How Does Gerrymandering Affect American Politics

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

The gerrymandering process allows the majority party within a given state to maximize the number of seats it can win in the future elections. This leads it into creating as many districts as possible where it constitutes the majority. By doing this, those who support the minority parties are packed into the remaining few districts. This results in more electoral security for the minority party and less electoral security for the members of the minority parties. It also produces greater homogeneity within the districts while reducing competition for the house seats. Apart from the positive effects of gerrymandering, there are a number of negative effects associated with partisan gerrymandering. This process results in more competitive districts when compared to the non competitive districts and this in turn ambiguously affects polarization. Partisan gerrymandering also affects the state legislative electoral competitiveness as it has severe partisan biases. Excessive partisan gerrymandering is the violation of the equal protection clause since it consigns the

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,

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 order to combat gerrymandering, it is important to understand how and why a district is

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.

In American politics today, many practices exist that greatly harm the American public. One of these dangerous practices, known as gerrymandering, occurs in nearly every state. While some claim that the practice helps America, in reality gerrymandering harms American democracy and safety. Gerrymandering greatly affects society, and must become illegal to insure fair representation, the democratic processes in America continues, and America continues to thrive.

Gerrymandering in the United States Gerrymandering is a political technique where the majority party in a district or state, set up the boundaries of each district for state and federal governing houses to benefit them. In the United States, districts in each state are redrawn when the census is taken, but the redrawing is voted on by the members of the government in each state, so often the majority party sets up each district boundaries to favor incumbent candidates or their own party. Both major parties in the U.S. contribute to gerrymandering, but the GOP has been proven to more actively engage in the practice, mostly to disenfranchise minority voters, who often align with the Democratic party. Ocasionally, parties will collude with the

Gerrymandering may prevent the purpose of members being elected on a single-member district basis because districts can be drawn favoring one political party. Gerrymandering is when districts have been drawn so the boundaries of legislative districts in bizarre or unusual shapes to favor one party. Gerrymandering protects incumbents and discourages challengers and it strengthens the majority party while weakening the opposition party

I certainly agree that gerrymandering deprives voters and is unjust in itself. Gerrymandering produces an extremely biased government, one that is solely based upon the

Gerrymandering is a tactic in which the drawing of district boundaries is manipulated so it favors one party over another. The shapes of these certain boundaries are altered substantially to benefit a certain party. According to American Government and Politics Today, the strategy of gerrymandering arose in 1812, when under the power of the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, gerrymandering was used to aid his specific party (Bardes, Shelley, and Schmidt). To state the obvious, gerrymandering does hinder our American democracy. What is the point of a democracy and elections if the legislative body is redrawing district boundaries, while purposefully trying to influence voting? Gerrymandering skews voting. A post on 21st Century Jeffersonianism

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

Each party wants to have the most people representing the citizens. This causes the parties to argue on the districts congressional lines, especially those in Florida, as Warren discusses the ways that gerrymandering has been going on with the Florida legislature. Who gets to decide what is fair is the most important question within this article, but it all comes down to the parties. One party will always overrun the other, which is the way the system tends to work. The problem is which party decides what is fair.

Historically in America, voting has been a relatively discriminatory practice. It has limited and deprived many individuals of many diverse races, ethnicities, and walks of life from casting their votes to select the individual who they feel is most educated, and skilled to represent their interests. Not only has this been proven to be wrong by discriminating minority groups in voting, it also has proved to be a process, which minimizes the largest growing demographics in the country. Furthermore, with millennials growing to become more politically active, minority groups are becoming more politically involved than ever. Taking this into account an important question that is raised by the author William Eskridge in his book “Legislation and Statutory Interpretation” is “Would minorities be better off with more representatives who had to pay attention to their interests because they are a powerful and organized constituency, rather than with a few representatives of minority districts who specialize in protecting only their interests?” (Eskridge,Frickley,& Garrett, 2006, pp.55).

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.