How does gerrymandering work?
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Say you have 4 districts with equal Republicans to Democrats. You redraw the county lines so that most Democrats are in one of those districts and in the other 3 the Republicans outnumber them. This is whats been done in Ohio, the map was even ruled unconstitutional but it hasn’t been changed yet. Ohio is pretty evenly split but it’s been gerrymandered to hell to keep one party in power. Part of the name is that the districts look all fucked up and uneven, like a salamander.
Let’s say there are 100 voters in a given region, of which 60 voters like Dogs and 40 voters like Cats.
You want to split the region into five districts.
Proportionally, there should be three Dog districts and two Cat districts.
But you can also draw district boundaries like this:
1. 19 Dog, 1 Cat.
2. 17 Dog, 3 Cat.
3. 8 Dog, 12 Cat.
4. 9 Dog, 11 Cat.
5. 7 Dog, 13 Cat.
Now the Cats have the majority (three seats to two), despite having a minority in votes.
Gerrymandering works because of the “wasted vote” effect, where all of those extra Dog votes in District 1 and 2 don’t give the Dogs any more seats.
Let’s say we have a state with 500k people. 200k are purple party and 300k are orange party. Orange party has the majority, but we can gerrymander it so that purple wins.
We have 5 districts with 100k people each.
District 1: 90k orange 10k purple – orange wins
District 2: 90k orange 10k purple – orange wins
District 3: 45k orange 55k purple – purple wins
District 4: 45k orange 55k purple – purple wins
District 5: 30k orange 70k purple – purple wins
With this configuration, even though orange has the majority of people, purple wins 3 of the 5 districts.
Say you have a country that is divided into 4 regions and a total population of 1000. Every region must have 250 residents and appoints a leader through “majority wins” elections in that region. The population is divided in 460 “orange party” and 540 “purple party” supporters.
From purples point of view, they’d like the regions divided such that each region has 135 purple supporters – thus guaranteeing them leadership in all 4 regions.
From oranges point of view, their ideal situation would be 3 regions with at least 126 supporters and therefore they’d have 3 leaders and purple only 1.
Gerrymandering is a political process where both parties deliberately (and sometimes illegitimately) try to draw regional boundaries to maximize the election outcomes by concentrating and/or diluting the representation of their supporters and opponents.
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