A: In many states, the state legislature is responsible for drawing new districts, subject to the approval or veto of the governor. 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. The Court. Liberal judges maintain that the process has gotten out of hand to the point of violating the Constitution, and it is therefore the responsibility of the court to step in.
The decision is likely to come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy. In a opinion , he expressed alarm at the practice of extreme partisan gerrymandering but said the court should hold off on outlawing it. He also left the door open to ruling differently in the future, as long as lawyers provided a suitable way to measure when gerrymandering goes too far. He said that without that measurement, the court runs the risk of becoming too involved in a decision-making process that is legally mandated to state legislatures.
Kennedy did not direct a single question to the lawyer for the Wisconsin Democrats. So how much is too much? Even so, the current moment is perhaps the most auspicious one in decades for reining in partisan gerrymandering. New quantitative approaches—measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps—could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much.
Last November, some of these new approaches helped convince a United States district court to invalidate the Wisconsin state assembly district map —the first time in more than 30 years that any federal court has struck down a map for being unconstitutionally partisan. That case is now bound for the Supreme Court. So far, political and social scientists and lawyers have been leading the charge to bring quantitative measures of gerrymandering into the legal realm.
But mathematicians may soon enter the fray. The workshop has drawn more than 1, applicants. You could create one district that Party A will win, 95 to 5, and nine districts that it will lose, 45 to Even though the parties have equal support, Party B will win 90 percent of the seats.
Such gerrymanders are sometimes easy to spot: To pick up the right combination of voters, cartographers may design districts that meander bizarrely. The compactness problem will be a primary focus of the Tufts workshop. The goal is not to come up with a single compactness measure, but to bring order to the jostling crowd of contenders. The existing literature on compactness by nonmathematicians is filled with elementary errors and oversights, Duchin said, such as comparing two measures statistically without realizing that they are essentially the same measure in disguise.
Explore Our Work. Here are six things to know about partisan gerrymandering and how it impacts our democracy. Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic. There are multiple ways to gerrymander. Gerrymandering has a real impact on the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures.
Gerrymandering affects all Americans, but its most significant costs are borne by communities of color. Gerrymandering is getting worse. Federal reform can help counter gerrymandering — but Congress needs to act soon. November 4, October 28, October 13, October 12, October 8, September 29, Stay up to date.
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