Proofiness - Charles Seife [69]
When the Democratic-Republicans enacted the plan, it was extremely controversial. The bizarrely shaped new districts looked hideous and unnatural. A salamander-like district curled its body around Essex County, its belly to the west and its head snaking across the north. Wags promptly named it after its creator. The gerrymander was born.
As ugly as it was, the bizarre creature worked its magic for the Democratic-Republicans. Even though the Federalists got the majority of votes cast for state senator—50.8 percent of them, to be precise—the Democratic-Republicans won an overwhelming majority of the state senate seats: twenty-nine out of forty. By gerrymandering, they had turned what should have been an electoral defeat into a landslide victory. They held on to power not because of the will of the people, but in spite of it. They used gerrymandering to undermine the electoral process, annulling the votes of their opponents.
A gerrymander is a creature born from proofiness. At its core, gerrymandering is cherry-picking, with one key difference: the data being manipulated are votes. Indeed, the gerrymander is essentially a monster that allows politicians to carefully select votes, choosing those that they like and ignoring those that they don’t.
Figure 11. The original gerrymander.
Gerrymandering gets its power from two kinds of vote manipulation—two tricks that politicians have become extremely adept at over the years. These tricks are known as packing and cracking . Packing takes opposition votes and packs them tightly together, rendering most of them redundant. Cracking splits apart opposition strongholds, distributing their votes among multiple districts so that the enemy is not able to wield a majority in any one district.
Figure 12. A fair division of districts.
As an example, imagine there’s a county that is divided into four districts, two urban and two rural, each of which gets one representative to Congress. This county happens to be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans; the two urban districts have a Democratic majority and the two rural districts have a Republican majority.
Each district sends a representative to the statehouse; the cities elect Democrats to represent them, while the two rural districts, naturally, elect Republicans. This is the way it should be; an evenly split electorate should split their representatives equally too. But imagine that the Republicans gain control of the statehouse, allowing them to redraw the boundaries of the districts. Their gerrymandering strategy will be to pack as many Democrats as they can into a single city district. They’ll crack the other city apart, distributing the city Democrats among Republican-heavy rural districts so that they’re unable to muster a majority anywhere. The result is a bunch of districts that make a little less geographical sense—urban voters are mixed with rural voters—but gain the Republicans an extra seat in Congress.
Figure 13. A pro-Republican gerrymander.
Even though the electorate is split down the middle—there are exactly as many Democrats in the county as there are Republicans—the gerrymandering has allowed the Republicans to control 75 percent of the congressional seats. Conversely, if the Democrats had managed to gain control, they would do the exact same thing in reverse. They would pack Republicans into one rural district and crack the other, distributing Republicans among the three remaining districts so that they’re firmly in the minority.
The Democratic seat-grab is just as effective as the Republican version; they have 75 percent of the congressional representatives despite having only 50 percent of the vote.
Figure 14. A pro-Democratic gerrymander.
In skillful hands, the gerrymander can give a party more power than the people want them to have; it can entrench an unpopular politician or dislodge a popular one; it can render some votes moot while investing others with great weight. Even worse, the practice of gerrymandering makes it