When used in a rhetorical manner by opponents of a particular district map, gerrymandering has a negative connotation but does not necessarily address the legality of a challenged map. In this context, proponents may counter that the map has not been gerrymandered but has been drawn to conform with overlapping, potentially conflicting redistricting standards.
The term can also be used in legal proceedings and documents; in this context, the term describes redistricting practices that violate federal or state laws. Federal law establishes that to combat racial gerrymandering and to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act, states and jurisdictions may create majority-minority electoral districts. A majority-minority district is one in which a racial minority group or groups compose a majority of the district's total population.
Thornburg v. Gingles , a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in , established a three-part test for proving whether vote dilution in violation of the Voting Rights Act has occurred in a district: [4]. For more information on gerrymandering , please see this page.
Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. The plaintiffs could then rebut that claim by producing a less biased plan that performed as well as the existing map on measures like compactness.
The efficiency gap can help to identify plans with strong partisan bias, but it cannot say whether that bias was created intentionally. To disentangle the threads of intentional and unintentional gerrymandering, last year Cho—along with her colleagues at Urbana-Champaign, senior research programmer Yan Liu and geographer Shaowen Wang — unveiled a simulation algorithm that generates a large number of maps to compare to any given districting map, to determine whether it is an outlier.
In that paper, Cho and Liu used their algorithm to draw million imperfect but reasonable congressional district maps for Maryland, whose existing plan is being challenged in court. Nearly all their maps, they found, are biased in favor of Democrats. But the official plan is even more biased, favoring Democrats more strongly than The Florida ruling was based on the state constitution, so its implications for other states are limited.
Grofman has developed a five-pronged gerrymandering test that distills the key elements of the Wisconsin case. To these, Grofman adds two more requirements: simulations showing that the plan is an extreme outlier, suggesting that the gerrymander was intentional, and evidence that the people who made the map knew they were drawing a much more biased plan than necessary.
The choice has major ramifications. Last year, Chen and David Cottrell , a quantitative social scientist at Dartmouth University, used simulations to measure the extent of intentional gerrymandering in congressional district maps across most of the 50 states; they uncovered a fair bit, but they also found that on the national level, it mostly canceled out.
Banning only intentional gerrymandering, they concluded, would likely have little effect on the partisan balance of the US House of Representatives although it could have a significant effect on individual state legislatures.
That decision is up to the court. Collaboration between political and social scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists is the ideal way forward, Rodden and McGhee both say. But he argued that such unfairness is inherent to winner-take-all elections:. The one-person, one-vote rule is relatively easy to administer as a matter of math. The same cannot be said of partisan gerrymandering claims, because the Constitution supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly.
It hardly follows from the principle that each person must have an equal say in the election of representatives that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation in some way commensurate to its share of statewide support. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Protestors rally outside the Supreme Court during the gerrymandering cases Lamone v. Benisek and Rucho v. Common Cause on March 26, Activists have long hoped the Supreme Court would restrict partisan gerrymandering Since the s , the Supreme Court has established a great deal of precedent around what, exactly, states can and cannot do when it comes to drawing both congressional and state legislative district boundaries.
He continued: We have never struck down a partisan gerrymander as unconstitutional — despite various requests over the past 45 years.
Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. But some states have entrusted redistricting to special commissions composed of citizens or a bipartisan panel of politicians. Constitution requires that each district have about the same number of people. The federal Voting Rights Act also requires that district boundaries allow minority voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Some states have adopted additional criteria, such as requiring districts to encompass compact, contiguous areas or to keep counties, cities and communities of interest together whenever possible.
A: Gerrymandering occurs when district lines are drawn to give an advantage to a political party or group of people. One common method is for a majority party to pack voters who support the opposing party into a few districts, allowing the majority party to win a greater number of surrounding districts. A: The term dates to , when Massachusetts Gov.
Elbridge Gerry signed a bill redrawing state Senate districts to benefit the Democratic-Republican Party. Some thought an oddly shaped district looked a salamander. Gerry lost re-election as governor in but won election that same year as vice president with President James Madison.
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