In any election year, like last year, the term “gerrymandered” is thrown around by pundits and those with a vague understanding of politics without any real recognition of the term. This upcoming week is the anniversary of the namesake district being created, so let’s delve into the history!
Gerrymandering is the process through which those in power use their status to manipulate their chances to win re-election in an upcoming single-member district election. Due to elections being first-past-the-post rather than a more proportional system, all you need to do is ensure that you’ll get a majority of the vote to win. With only two candidates, this margin of victory is only 50.1%, but if there are additional candidates the margin gets lower. While the use of computerized algorithms to predict voting patterns is new and has resulted in much more efficient gerrymanders, this trend has happened in the English-speaking world since at least the 1700s. Through the use of bribes and districts with small numbers of eligible voters, those in power retained their power.
It wasn’t until 1812 right here in Massachusetts that gerrymandering took on its now familiar anti-democratic role in politics. Massachusetts, as it is today, was a more urban area that favored a more powerful federal government. A majority of the federal delegation were Federalists and the state only voted for the Democratic-Republican Party twice between 1800 and 1820. However, the Democratic-Republicans held a slim majority in the General Court and controlled the Governorship under Elbridge Gerry during the 1812 redistricting, so they went to work manipulating the districts to guarantee victory.
The most pronounced district was the Essex South District, which critics said looked like a salamander as it curved around certain towns in the North Shore to combine Salisbury to Salem and Chelsea. Dubbed the “Gerry-Salamander” or “Gerry-Mander” the district soon became a focal point in attack articles by the Federalists. But the damage was already done, as the Democratic-Republicans won 49% of the vote while taking home 72.5% of the available seats. Due to inefficiently gerrymandering, the party would go on to lose the next election.
However, gerrymandering has lived on to refer to any manipulation of voting districts for electoral gain. Map makers use two tools that were in their infancy when Gerry made his salamander: cracking and packing. When cracking, you work to split up a large block of opposing voters into different districts to dilute their power to influence as a block. An example of this can be seen in Nashville, where the majority Democratic city was cracked into three different districts resulting in an incumbent Democrat of 20 years losing his seat. This changed the state from a 7R-2D split in their Congressional Delegation into an 8R-1D split, even though the results of the Presidential Election suggest it should be a 6R-3D state. On the opposite end is packing, where you put as many of your opponents into one district as possible, giving them a seat but making their votes less useful in swaying the election. This can be seen most clearly in Indiana, where lawmakers packed Democratic voters in Indianapolis into one district, increasing the safety for the three surrounding Republican seats. Both parties use gerrymandering, recent efforts by Republicans in these cases simply provided the clearest examples of cracking and packing.
Gerrymandering is something we are forced to live with here in the United States as the Supreme Court has refused to recognize a right to fair electoral districts, instead referring us to the very broken political process that gerrymanders to ignore the will of the people in the first place. Regardless of your political affiliation, it is something that we should all be able to admit is broken and needs fixed, all thanks to Governor Gerry and his salamander.
