How to overcome gerrymandering before it overtakes politics.
By Gus Wezerek Graphics Editor, Opinion |
How do you get people to care about gerrymandering? |
The stakes are certainly high enough. The new congressional maps that states approve this year could determine which party controls the House of Representatives for the next decade. But it's hard to write an attention-grabbing headline when the topic you're discussing is chockablock with jargon like "redistricting," "reapportionment," "cracking," "packing," "disenfranchisement," "compactness scores" and "independent commissions." |
And then there's "gerrymandering" itself. The word is a portmanteau from an 1812 political cartoon that combines the name of Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and "salamander." If it wasn't obvious. |
One trick that journalists have used for generating interest comes directly from that 1812 cartoon, which zoomorphizes a wriggly district that was drawn to dilute the Federalist Party's power in Massachusetts. We're still talking about gerrymandering because political parties are still dreaming up districts that look like pterodactyls or snakes or ducks. (And journalists are still calling them out on it by making lists of the most blatant partisan gerrymanders.) The brazenness of mapmakers' attempts to tip the political scale is plain to see in the districts' ungainly shapes. |
There's just one problem: the cartographers are getting sneakier. |
As my colleague Duy Nguyen shows in a series of maps, technological advances have helped mapmakers draw compact, unassuming districts that allow a political party to disproportionately control congressional seats with more precision than ever before. The broken-winged pterodactyl is dead, replaced by a much less evocative … splotch. |
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So what's the solution? The first step is moving the conversation around gerrymandering beyond a heuristic that equates geometric simplicity with fairness. |
There's another fix, too. It involves one of those clunky phrases I mentioned: independent commissions. To learn more about how they might help, read Duy's essay here. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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