Eli5 gerrymandering and how it works so successfully?
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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.
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