the lack of contested seats makes it unnecessary for candidates to attract middle voters and compromise.

Tullymandering

In the Republic of Ireland in the mid 1970s, the Minister for Local Government, James Tully, attempted to arrange constituencies to ensure that the governing National Coalition would win a parliamentary majority. This he did by ensuring as many as possible three-seat constituencies, in the expectation that the governing parties would each win a seat in many constituencies, relegating the opposition Fianna FÃÂÃÂ¡il party to one out of three. In fact the process backfired spectacularly, with Fianna FÃÂÃÂ¡il winning two out of three in many cases, relegating the National Coalition parties to fight for the last seat. His attempted gerrymander came to be called a Tullymander.