Gerrymandering is the art of drawing political boundaries to benefit one group over another. In the US it applies to both local and national electoral districts. Under the US Constitution the states create their own districts, but must adhere to federal law and court rulings. The term Gerrymander comes from the Boston Gazette, which coined the term in 1812. It’s a combination of then governor Elbridge Gerry’s name and the word salamander – apparently one of the redrawn districts resembled the amphibian. Governor Gerry wasn’t the first US politician to (ab)use this power. He was just the (un)fortunate one to have his name attached to it. Gerrymandering continues to this day Driven by local politics and the constitutionally mandated 10-year census at the federal level, gerrymandering continues to this day .
Say what you will about the evils of gerrymandering, and almost every pundit has, at least the whackily drawn districts result in elected officials representing groups with numerically similar populations. The current congressional apportionment averages 710,767 people (using 2010 Census data). To be fair the need to keep districts within state lines creates some variance. Leaving out the District of Columbia (which is not a state meaning its 672,228 residents have no voting representation in congress) the most under-represented citizens live in Montana’s single congressional district. Its 994,416 residents receive only 53% of the voting weight of the 526,283 members of Rhode Island’s first district, which is the least populous. Given representatives are capped at 435 and that every state must have at least one member it’s really not that bad.
The same cannot be said for the US Senate. It was created to protect the smaller states from domination by the more populous states. The Constitution mandates two senators from each state and calls for them to be appointed by the state legislatures. The writers of the Constitution did this to distance senators from public (or at least male public) opinion. They believed the distance would enable them to better take care of business. By the second half of the 19th century political infighting and corruption created crises that couldn’t be ignored.
In 1913 the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution established the direct election of senators. It solved some problems, but not the problem of disproportionate representation. Specifically, when the original states ratified the US Constitution nearly one in five people lived in Virginia, which had almost eleven times as many people as Rhode Island. Today nearly one in eight Americans lives in California compared to only one in 547 for Wyoming. Both states have two senators with one vote each. Thus each Wyomingite has 66 times the senatorial voting power of a Californian.
There have been many attempts to redraw or gerrymander the US into 50 states of equal population, including concentric circles and longitudinal lines. My favorite is Neil Freeman’s from fakeisthenewreal.org. His map attempts to build states with both equal population and some cultural cohesion.
Bonus Map
Neil’s map is great, but the labels can make it difficult to find your new state. The map below (created by SAS blogger Robert Allison) shows Neil’s map with county boundaries and no labels.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen