Gerrymandering is a form of
boundary delimitation (redistricting)
in which
electoral district or
constituency boundaries are
deliberately modified for electoral purposes, thereby producing a
contorted or unusual shape. The resulting district is known as a
gerrymander; however, that noun can also refer to
the process.
Gerrymandering may be used to achieve desired electoral results for
a particular party, or may be used to help or hinder a particular
group of
constituent, such as
a political, racial, linguistic, religious or class group.
When used to allege that a given party is gaining a
disproportionate power, the term
gerrymandering has
negative connotations. However, a gerrymander may also be used for
purposes perceived as positive, notably in US federal voting
district boundaries which produce a proportion of constituencies
with an African-American or other minority in the majority (these
are thus called "minority-majority districts").
Origin of the term
The word
gerrymander is a portmanteau of
"Gerry" and "salamander", and is named
after Elbridge Gerry (pronounced
/ˈɡɛri/; 1744–1814), the governor of Massachusetts
from 1810 to 1812, and a supposedly
salamander-shaped constituency that he created.
In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill into law that redistricted
his state to benefit his
Democratic-Republican party. One of
the resulting contorted districts was said to resemble a
salamander. The term first appeared in the
Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812.
Although the letter
g of the eponymous
Gerry is
pronounced with a
voiced velar
plosive /ɡ/, the word
gerrymander is most commonly
pronounced /ˈdʒɛrɪˌmændər/, with a
voiced postalveolar affricate
/dʒ/.
Voting systems
Gerrymandering is used most often in favor of ruling
incumbents or a specific
political party. Societies whose
legislatures use a single-winner
voting
system are the most likely to have political parties that
gerrymander for advantage. Most notably, gerrymandering is
particularly effective in
non-proportional
systems that tend towards fewer parties, such as
first past the post.
Most democracies have partly proportional electoral systems, where
several political parties are proportionally represented in the
national parliaments, in proportion to the total numbers of votes
of the parties in the regional or national elections. In these more
or less
proportional
representation systems, gerrymandering has little or less
significance.
Some
countries, such as the UK
and Canada
, authorize
non-partisan organizations to set constituency boundaries to
prevent gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is most common in
countries where elected politicians are responsible for defining
constituency boundaries. They have obvious self interest in
determining boundaries to their and their party's interest.
Gerrymandering should not be confused with
malapportionment,
whereby the number of eligible voters per elected representative
can vary widely.
Nevertheless the ~mander suffix has
been applied to particular malapportionments, such as the "Playmander" in South Australia
and the "Bjelkemander"
in Queensland
. Sometimes political representatives use
both gerrymandering and malapportionment to try to maintain
power.
Packing and cracking
The two aims of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of
supporters’ votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes.
One strategy,
packing, is to concentrate as many voters of
one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence
in other districts. In some cases this may be done to obtain
representation for a community of common interest, rather than to
dilute that interest over several districts to a point of
ineffectiveness. A second strategy,
cracking, involves
spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in
order to deny them a sufficiently large voting block in any
particular district. The strategies are typically combined,
creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in
order to secure even greater representation for voters of another
type.
Gerrymandering is effective because of the
wasted vote effect. By packing opposition
voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess
votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts
where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for
eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition
can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins
in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among
supporters is minimized.
Effects of gerrymandering
Reduction in electoral competition and voter turnout
The most immediate and obvious effect of gerrymandering is that
elections become less competitive in all districts, particularly
packed ones. As electoral margins of victory become significantly
greater and politicians have
safe seats,
the incentive for meaningful campaigning is reduced.
As the chance of influencing electoral results by voting is
reduced,
voter turnout is likely to
decrease. Correspondingly, political campaigns are less likely to
expend resources to encourage turnout. With a reduction in
competition, a candidate puts more effort into securing party
nomination for a given district rather
than gaining approval of the general electorate. In a gerrymandered
district, the candidate is virtually assured of a win once
nominated. In 2004, for example, when California's 3rd
Congressional District became an
open seat after Republican Congressman
Doug Ose ran for higher office, the state's
three strongest Republican congressional candidates campaigned
vigorously against one another for nomination in the district's
primary election. Several other
districts were uncontested with no Republican nominees making even
a token campaign effort.
Increased incumbent advantage and campaign costs
The effect of gerrymandering for incumbents is particularly
advantageous, as incumbents are far more likely to be reelected
under conditions of gerrymandering. For example, in 2002, according
to political scientists
Norman
Ornstein and
Thomas Mann, only
four challengers were able to defeat incumbent members of the US
Congress, the lowest number in modern American history. Incumbents
are likely to be of the majority party orchestrating a gerrymander,
and incumbents are usually easily renominated in subsequent
elections, including incumbents among the minority.
This demonstrates that gerrymandering can have a deleterious effect
on the principle of democratic accountability. With uncompetitive
seats/districts reducing the fear that incumbent politicians may
lose office, they have less incentive to represent the interests of
their constituents, even when those interests conform to majority
support for an issue across the electorate as a whole. Incumbent
politicians may look out more for their party's interests than for
those of their constituents.
Gerrymandering can have an impact on campaign costs for district
elections. If districts become increasingly stretched out,
candidates must pay increased costs for transportation and trying
to develop and present
campaign
advertising across a district. The incumbent's advantage in
securing campaign funds is another benefit of his or her having a
gerrymandered secure seat.
Less descriptive representation
Gerrymandering also has significant effects on the
representation received by voters
in gerrymandered districts. Because gerrymandering is designed to
increase the number of wasted votes among the electorate, the
relative representation of particular groups can be drastically
altered from their actual share of the voting population. This
effect can significantly prevent a gerrymandered system from
achieving
proportional
and
descriptive
representation, as the winners of elections are increasingly
determined by who is drawing the districts rather than the
preferences of the voters.
Gerrymandering may be advocated to improve representation within
the legislature among otherwise underrepresented minority groups by
packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, as
it may lead to those groups' remaining marginalized in the
government as they become confined to a single district. Candidates
outside that district no longer need to represent them to win
election.
As an example, much of the redistricting conducted in the United
States in the early 1990s involved the intentional creation of
additional "majority-minority" districts where racial minorities
such as
African Americans were
packed into the majority. This "
maximization policy" drew support by
both the Republican Party (who had limited support among African
Americans and could concentrate their power elsewhere) and by
minority representatives elected as
Democrats from these
constituencies, who then had
safe
seats.
Incumbent gerrymandering
Gerrymandering can also be done to help
incumbents as a whole, effectively turning every
district into a packed one and greatly reducing the potential for
competitive elections. This is particularly likely to occur when
the minority party has significant obstruction power — unable to
enact a partisan gerrymander, the legislature instead agrees on
ensuring their own mutual reelection.
In an
unusual occurrence in 2000, for example, the two dominant parties
in the state of California
cooperatively
redrew both state and Federal legislative districts to preserve
the status quo, ensuring the electoral safety of the politicians
from unpredictable voting by the electorate. This move
proved completely effective, as no State or Federal legislative
office changed party in the
2004 election, although 53
congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats were
potentially at risk.
In 2006, the term "70/30 District" came to signify the equitable
split of two evenly split (i.e. 50/50) districts. The resulting
districts gave each party a guaranteed seat and retained their
respective power base.
Prison-based gerrymandering
Prison-based gerrymandering occurs when prisoners are counted as
"residents" of a particular district in order to pad out the
district's population when assigning political apportionment. This
phenomenon unfairly inflates the votes of individuals who happen to
live in district with prisons, violating the principle of
one person, one vote that is
fundamental to American
democracy.
Furthermore, organizations such as the
Prison Policy Initiative argue that
although many prisoners come from (and return to) urban
communities, they are counted as "residents" of the rural districts
that contain large prisons, diluting urban voters' political clout
and artificially inflating the political representation for rural
districts.
Changes to achieve competitive elections
Due to many issues associated with gerrymandering and its impact on
competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous
countries have enacted reforms making the practice either more
difficult or less effective. Countries such as the UK, Australia,
Canada and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility
for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party
bodies.
In the United States, however, such reforms are controversial and
frequently meet particularly strong opposition from groups that
benefit from gerrymandering. In a more neutral system, they might
lose considerable influence.
Redistricting by neutral or cross-party agency
The most commonly advocated electoral reform proposal targeted at
gerrymandering is to change the redistricting process. Under these
proposals, an independent and presumably objective commission is
created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the
legislature do it.
This is the system used in the United Kingdom, where the independent Boundary Commission
determines the boundaries for constituencies in the House of
Commons
and regional legislatures, subject to ratification
by the body in question (almost always granted without
debate).
To help ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be
appointed from relatively apolitical sources such as retired judges
or longstanding members of the
civil
service, possibly with requirements for adequate representation
among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the
board can be denied access to information that might aid in
gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns
of the population. As a further constraint,
consensus requirements can be imposed to ensure
that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of
fairness, such as a requirement for a
supermajority approval of the commission for
any district proposal.
Consensus requirements, however, can lead to
deadlock, such as occurred in Missouri
following
the 2000 census. There, the equally numbered partisan
appointees were unable to reach consensus in a reasonable time, and
consequently the courts had to determine district lines.
In the US
state of Iowa
, the
nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau (LSB) (akin to the US
Congressional Research
Service) determines boundaries of electoral districts.
Aside from satisfying federally mandated contiguity and population
equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities.
Consideration of political factors such as location of incumbents,
previous boundary locations, and political party proportions is
specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are chiefly regularly
shaped
polygons, the LSB process has led to
districts that follow county lines.
In 2005,
the US state of Ohio
had a ballot
measure to create an independent commission whose first priority
was competitive districts, a sort of "reverse gerrymander".
A complex mathematical formula was to be used to determine the
competitiveness of a district. The measure failed voter approval
chiefly due to voter concerns that communities of interest would be
broken up.
Changing the voting system
Because gerrymandering relies on the wasted vote effect, the use of
a different
voting system with fewer
wasted votes can help reduce gerrymandering. In particular, the use
of
multimember districts
alongside voting systems establishing
proportional representation such
as
single non-transferable
vote or
cumulative voting can
greatly reduce the proportion of wasted votes, and therefore the
potential for gerrymandering. Due to their relative simplicity and
similarity to
first past the
post electoral reformers often advocate them as
replacement systems .
Electoral systems with different forms of proportional
representation are now found in nearly all European countries. In
this way, they have multi-party systems (with many parties
represented in the parliaments) with higher voter attendance in the
elections , fewer wasted votes, and a wider variety of political
opinions represented.
Electoral systems with election of just one winner in each district
(i.e., "winner-take-all" electoral systems), and no proportional
distribution of extra mandates to smaller parties, tend to create
two-party systems (
Duverger's Law).
In these, just two parties effectively compete in the national
elections and thus the national political discussions are forced
into a narrow two-party frame, where loyalty and forced statements
inside the two parties distort the political debate.
Changing the size of districts and the elected body
If a proportional or semi-proportional voting system is used then
increasing the number of winners in any given district will reduce
the number of wasted votes. This can be accomplished both by
merging separate districts together and by increasing the total
size of the body to be elected. Since gerrymandering relies on
exploiting the wasted vote effect, increasing the number of winners
per district can reduce the potential for gerrymandering in
proportional systems. Unless all districts are merged, however,
this method cannot eliminate gerrymandering entirely.
In contrast to proportional methods, if a nonproportional voting
system with multiple winners (such as
block voting) is used, then
increasing the size of the elected body while keeping the number of
districts constant will not reduce the amount of wasted votes,
leaving the potential for gerrymandering the same. While merging
districts together under such a system can reduce the potential for
gerrymandering, doing so also amplifies the tendency of block
voting to produce
landslide
victories, creating a similar effect to gerrymandering by
concentrating wasted votes among the opposition and denying them
representation.
If a system of single-winner elections is used, then increasing the
size of the elected body will implicitly increase the number of
districts to be created. This change can actually make
gerrymandering easier when raising the number of single-winner
elections, as opposition groups can be more efficiently packed into
smaller districts without accidentally including supporters,
further increasing the number of wasted votes amongst the
opposition.
Using fixed districts
Another way to avoid gerrymandering is simply to stop redistricting
altogether and use existing political boundaries such as state,
county, or provincial lines. While this prevents future
gerrymandering, any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained.
The
United States Senate, for
instance, has more competitive elections than the House of
Representatives due to the use of existing state borders rather
than gerrymandered districts — Senators are elected by their entire
state, while Representatives are elected in legislatively-drawn
districts.
The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however,
in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in
population. Individual voters can come to have very different
degrees of influence on the legislative process. This
malapportionment can greatly affect
representation after long periods of time or large population
movements. In the United Kingdom during the
industrial revolution, several
constituencies which had been fixed since they gained
representation in the Parliament of England became so small that
they could be won with only a handful of voters (
rotten boroughs). Similarly, in the US
the state legislature of Alabama refused to redistrict for more
than 60 years, despite major changes in population patterns. By
1960 less than a quarter of the state's population controlled the
majority of seats in the legislature. However, this practice of
using fixed districts for state legislatures was effectively banned
in the United States after the
Baker
v. Carr Supreme
Court decision, establishing a rule of
one man, one vote.
Objective rules to create districts
Another means to reduce gerrymandering is to create objective,
precise criteria to which any district map must comply. Courts in
the United States, for instance, have ruled that congressional
districts must be contiguous in order to be constitutional. This,
however, is not a particularly binding constraint, as very narrow
strips of land with few or no voters in them may be used to connect
separate regions for inclusion in one district. Another objective
criterion is maximized
compactness, subject to other
constraints such as geographic features and boundaries of local
governments.
Shortest splitline algorithm
The
Center for Range Voting
has proposed a way to draw districts by a simple
algorithm. The algorithm uses only the shape of
the state, the number N of districts wanted, and the population
distribution as inputs. The algorithm (slightly simplified) is:
- Start with the boundary outline of the state.
- Let N=A+B where A and B are as nearly equal whole numbers as
possible. (For example, 7=4+3.)
- Among all possible dividing lines that split the state into two
parts with population ratio A:B, choose the shortest.
- We now have two hemi-states, each to contain a specified number
(namely A and B) of districts. Handle them recursively via the same
splitting procedure.
This district-drawing algorithm has the advantages of simplicity,
ultra-low cost, lack of intentional bias, and it produces simple
boundaries that do not meander needlessly. It has the disadvantage
of ignoring geographic features such as rivers, cliffs, and
highways and cultural features such as tribal boundaries. This
landscape oversight causes it to produce districts differently than
those an unbiased human would produce. Not ignoring geographic
features can induce very complicated boundaries.
Another criticism of the system is that splitline districts
sometimes divide and diffuse the voters in a large metropolitan
area. This condition is most likely to occur when one of the first
splitlines cuts through the metropolitan area. It is often
considered a drawback of the system because residents of the same
city are assumed to be a community of common interest.
This is most evident
in the splitline allocation of Colorado
.
As of July 2007, shortest-splitline redistricting pictures are now
available for all 50 states.
Minimum district to convex polygon ratio
Another method is to define a
minimum district to convex polygon ratio. To use this
method, every proposed district is circumscribed by the smallest
possible convex polygon (similar to the concept of a
convex hull). Then, the area of the district is
divided by the area of the polygon; or, if at the edge of the
state, by the portion of the area of the polygon within state
boundaries. The advantages of this method are that it allows a
certain amount of human intervention to take place (thus solving
the Colorado problem of splitline districting); it allows the
borders of the district to follow existing jagged subdivisions,
such as neighborhoods or voting districts (something isoperimetric
rules would discourage); and it allows concave coastline districts,
such as the Florida gulf coast area. It would mostly eliminate bent
districts, but still permit long, straight ones. However, since
human intervention is still allowed, the gerrymandering issues of
packing and cracking would still occur, just to a lesser
extent.
Minimum isoperimetric quotient
It is possible to define a specific minimum
isoperimetric quotient or minimum
ratio, between the area and perimeter of any given congressional
voting district. Although technologies presently exist to define
districts in this manner, there are no rules in place mandating
their use, and no national movement to implement such a policy.
Such rules would prevent incorporation of jagged natural
boundaries, such as rivers or mountains. When such boundaries are
required (such as at the edge of a state), certain districts may
not be able to meet the required minima.
Use of databases and computer technology
The introduction of modern
computers
alongside the development of elaborate
voter databases and special districting
software has made gerrymandering a far more precise science. Using
such databases, political parties can obtain detailed information
about every household including political party registration,
previous campaign donations, and the number of times residents
voted in previous elections and combine it with other predictors of
voting behavior such as age, income, race, or education level. With
this data, gerrymandering politicians can predict the voting
behavior of each potential district with an astonishing degree of
precision, leaving little chance for creating an accidentally
competitive district.
National examples of gerrymandering
Among western democracies, Israel and the Netherlands employ
electoral systems with only one (nationwide) voting district for
election of national representatives. This precludes
gerrymandering.
Canada
Early in
Canadian history, both the federal and provincial levels
used gerrymandering to try to maximize partisan power.
When
Alberta
and Saskatchewan
were admitted to Confederation in 1905, their original district boundaries were set forth
in the respective Alberta and Saskatchewan Acts. These boundaries
had been devised by federal
Liberal cabinet members to ensure the election
of provincial Liberal governments.
Since responsibility for drawing electoral boundaries was handed
over to independent agencies, this problem has largely been
eliminated. Manitoba was the first province to authorize a
non-partisan group to define constituency boundaries in the 1950s.
In 1964, the federal government delegated the drawing of boundaries
for national seats to the "arm's length"
Elections Canada. As a result,
gerrymandering is not generally a major issue in Canada.
In 2006,
a controversy arose on Prince Edward Island
over the provincial government's decision to throw
out an electoral map drawn by an independent commission.
Instead they created two new maps. The government adopted the
second of these, designed by the
caucus of
the governing party. Opposition parties and the media attacked
Premier
Pat Binns for what they saw as
gerrymandering of districts. Among other things, the government
adopted a map that ensured that every current
Member of the Legislative
Assembly from the premier's party had a district to run in for
re-election, whereas in the original map, several had been
redistricted. Despite this, in the
2007 provincial
election only seven of 20 incumbent Members of the Legislative
Assembly were re-elected (seven did not run for re-election).
The
current federal electoral district boundaries in Saskatchewan have also been labelled as gerrymandered — the
province's two major cities, Saskatoon
and Regina
, are both "cracked" into four districts each when
the populations of the cities proper would justify about three and
two and a half all-urban (or mostly-urban) districts respectively -
the map instead groups parts of the New Democratic Party-friendly cities
with large Conservative-leaning rural
areas.
At the time the districts were created in their largely present
form in the mid-1990s, it was alleged that they were intended to
give the NDP and Liberals a better chance of winning seats
including much of the province's rural hinterlands at the expense
of the then-extant
Reform
Party. If that was the intention it has backfired, as in 1997
Reform took three of the four Saskatoon seats thanks largely to
strong rural support, in 2000 their successors the
Canadian Alliance added the remaining
Saskatoon seat plus one in Regina and in 2004 the CA's successors
the Conservatives added the NDP's two remaining Regina seats to
shut the NDP out of the province. Since then the Conservatives have
held the seven districts in question, while the NDP holds no seats
in the province despite commanding a strong proportion of the vote
especially in the cities. Polling data shows the Tories could
probably not have swept either of these cities had they contained
all-urban or mostly-urban constituencies. Perhaps not surprisingly,
neither the federal Conservatives nor the new centre-right
Saskatchewan Party government has
expressed any interest in changing the map, notwithstanding the
fact that it was not their creation.
Chile
After Chileans voted General
Augusto
Pinochet out of power in a 1988
plebiscite, the military government began working
on a law to define the new electoral system for the 1989 elections.
The
60 electoral
districts for the
Chamber of Deputies (lower
house) were designed so that — if the results of the 1988
plebiscite were extrapolated to the coming parliamentary elections
— in no district would the NO option outpoll the YES option by more
than 2:1. (The NO option was for removing Pinochet from power and
to trigger democratic elections.) The rationale for this — in a
system in which only two candidates are elected per district and
where a coalition needed twice the vote of the opponent to gain
both district seats — was that the voters who favoured the NO
option would vote for the
Centre-Left coalition,
which opposed the Pinochet dictatorship, and the ones that favoured
the YES option would be inclined to vote for the candidates of the
right, which supported the
military government.
In the
Senate —where a whole
administrative region consists of
one or two constituencies— gerrymandering of districts had a
limited effect. The dictatorship, therefore, to ensure that the
winning majority (the Center-Left coalition, as it was expected)
would be unable to reach the
quorum necessary
to change the
Constitution by
itself, allocated a number of seats to appointed senators. These
unelected senators were eliminated in the 2005 constitutional
reforms, but the electoral map has remained largely untouched. (In
2007 a new region was created, which altered the composition of two
senatorial constituencies.)
Germany
When the
electoral districts in Germany
were redrawn in 2000, the ruling Social Democratic
Party (SPD) was
accused of gerrymandering to marginalize the socialist PDS party. The SPD combined
traditional PDS strongholds in eastern Berlin
with new
districts made up of more populous areas of western Berlin, where
the PDS had very limited following.
After having won four seats in Berlin in the 1998 national
election, the PDS was able to retain only two seats altogether in
the 2002 elections. Under German electoral law, a
political party has to win either more than
five percent of the votes, or at least three directly-elected
seats, to qualify for top-up seats under the
Additional Member System.
The PDS
thus were unable to qualify for top-up seats and were confined to
just two members of the Bundestag
, the German federal parliament. But the elected
representatives held their seats as individuals. In the election of
2005, the "Left Party" (successor of the PDS) gained 8.7% of the
votes and thus qualified for top-up seats.
However, the number of Bundestag seats of parties which
traditionally get over 5% of the votes cannot be affected very much
by gerrymandering, because seats are awarded to these parties on a
proportional basis. Only when a party wins so many districts in any
one of the 16 federal states that those seats alone count for more
than its proportional share of the vote in that same state does the
districting have some influence on larger parties — those extra
seats, called "
Überhangmandate",
remain.
Greece
Gerrymandering has been rather common in Greek history since
organised parties with national ballots only appeared after the
1926 Constitution. The only case before that was the creation of
the Piraeus electoral district in 1906, in order to give the
Theotokis party a safe district. The most infamous case of
gerrymandering was in the 1956 elections, which was incidentally
the first election where women voted. While in all other post
World War II national elections the
districts were based on the
prefecture
(νομός) for 1956 the country was split in districts of varying
sizes, others being the size of prefectures, others the size of
sub-prefectures (επαρχία) and others somewhere in between. In small
districts the winning party would take all seats, in intermediate
size it would take most and there was proportional representation
in the largest districts. The districts though were chosen in such
a way that small districts were those that traditionally voted for
the right while large districts were those that voted against the
right. This system has become known as the three-phase (τριφασικό)
system or the baklava system (because, as baklava is split into
full pieces and corner pieces, the country was also split into
disproportionate pieces). The opposition, being composed of the
center and the left, formed a coalition with the sole intent to
change the electoral law to be more representative and call new
elections, despite the fact that only 7 years earlier the center
and the left had fought each other in the
Greek Civil War. Despite the opposition
winning the popular vote (1,620,007 votes against 1,594,992), the
right wing
ERE won the majority of seats (165 to
135) and was to lead the country for the next 2 years.
Ireland
Until the
1980s Dáil boundaries in the
state of Ireland
were drawn not by an independent commission but by
government ministers. Successive arrangements by governments
of all political characters have been attacked as gerrymandering.
Ireland uses the
Single
Transferable Vote and as well as the actual boundaries drawn
the main tool of gerrymandering has been the number of seats per
constituency used, with three-seat constituencies normally
benefiting the strongest parties in an area, whereas four-seat
constituencies normally helped the second strongest party.
In 1947 the rapid rise of new party
Clann na Poblachta threatened the
position of the governing party
Fianna
Fáil. The government of
Éamon
de Valera introduced the
Electoral Amendment Act, 1947
which increased the size of the Dáil from 138 to 147 and increased
the number of three-seat constituencies from fifteen to twenty-two.
The
result has been described as "a blatant attempt at gerrymander
which no Six
County
Unionist could have bettered." The following
February the
1948 general
election was held and Clann na Poblachta secured ten
constituencies instead of the nineteen they would have received
proportional to their vote.
In the mid-1970s, the Minister for Local Government,
James Tully, attempted to
arrange the constituencies to ensure that the governing
Fine Gael–
Labour
Party National
Coalition would win a parliamentary majority. The
Electoral Act 1974 was
planned as a major reversal of previous gerrymandering by Fianna
Fáil (then in opposition). Tully ensured that there were as many as
possible three-seat constituencies where the governing parties were
strong, in the expectation that the governing parties would each
win a seat in many constituencies, relegating Fianna Fáil to one
out of three. In areas where the governing parties were weak,
four-seat constituencies were used so that the governing parties
had a strong chance of still winning two. The election results
created substantial change, as there was a larger than expected
collapse in the vote, with Fianna Fáil winning a landslide victory,
two out of three seats in many cases, relegating the National
Coalition parties to fight for the last seat. Consequently, the
term
Tullymandering
was used to describe the phenomenon of a failed attempt at
gerrymandering.
Latvia
In 1989 and 1990 elections, some accused the
Popular Front of Latvia (PFL) of
gerrymandering in favor of ethnic Latvians. For example, in 1990
the nearly pure Latvian-ethnic
Ventspils district (with about 0.6% of
population) was awarded 3 constituencies out of 201 (1.5%), with 2
of PFL candidates running unopposed. In 1991, most native Russians
were
denied citizenship and
therefore had no voting rights. Naturalization of native Russians
began in 1995. In 1993 the country returned to proportional
representation.
Lithuania
After declaring independence from the USSR in 1990, in 1994 the
then-government reorganised the county and municipal boundaries in
the
south-east of the country to
reduce the influence of the
Polish majority in the area.
This was done by connecting the majority-Polish areas in the
Vilnius, Trakai and Šalčininkai municipalities to municipalities
without major Polish populations, such as Elektrėnai, Ukmergė and
Širvintos.
The result is that Vilnius County
has a total Polish minority of 29.01%, which
contain municipalities like Vilnius and Šalčininkai, which have a
much larger percentage of the population (61.3% and 80%
respectively). This was done to ensure continued
discrimination and
Lithuanisation of
the Polish minority, and to ensure that no autonomous Polish
districts would get a high-enough percentage number of support in
the county.
Northern Ireland
In the
1920s and 1930s, the Ulster
Unionist Party created electoral boundaries for the Londonderry
County Borough Council
to ensure election of a Unionist council in a city where
Nationalists had a high
majority. Initially local parties drew the boundaries, but
in the 1930s the
province-wide government
redrew them to reinforce the gerrymander.
In 1929 the
Parliament of
Northern Ireland passed a bill shifting the Parliament's
electoral system from the relatively proportional
single transferable vote (STV) to
the less proportional
first past the
post or
plurality voting
system.
The only exception was for the election of
four Stormont MPs to represent the Queen's
University of Belfast
. Many scholars believe that the boundaries
were gerrymandered to underrepresent Nationalists. Some geographers
and historians, for instance Professor
John H. Whyte,
disagree. They have argued that the electoral boundaries for the
Parliament of Northern
Ireland were not gerrymandered to a greater level than that
produced by any single-winner election system, and that the actual
number of Nationalist MPs barely changed under the revised system.
Most observers have acknowledged that the change to a single-winner
system was a key factor, however, in stifling the growth of smaller
political parties, such as the
Northern Ireland Labour Party
and Independent Unionists.
The United Kingdom suspended the Parliament of Northern Ireland and
its government in 1972. It restored the single transferable vote
(STV) for elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the
following year, using the same definitions of constituencies as for
the Westminster Parliament.
Currently in Northern Ireland, all elections
use the STV except those for positions in the Westminster
Parliament
, which follow the pattern in the rest of the United
Kingdom by using "first past the post."
Singapore
In recent decades, critics have accused the ruling
People's Action Party (PAP) of unfair
electoral practices to maintain significant majorities in the
Parliament of Singapore.
Among the complaints are that the government uses
gerrymandering.
The
Elections Department was
established as part of the executive branch under the
Prime Minister of Singapore, rather
than as an independent body. Critics have accused it of giving the
ruling party the power to decide polling districts and polling
sites through electoral engineering, based on poll results in
previous election. Opposition parties have alleged that the
Elections Department decisions have given unfair advantage to the
ruling party and have affected the outcome of some electoral
battles.
Critics point out the dissolution of the Group Representation
Constituencies (GRC) of
Cheng San GRC
and
Eunos
GRC. Each was dissolved by the Elections Department with voters
redistributed to other constituencies after opposition parties
gained ground in elections. Such action was controversial. Critics
have speculated about the possibility of the Elections Department's
dissolving next the
Aljunied GRC in
the next General Elections, likely in 2010 or 2011. The opposition
Workers' Party gained ground there in the General Elections in
2006, when it earned approximately 44% of the votes.
PAP strongholds, such as
Tanjong Pagar
GRC and
Ang Mo Kio GRC,
where Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong respectively contest, have seldom been contested by the
opposition. When Ang Mo Kio GRC was last contested in 2006, the PAP
has
won 66% of the
votes.
United States
The United States has a long tradition of gerrymandering which
precedes the 1789 election of the
First U.S. Congress.
In 1788, Patrick Henry and his Anti-Federalist allies were in control of
the Virginia
House of
Delegates. They drew the boundaries of Virginia's
5th congressional district
in an attempt to keep James Madison out of the U.S. House of
Representatives.
Historically, each state legislature has used gerrymandering to try
to control the political makeup of its United State House
delegation. Partisan legislators typically try to maximize the
number of congressional delegation seats under the control of the
legislature's majority party.
The practice of gerrymandering the borders of new states continued
past the Civil War and into the late 19th century. By the rules for
representation in the
Electoral College, each new
state carried at least three electoral votes regardless of its
population.
All redistricting in the United States has been contentious because
it has been controlled by political parties vying for power. As
established by the
United
States Constitution, districts for members of the
House of
Representatives are to be redrawn every ten years following
each
census. In many states, state
legislatures have redrawn boundaries for state legislative
districts at the same time.
When faced with losing power, however, members of some legislatures
simply refused to redistrict. Early struggles for power were
between rural and urban interests, as well as between political
parties. The state legislature of Alabama, for instance, refused to
redistrict from 1901 to the 1960s, despite changing conditions in a
state that was industrializing and where population was rapidly
moving to cities. This allowed state politics to heavily favor
rural interests. In 1960, approximately a quarter of the state's
population controlled the state legislature. When the state
legislature could not agree on boundaries, a federal court worked
with a new non-partisan body to conclude defining new districts in
1972.
Intense political battles over contentious redistricting typically
take place within state legislatures responsible for creating the
electoral maps. Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
federal courts may be involved to ensure that historical patterns
of discrimination are not perpetuated.
This process can create strange bedfellows interested in securing
reelection; in some states, Republicans have cut deals with
opposing black Democratic state legislators to create
majority-black districts. By packing black Democratic voters into a
single district, they can essentially ensure the election of a
black Congressman or reelection of a black state legislator due to
the packed concentration of Democratic voters — however, the
surrounding districts are more safely Republican in areas like the
South, where white conservatives have increasingly shifted from the
Democratic to the Republican Party in national elections in the
last four decades.
In Pennsylvania, the Republican-dominated state legislature used
gerrymandering to eliminate Democratic representative
Frank Mascara. Mascara was elected to Congress
in 1994. In 2002 the Republican Party altered the boundaries of his
original district so much that he was pitted against fellow
Democratic candidate
John Murtha in the
election. The shape of Mascara’s newly drawn district formed a
finger that stopped at his street, encompassing his house though
not the spot where he parked his car. Murtha won the election in
the newly formed district.
State legislatures have used gerrymandering along racial or ethnic
lines both to decrease and increase minority representation in
state governments and congressional delegations. In the state of
Ohio, a conversation between Republican officials was recorded that
demonstrated that redistricting was being done to aid their
political candidates. Furthermore, the discussions assessed race of
voters as a factor in redistricting, because African-Americans had
backed Democratic candidates. Republicans removed approximately
13,000 African American voters from the district of Jim Raussen, a
Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, in an
attempt to tip the scales in what was once a competitive district
for Democratic candidates.
International election observers from the
OSCE
Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, who were
invited to observe and report on the
2004 national
elections, expressed criticism of the U.S. congressional
redistricting process and made a recommendation that the procedures
be reviewed to ensure genuine competitiveness of Congressional
election contests.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
After Reconstruction and the granting of citizenship and suffrage
to freedmen, state legislatures developed new constitutions with
provisions to make voter registration and elections more
complicated, such as
poll taxes,
residency requirements,
literacy
tests and
grandfather
clauses. These were designed to, and effectively succeeded in
disfranchising
most African Americans and many poor whites in southern states. In
areas where African American and other minorities succeeded in
registering, some states created districts that were gerrymandered
to reduce the voting impact of minorities.
With the Civil Rights Movement and passage of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, additional federal enforcement and protections of suffrage
for all citizens were enacted. Gerrymandering for the purpose of
reducing the political influence of a racial or ethnic minority
group was prohibited. Poll taxes for federal elections were
prohibited by ratification of the
Twenty-fourth
Amendment in 1964, and a later Supreme Court case struck down
poll taxes as a prerequisite for any election. Gerrymandering for
political gain has remained possible under the Constitution.
After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, some states created
"majority-minority" districts. This practice, also called
"affirmative gerrymandering", was supposed to redress historic
discrimination and ensure that ethnic minorities would gain some
seats in government.
Since the 1990s, however, gerrymandering
based solely on racial data has been ruled unconstitutional by the
United States Supreme Court
under the Fourteenth
Amendment, first in Shaw
v. Reno (1993)
and subsequently in
Miller
v. Johnson
(1995).
The constitutionality of using racial considerations to create
districts remains difficult to assess, despite past injustices. In
Hunt v. Cromartie (1999), the Supreme Court
approved a racially focused gerrymandering of a congressional
district on the grounds that the definition was not pure racial
gerrymandering but instead partisan gerrymandering, which is
constitutionally permissible. With the increasing racial
polarization of parties in the South in the US as conservative
whites move from the Democratic to the Republican Party,
gerrymandering may become partisan and also achieve goals for
ethnic representation.
In a few circumstances, the use of goal-driven district boundaries
may be used for positive social goals (at least considered so from
less partisan viewpoints).
When the state legislature considered
representation for Arizona
's Native American reservations, they thought each
needed their own House member, because of historic conflicts
between the Hopi and Navajo nations. Since the Hopi
reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, the
legislature created an unusual district configuration which
features a fine filament along a river course several hundred miles
in length to attach two Navajo regions,
Arizona's 2nd congressional
district.
In another case (frequently cited as an outrageous example of
gerrymandering), the California state legislature created a
congressional district that extends over a narrow coastal strip for
several hundred miles. It ensures that a common community of
interest will be represented, rather than the coastal areas' being
dominated by inland concerns. These are illustrative of factoring
in communities of common interest in drawing district
boundaries.
Recent steps
In a
decision
on June 28, 2006, the United States Supreme Court upheld most of a Texas congressional map engineered
in 2003 by former House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The
7-2 decision allows state legislatures to redraw and gerrymander
districts as often as they like (not just after the decennial
census). Thus they may work to protect their political parties'
standing and number of seats, so long as they do not harm racial
and ethnic minority groups. A 5-4 majority declared one
Congressional district unconstitutional in the case because of harm
to an ethnic minority.
Rather than allowing more political influence, some states'
citizens are considering shifting redistricting authority from
politicians and giving it to non-partisan commissions. For
instance, Washington state created the
standing Washington State
Redistricting Commission and Arizona the
Arizona Independent
Redistricting Commission. The
Rhode Island
Reapportionment Commission and
New Jersey Redistricting
Commission are
ad hoc but
developed the past two decennial reapportionments tied to new
census data.
According
to its municipal charter, the city
of San
Diego
uses a third party commission to define district
boundaries.
See also
References
- Michel Balinski, "Fair Majority Voting (or How to Eliminate
Gerrymandering)" Amer. Math. Monthly 115
2 (2008): 97. "Incumbent candidates, in tailored districts, are
almost certain of reelection (over 98% in 2002, over 94% in
2006).
- Prison-Based Gerrymandering — New York Times
editorial, New York Times, May 20, 2006.
- Dr. Michael McDonald, US Elections Project: Alabama
Redistricting Summary Dept. of Public and International Affairs George Mason
University, accessed 6 Apr 2008
- Reynolds v. Sims states that "a state
legislative apportionment scheme may properly give representation
to various political subdivisions and provide for compact districts
of contiguous territory if substantial equality among districts is
maintained." See also the Wikipedia article.
- http://www.rangevoting.org/SSHR/co_final.png
- James Case "Flagrant Gerrymandering: Help from the
Isoperimetric Theorem?"
- "No Christmas election: Binns". cbc.ca, November 16, 2006.
- Based on the average population per federal riding in
Saskatchewan which is considerably less than in the more
populous provinces
- The Chilean Electoral System.
- Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow
(Hutchinson, London, 1993) hardback. page 637 ISBN 009175030X
- Constituencies in 1990 elections — see Ugāles,
Tārgales, Ziru constituencies, # 199—201
- Yawning
Bread, "Electoral boundary changes: as opaque as ever", March
2006. http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2006/yax-553.htm
- Prime Minister's Office, Our Departments
- Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political
Behavior, Pippa Norris
- About Elections, Singapore Democratic
Party
- Manifesto, The Workers' Party of Singapore
- Labunski, Richard. James Madison and the Struggle for the
Bill of Rights', New York: Oxford University Press, 2006
- Compare a map of the United States in 1860 [1] with a map from 1870 [2].
- Dr. Michael McDonald, US Elections Project: Alabama
Redistricting Summary George Mason University, Dept. of Public and International
Affairs, accessed 6 Apr 2008
- Temporarily Disabled
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