Gerrymandering is the most effective governance technology available for translating minority preferences into majority outcomes. Its pervasiveness is the clearest evidence that the system designed to prevent it has failed.
The Technology
Gerrymandering — the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage the party controlling the redistricting process — has been a feature of American politics since the process that gave it its name in the early nineteenth century. What has changed in the modern era is the precision with which it can be executed. The combination of granular voting data and computational mapping software allows redistricting map-makers to construct districts that pack opposition voters into a small number of districts, crack opposition communities across multiple districts to dilute their electoral strength, and produce the specific partisan outcome the mapmakers want with a precision that would be impossible through manual map-drawing.
The Supreme Court's Rucho decision, which held that partisan gerrymandering claims present non-justiciable political questions that federal courts cannot address, removed the federal judicial check on the practice. The result is a redistricting system in which the party in control of a state legislature has nearly unconstrained authority to draw maps that entrench their own electoral advantage — producing the legislative maps that protect legislative majorities from the competitive elections that democratic theory requires and that voters would otherwise produce through normal electoral variation.
Gerrymandering is the mechanism through which the party in power converts the power it currently has into the structural advantage that perpetuates its power. In a democratic system, the party with a majority of seats should not have the authority to draw the maps that determine how those seats are allocated — but in most American states, it does. The governance failure this represents is the substitution of electoral competition by structural entrenchment.
Discussion