Essay on Gerrymandering

The first proposal, of changing the electoral system for the House of Representatives, would mean that each state is represented in proportion to its population. This entails that states with higher populations will receive more votes because they have more seats in the House. Less populous states may argue against this reform because they will have a disadvantage when it comes to voting on legislation. However, the reform also includes having each state serve as electoral districts. In this case, multi-member districts will be needed—proportional representation will require a larger district magnitude. Having these territorial subdivisions will help create an efficient legislative system because there would be less possibility of manipulating the votes—not as relevant to election results when seats are proportional. Having the votes distributed in this manner may help avoid a deadlock and therefore, allow for a faster process when passing legislation. In addition, minorities will have chance to be represented by possibly gaining a seat in a particular district—a highly populous

     First, let’s talk about the advantages of partisan elections compared to nonpartisan elections. It makes voting a lot faster because the people can just go to either democrat, republican or independent column. They do not have to go through a big list of candidates

Politics in the United States is a complex structure that is comprised of many systems. While most of these systems appear to work well, there are a few that are broken. A perfect example of a broken system is the district boundaries and the likelihood of gerrymandering. Multiple states across the country are subjected to gerrymandering, which is the act of dividing a county into election districts that provide one political party with an unfair advantage over the other. Gerrymandering is used to help or prevent a particular demographic from gaining adequate representation. In Florida, for example, there is controversy over Congressional District 5, which extends from Jacksonville down to Orlando in a way that creates a “minority-majority” district.

Partisan primaries result in judicial candidates who are dependent on special interests for their election and also tend to force candidates to affiliate with a political party.

Riker argues that these bold uses of gerrymandering are made possible, and even encouraged, by two landmark Supreme Court Cases. Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims were two similar cases from the 1960’s that addressed the unequal representation caused by the unwillingness of politicians to adjust the electoral districts to accurately reflect the major population changes of the twentieth century.15 Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims forced Congress and state legislative bodies to correct this inaccurate political representation by mandating equally sized voting districts.16 In fact, Reynolds v. Sims went so far as to require a voting population difference of no more than ten percent between the largest and smallest electoral districts.17 Furthermore,

During the course of the past few decades, the United States of America faced hundreds of issues that impact the nation’s view of leadership. Some people of the United States believe that the issues that face America involves those in office, while others believe that the issue is structural. In the case of America today, there is a momentous structural difficulty in our voting system. Furthermore, the most distinct problem that the United States handles today is gerrymandering. Throughout this essay, it will be made clear that gerrymandering is the leading problem facing America today because it harms the equality of citizens.

There are two types of gerrymandering, the first is called packing. Packing is when you put the same type of people in one electoral district. Why is packing helpful?, well packing can decrease the chance of one party influencing the other party. Cracking is the other way of gerrymandering, this is when you spread one party out to decrease their impact on the district, causing the other party to win the district. Gerrymandering in general sounds a little wrong in a political view. It sounds very wrong after hearing about the great gerrymander in 2012. In the house of representatives we have 435 seats. To be able to determine how many seats go to a state every ten years the department of commerce holds something called a census. The

In the following essay I will be talking about the disadvantages and advantages of partisan elections for state politics. I will also examine the last couple year's election results and costs. Finally, I will discuss if partisanship made a difference in the vote, as well as if a judge should be decided by partisan vote. In the next couple paragraphs I will talk more specifically about these topics.

Gerrymandering is a form of boundary redistricting, in which the boundaries of an electoral district or constituency are modified for electoral purposes, often producing a contorted or unusual shape. The resulting district is known as a Gerrymander. Gerrymandering is used as a potential way to achieve desired electoral results for a particular party, or may be used to

The article, “In Praise of Gerrymandering” written by Kevin D. Williamson, talks about gerrymandering, which is when politicians are cheating to be elected and shares his opinion that Republicans have become “too good” at this. He then illustrates that Democrats need to demonstrate better ways of obtaining votes.

Gerrymandering, is a way for certain parties- Democrats, and Republicans- to legally rig an election. The way it works is every ten years the electoral maps have to be re-drawn, meaning the districts that our votes are counted towards are redrawn every ten years. Now this might sound very innocent but the way it is set up is so a commision can draw the districts on the map, meaning they can take a very highly saturated Democratic or Republican county, and break it up so that they can group parts with other places that don't have many other people of that same party. Now this may sound like it will hurt them because they're splitting up their strong front but the commissions are much more strategic, they only break up their strong holds to place them into other districts that they can easily win. Or they break them up to shift them into districts where they need more help. Now this may make you angry that the system is built this way, but their is some good news and that is this only works in six states, and also president Obama is trying to change it so that it is not possible anywhere.

Geographically, how the territory is shaped as a major influence on what happens in an election. When you have the different sizes of districts it can come down to a win/lose situation. There are many examples throughout history of how gerrymandering has influenced and changed political outcomes, in this paper we are going to be looking a couple of different examples in order to see why the movement and location of the various districts has an impact. For this paper I am going to start by looking into historical impacts of gerrymandering, and what it has done for maps and territories. Secondly, I will then look at a specific example, North Carolina and Maryland and study how the changing of the given territory will impact the political election. Finally, I will look at gerrymandering system as a whole and the pros and the cons it has on the geographical

Proportional representation is an electoral system where parties will earn congressional seats in proportion to how many votes people cast for them. This would be an extreme opposite to the result of gerrymandering. People would then feel the need to vote because they know that their vote will actually go towards something. If 25% of the voters supported a certain party, that party would then get about 25% of congressional seats. Proportional representation is a way that could help fix the unfairness of the plurality system. The plurality system allows for larger parties to get an unfair amount of congressional seats whereas smaller parties do not have this advantage and also have a huge difficulty in winning any representation at all, also known as Duverger’s law. This would be a great way to prevent gerrymandering which helps with the redistricting issue majorly. Proportional representation could be brought in without a constitutional amendment in some cases, but the system born from this would not work well unless the powers of the Governor General were made clear. What would require a constitutional amendment would be a change to the powers of the Governor General. If it were simple enough to not require a constitutional amendment, I feel as if this would be an excellent idea and help solve many problems and unhappy people with our current

This essay determine how 100 congressional seats should be divided among the 10 states of the union. The number of seats in a state should (in any fair distribution) be proportional to its ratio in the population. Therefore rounding according to some (acceptable) rule should be applied.

In “Political Representation,” Shapiro et al. (2009) say that “political representation lies at the core of modern politics.” Representation is usually linked to the concept of democracy (Shapiro et al. 2009). The concept of representation is explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution (U.S. Const. art. I, § 1, 2). However, the meaning and appropriate form of “representation” have been debated by political theorists and philosophers for centuries. The definition of representation one chooses to use is influenced by the form of representation one finds most appropriate. Given the different forms of representation, legislators can be responsive in different ways. Representation also operates at two different levels – the national and local