Technology
Impact of Gerrymandering on Democratic Fairness
Quick fact
In the 2012 U.S. House elections, Democrats won about 1.4 million more votes nationwide than Republicans, yet Republicans secured a 33-seat majority in the House, a result widely attributed to gerrymandering.
Why this is interesting
Have you ever noticed that election outcomes sometimes don't seem to match the overall popular vote? The lines on a map might be the reason.
Read the full explanation
Understanding Impact of Gerrymandering on Democratic Fairness
Imagine you have a large pizza and you get to cut it into slices. If you control the knife, you could make some slices huge and some tiny. Similarly, in politics, the people in power often draw the boundaries of voting districts. This is called redistricting, and when it's done to give one group an advantage, it's called gerrymandering. The two main tricks are 'cracking' and 'packing'. Cracking spreads the opposing party's voters thinly across many districts so they can't form a majority in any one. Packing concentrates them into just a few districts, so they 'waste' many extra votes in those, losing other districts by small margins. This means that even if both parties have equal support state-wide, the party drawing the map can secure more seats. So, the fairness of elections depends heavily on who draws these lines.
A deeper explanation
Gerrymandering works by manipulating the 'wasted votes' in a system. In a winner-take-all district, every vote for the losing candidate is wasted, and every vote for the winning candidate beyond the 50% threshold is also wasted. A fair map would have roughly equal wasted votes for each party. But gerrymandering aims to create an 'efficiency gap'—one party wastes significantly more votes than the other. By cracking and packing, the map-drawing party ensures that its opponents' votes are spread thin (cracked) or packed into a small number of districts, maximizing the number of wasted votes for the opponent. This can produce a permanent minority rule: even if the other party wins a majority of the total votes, they can't win a majority of seats. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled partisan gerrymandering is a political question not subject to federal court review (Rucho v. Common Cause, 2019), many states use metrics like the efficiency gap or simulations to assess fairness, and some are turning to independent commissions. This concept is crucial because it shows how the rules of the game can undermine the democratic principle of majority rule.