Eli5 gerrymandering and how it works so successfully?
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The other thing about gerrymandering is that it is self-perpetuating. You can draw your districts so that your party wins the majority of seats, even in an election where the overall vote favors the opponent. Then when it comes time to draw new districts, you can make changes to the lines with new information to make even more districts safely for your party, which means you will get to draw districts the next time they come up, and so on.
There are 99 Dems and 99 Republicans in a square area.
You need to draw 4 districts.
You draw one meandering shape about all 99 Dems.
You draw 3 more meandering shapes around 33 Republicans each.
Despite an equal number of voters, Dems end up with 1 rep while Republicans end up with 3.
(There’s a bit more nuance to it, but in general, that’s how it works.)
If you were given a map and asked to draw voting districts on it, you might do something like draw a bunch of squares like a tic tac toe game or something similar. More or less equal in size, kind of “intuitive” something that makes geometric sense. Then the next step would be to change them a bit so they have equal populations. So you might relook at the map and mostly combine existing squares or perhaps divide a few in half. In the city they will be geographically smaller, in the suburbs a bit larger, and in the countryside and rural areas quite large. But it would still be intuitive to a degree for them to be shaped in a rather simple way.
Or, if you would prefer, use municipal boundaries – cities, maybe counties, maybe zip codes, maybe school boundaries or something similar. A way that would seem to make sense for the community.
In any given set of boundaries you will have people of various political persuasions. In the US we are talking mostly about democratic and republican or maybe right or left leaning or something similar.
What the politicians devised is a way to draw the boundaries so that they kinda match the political leanings of the people who live there. What this does is make the geographic shape real goofy, they don’t seem to make much intuitive “sense.” They don’t look like anything else, they don’t look pleasing shapes, they don’t follow much of existing boundaries. They swirl this way and that to grab that neighborhood because they lean that way, and to avoid some other neighborhood which leans another way. They look like barbells and barbie dolls and roller coasters and inkblots or maybe a constellation in the night sky, or the outline of a bird in flight or a pancake where the batter splattered on the pan. You get the idea.
So this housing development along the riverfront is expensive and high income, put that in (or out) of your boundary; the area of apartments near the warehouses in the rundown part of town, make sure to get that out of (or inside) your boundary; the area which used to be a nice part of town but then they built a freeway which drove down real estate prices and it’s not so nice and the population is changing, you want (or don’t want) that in your district. There’s that one part of town which has that catholic school so many people who live around there are catholic, if you want it, make sure you get it, if you don’t, draw that boundary around it.
The purpose of doing this is so that YOUR political party (if you’re in power and are drawing the maps) can “ensure” a win in that district. If you draw it so that it is 90% democrat and 10% republican, it’s almost a no brainer. That’s an extreme example, but it’s the idea.
The name comes from a political with the last name Gerry who did this, and made a district while some said looked like a lizard, or maybe a salamander. So they called it a gerrymander. It was a cartoon in a newspaper a couple of centuries ago.
There are a few strategies of gerrymandering, the goal is to keep your party in power. So you make districts where your party is a majority, and you identify the areas where people lean the opposite way, and you either combine those into one district, so hey, if they win one, it’s only one; or you can split up all the areas which lean the other way and then maybe they don’t win any district at all. If you can make districts with like 52% for you and 48% for the other side, then that’s something of a win. It is so effective because the politicians in power draw the maps, ensuring that their party remains in power. So if they get concerned about changing political tides they can change the map again.
Different areas have different rules and laws about this – who makes the map, who approves them, how often, etc.
In trying to lump together people of one political persuasion, there are other factors that may guide or get lumped in there too – education level, income level, home ownership status, age, religion, and race just to name a few. So if a group of people perceive that they are being treated unfairly and their favored candidates have no chance of winning, they may attribute the motive to sidelining/marginalizing/disenfranchising, etc one of those previously mentioned categories.
That is all, have a good day.
Gerrymandering mostly works in systems where the place that votes gets split up into several smaller places and in each of those smaller places the candidate with the most votes wins.
In such a system whoever gets to decide where the borders between voting districts are drawn can greatly affect the outcome.
The US is one country where this is commonly the case and where the name originated but far from the only one where it happens. It is less of an issue in countries or places that use systems of proportional representation or similar systems.
If done ‘right’ you can create situations where the majority of a population votes one way but the representatives elected go the other way.
Or you can at least fix things so the percentage of representatives a party gets is much lower than the percentage of voters who voted for that party.
You can draw borders of districts so that all the voters of the opposing parts are packed together into a single or a few districts, so they win those but no other districts. This often involved drawing crazy borders to connect neighborhoods where people who vote one way live together even though those places are nowhere near each other.
You can also draw borders so that the voters of a party you don’t like are all diluted among the various districts, having a few of them in all the districts but not anywhere enough to be enough to win the district. This works by connecting place of homes of voters against your part together with places where your voters live.
It creates outcomes where parties are underrepresented and it also creates safe districts where the outcome is predetermined and the candidate doesn’t even have to worry about not getting elected. sometimes it end up creating safe seat fro the opposing party too.
It is really apparent that something funny is going on when you look at the maps.
You can draw the borders really crazily in ways that only make sense is you want to achieve the specific unfair outcome.
The name Gerrymander come from a guy named Gerry who redrew the borders in his state to benefit his party and created a district that on a map looked so ridiculous that some newspaper in a cartoon compared it to a drawing of a salamander and called it a mythical beast name Gerrymander.
Imaging your preschool class is voting on which cartoon to watch: Zootopia or Coco. 8 kids want to watch Zootopia and 13 want to watch Coco. Should mean Coco wins right?
ZZZZZZZZ
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
Well the Zootopia kids decide that instead of direct democracy, the class should be divided into groups, and each group should vote, and whichever movie wins the most groups is picked. Coco kids think this sounds ok and go with it.
So the Zootopia kids put 7 Coco kids in one group, and split the remaining six in two other groups. Then they spread their own forces between these groups.
CCCCCCC – C
CCCZZZZ – Z
CCCZZZZ – Z
Coco wins one group, Zootopia wins two. When the Coco kids point out this isn’t fair, Zootopia kids say “tHiS Is A rEpUbLiC nOt A dEmOcRaCy” and invite them to cry harder.
Answer: The house is part of congress that makes laws. Each state has a number of house members based on its population. For example, New York has 26.
The state is divided into districts where residents in the district elect one house member each. The districts should have equal population, but sometimes they are drawn unfairly to favor one party over another.
For example, the drawer might put 4 cities that support the other party in one district, so they only get one house member instead of four.
In the spirit of explaining like we’re five, I’d like to point you to this interactive gerrymandering game, which will help you get an intuitive feel for how and why this works: [http://gametheorytest.com/gerry/game/](http://gametheorytest.com/gerry/game/)
You’ll notice that despite there often being more of one color than the other, if you’re drawing the lines, you can cause huge differences in which team controls more districts.
Gerrymandering in real life works the same way but with a team of experts, computers, and a bunch of voting records and other indicators of how people will vote.
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Let’s say there’s a voting system where most voted party gets a set per district. Say, if A gets 40% but B gets 60%, B gets the seat regardless, A gets nothing.
Now, by knowning in finer grained detailed where in the district people voted which party, you can split or rearrange districts as such that A can get an advantage even though nothing in regards to voter distribution changes. Just as to which district the votes are counted for.
Simplest in this example would be just splitting he district such that all the A voters are in a new district, and all the B voters in another. Result is now two districts, but 100% for A in one and 100% for B in both. Both get a seat and A gained a seat from nothing.
Of course, in reality, it’s quite more complex. I recommend looking at Google Image results for »gerrymandering«. The pictures there give quite an intuitive understanding.
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