If your ballot is boring, you can blame Elbridge Gerry
The Senate is taking up a big bill on voting rights. What do you think the 50 Republican members are going to do?
A. Invite the Democrats to a wine-tasting party in which the last 10 lawmakers standing get to make all the decisions.
B. Have Mitch McConnell announce that “as much as I would like to defeat this bill, effective government is more important than partisan advantage.”
C. Filibusterfilibusterfilibuster.
Yeah, yeah. Terrible to feel so cynical, isn’t it? Well, we’ll see. The House put a lot of important reforms in the bill, many aimed at making it easier for citizens to vote. But today let’s look at another piece of the story that doesn’t get enough attention: Gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the age-old practice of trying to fix the boundaries of electoral districts to make sure your side gets as much advantage as possible. It’s named for Elbridge Gerry, who was governor of Massachusetts in 1812 after the legislature passed a bill setting the lines of state Senate districts to give his party a big boost. That required a lot of creative map-drawing, and critics thought one of the districts wound up looking like a salamander — or, wags said, a “Gerry-mander.”
It’s an excellent lesson in how careful you have to be if you’re planning to become a historical figure. You can devote your life to creating a new nation, championing the Bill of Rights, getting elected as James Madison’s vice president, and in the end the one thing people will remember about you is a district shaped like an amphibian.
The bill now headed toward McConnell’s dustheap would require states to establish independent redistricting commissions when they prepare new maps for their legislatures and congressional districts based on the 2020 census. In days of yore this was a job for a bunch of guys sitting around a table full of maps, slowly divvying things up. Now it’s done with computers, which makes it much easier to game the system.
Gerrymandering is one of the main reasons many of us vote in elections in which the minority party has about as much chance of winning as ascending into heaven. There are a few saintly lawmakers dedicated to reform, but plenty just concentrate on making the system work for them.
Pretend you’re a member of Congress. An angel appears to you with two maps of your seven-district state. In one, your party has at least a 40-50% chance of winning six. In the other, it has no hope whatsoever of taking four; a 65% chance of getting two; and a 97.7% chance of winning the one in which you happen to be running. What would you do? If you quickly choose the very competitive option, congratulations! You are a person of strong moral principle who is highly unlikely to run for public office.
This mapmaking affects everything. Remember that anti-transgender bathroom law North Carolina passed in 2016? The folks who voted on it came from a brilliantly gerrymandered state legislature in which Republicans, who got only about half the statewide vote, nevertheless controlled a supermajority.
Democrats have been losing the redistricting game, but it’s going to take some effort to turn things around. At which point they’d probably start redrawing future maps to their advantage. What we need is a reform-populist movement dedicated to dividing the states up more fairly. It’s up to you to start complaining, people. Elbridge Gerry is watching from above.