Why is gerrymandering effective

There are more possibilities, and they add up. If that happens, much of the battle for control of the House of Representatives in would be settled before it even began. Gerrymandering is by far the most effective modern tool for a party seeking to swing election outcomes in the US. Instead of attempting to change which people turn out, they can, usually once a decade, simply change the district lines so that some votes will matter more than others.

Democrats have limited options for fighting back. They have the power to gerrymander a few states of their own, most notably New York , but Republicans have total control of map-drawing in more and more populous states. They can try suing, but the Supreme Court has limited their legal options. Their last resort will be to try to win by much more than they did last time. With the help of changing voting patterns and court decisions, Democrats were able to overcome that disadvantage in and But now the GOP has the chance to shake things up before the midterms.

For many state legislatures , the importance of new maps is even higher. That is, after all, how gerrymandering works. Every 10 years, after the US Census, district lines for the House of Representatives and for state legislature chambers are redrawn.

The two parties are increasingly polarized, politics is increasingly nationalized, and voters with firm partisan loyalties are increasingly sorted geographically. More and more, the party that wins a US House seat is determined by how the district is drawn. Basically, you want to maximize the number of districts where your party wins by a comfortable but not too big margin. This is a simplified example, but a map with a similar outcome was used in North Carolina , where Democrats won half the vote in but just three of 13 House seats.

In real-life redistricting, several sometimes conflicting factors often come into play:. The tricky part lies in determining how to balance all those interests. And Democrats face an added challenge. Because of where Democratic and Republican voters happen to live in swing states — with much of the Democratic vote packed into urban areas — it is usually easier to draw state maps that favor Republicans.

Drawing balanced or competitive maps is certainly possible, but the line-drawers often have to make a concerted effort to achieve that end, and it can often get harder to do so if they want cleanly shaped and compact districts preserving county and town boundaries. Republican legislators will be disinclined to make such an effort, and the various independent redistricting commissions may vary in how they approach this challenge.

Fortunately, the solution is simple: require each state to draw districts that accurately reflect the political views of the American people. Accordingly, in a state in which voters are split between Republicans and Democrats, the representatives would also be split Depending on the number of districts, and where people live, it may not always be possible to perfectly align the population and its representation.

But the purpose of voter-determined districts is to align them as closely as possible. And thanks to map-drawing software, map drawers are better able to do that now than ever before. States simply have to take the tools that have been employed in recent decades to gerrymander and use them to draw fair districts instead. However, to ensure that the process is not manipulated to the benefit of a particular political party, the maps should be drawn by an independent commission, not elected officials.

The redistricting process should also prioritize ensuring fair representation for communities of color, who continue to be drastically underrepresented in Congress and even more underrepresented in state legislatures. The bill would enhance transparency, strengthen protections for communities of color, and ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting.

With redistricting now beginning in many states, the need for Congress to pass reform legislation is more urgent than ever. Unless that happens, we risk another decade of racially and politically discriminatory line-drawing. But time is running short. The Census Bureau released data to the states for redistricting on August If new laws are to have the maximum impact, Congress needs to act quickly. Fair representation depends on it. Latinos powered population growth in the last decade, but it remains to be seen whether they get the political representation they deserve.

Explore Our Work. Here are six things to know about partisan gerrymandering and how it impacts our democracy. Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic. There are multiple ways to gerrymander. Gerrymandering has a real impact on the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures. Gerrymandering affects all Americans, but its most significant costs are borne by communities of color. Gerrymandering is getting worse.

Parties try to try to maximize their opportunities and minimize their losses. He cut his teeth challenging Democratic state maps in his native Tennessee, long a hotbed of gerrymandering challenges and the place where the foundational Baker v. Carr case created the modern gerrymandering game. It was pretty primitive. Although expensive minicomputers had already been supplanted by smaller and more powerful machines, they were still the primary platforms for redistricting software, which itself often could cost thousands of dollars.

The process relied on massive amounts of Census data—including what are known as TIGER shapefiles that contain the geographic information in play—that were free, but often required expensive manipulation by outside corporations in order to be accessible. On top of the direct costs, the software was cumbersome and prone to error, came with massive manuals, and often required users to directly input long strings of code and commands to even get started. The Caliper Corporation was a bit player in the mapping software markets then.

The startup had almost accidentally come up with a desktop Geographic Information System—or GIS, the kind of software under which most modern mapping programs fall—around , originally intended for use by transportation officials.

But it was one of the first mass-market programs that could handle raw TIGER files, which attracted attention among the broader cartographical community. Caliper moved to create a more generalized application from the specialized transportation program and called the resulting desktop GIS software GIS Plus. GIS Plus hit all the marks for savvy officials who wanted an edge in redistricting: It was cheaper than existing programs, ran on desktop computers, could digest Census data products, and required a much less monumental learning curve.

It was also critical for outside entities who had no access to the backroom mapmaking processes and giant computers that state officials shelled out thousands of dollars for for a process that only happened once a decade. And it was also easier. The developer went from dipping its toes in the redistricting market to a full-scale commitment for the cycle, when it scrapped plans to make cheap redistricting extensions for existing software and created a brand new series of software called Maptitude, which features a special redistricting version.

That version was more expensive than the jury-rigged GIS Plus copies that led the way in , and also allowed even people who had very little training in mapping or programming to get their hands dirty and import voting data with ease.

Republican operatives saw an opportunity during the cycle, and adopted Maptitude at every level, adding a technological edge to a considerable organizing and funding lead and a surge in control of statehouses. Democrats were left scrambling, and largely lagged behind an increasingly sophisticated redistricting effort on the other side.

By , Republicans were ready to turn the gap between the parties on all things redistricting into a chasm. Their aggressive campaign of sophisticated redistricting—often resulting in hyper-gerrymandered districts that had never been seen before—took not only Democrats off guard, but also members of the larger community of parties interested in redistricting. With the levers of redistricting in vital areas firmly in party control, then it was time for the GOP consultants to pour into statehouses in A article in the pages of this magazine illustrates how that process worked via the example of Tom Hofeller, perhaps the most well-known—and notorious—of the Republican redistricting consultancy:.

And so his cyclical travels take him mainly to states where the Republicans are likely to be drawing the new maps. In most states, an appointed committee consisting of legislators from the majority party produces the map, which is then brought to the legislative body for a vote.

Other states relegate the duties to an appointed commission.