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Mar 1 A Visual Explanation of Gerrymandering

The Washington Post recently published this simple but very effective visual explanation of Gerrymandering: How to steal an election: a visual guide

Gerrymandering -- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party -- is a difficult process to explain . If you find the notion confusing, check out the chart above --  adapted from one posted to Reddit this weekend -- and wonder no more. Suppose we have a very tiny state of fifty people. Thirty of them belong to the Blue Party, and 20 belong to the Red Party. And just our luck, they all live in a nice even grid with the Blues on one side of the state and the Reds on the other. Now, let's say we need to divide this state into five districts. Each district will send one representative to the House to represent the people. Ideally, we want the representation to be proportional: if 60 percent of our residents are Blue and 40 percent are Red, those five seats should be divvied up the same way.

This is a great example of using data visualization to explain a complex process. The use of the matrix of squares to represent people simplifies the context and keeps the audience attention focused on the groupings.

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ACADEME BLOG

The blog of academe magazine, a visual demonstration of the absurdity of gerrymandering.

Most Progressives, especially in the “Rust Belt” states, have had much reason to regret the failure of the national Democratic Party to generate voter turnout in 2010. During that census year, Republicans secured the governorships and large legislative majorities in many of those states and then gerrymandered districts that have allowed them to maintain 2:1 to 3:1 majorities in those state legislatures and in the federal House of Representatives, even though in every one of those states, their candidates received fewer votes, in total, than Democratic candidates received in 2012.

I still believe that that election was a disaster for Progressives, mainly because even if the Democrats regain lost ground in the legislatures, it may take a decade or more to roll back all of the anti-government, anti-female, and anti-worker statutes that the Far Right has pushed through, usually with very little citizen input and even with very little formal discussion among the legislators themselves.

That said, it is starting to look as though that election may turn out to be an even bigger disaster for the GOP. In the midst of this ill-conceived government shutdown, many Republicans are publicly making the case that, in eliminating any meaningful contests in the general elections, the gerrymandering has pushed the party too far to the Right, because the various interests collectively categorized as the “Tea Party” can control the outcomes of primaries by producing or influencing a few thousand or even a few hundred voters.

No Republican has gone this far, but an extension of that point is that the GOP grossly over-estimated the “mandate” that it had received in the 2010 elections. Before the gerrymandering, they had indeed won large majorities in many state legislatures, but they had won many of those seats by narrow margins. For instance, in Ohio, where only two out of three eligible voters are registered to vote, less than half of the registered voters actually cast ballots in 2010, even though there was a hotly contested gubernatorial contest. And, in winning the governorship, John Kasich actually received less than 50% of the vote and won by a less than 2% margin. So, Kasich received less than half of the votes from less than half of the registered voters who were less than two-thirds of the eligible voters. In sum, he won by getting the votes of about 16% of the Ohio residents eligible to vote. That is simply not a sufficient mandate to change in radical, ideologically driven ways how the state impacts the lives of the average Ohioans, without risking some serious pushback.

Last week that pushback was reinitiated with a large rally on the Statehouse lawn by women protesting the raft of anti-female statutes literally slipped at the last hour into the most recent biennial budget. [For an account of how this was done, see my post, “In Politics, Violating Your Own Truisms Is the Definition of Cynicism”: https://academeblog.org/2013/07/02/in-politics-violating-your-own-truisms-is-the-definition-of-cynicism/ .

The defeat by referendum of the union-busting Senate Bill 5 should have been a reason for the GOP to proceed more cautiously. Instead, they have provoked a push-back from other sizable voting blocks—and political fundraisers–within the electorate.

In any case, Business Insider has provided a “quiz” that comically highlights the extreme gerrymandering that has occurred. Pairing gerrymandered districts with their “mirror” images, Walter Hickey mixes them with Rorschach inkblots and asks readers to try to differentiate them.

For instance, consider the following image:

It’s actually not a Rorschach Blot but a “doubled” image of the 13 th Congressional District in North Carolina:

Hickey’s entire article can be found at: http://www.businessinsider.com/quiz-gerrymandered-gop-congressional-district-or-rorschach-inkblot-2013-10 .

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Can You Gerrymander Your Party to Power?

By Ella Koeze Denise Lu and Charlie Smart Jan. 27, 2022

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By Ella Koeze , Denise Lu and Charlie Smart

Gerrymandering is the intentional distortion of political districts to give one party an advantage, and it has been criticized for disenfranchising many voters and fueling deeper polarization.

To help you understand it better, we created an imaginary state called Hexapolis , where your only mission is to gerrymander your party to power.

Welcome to Hexapolis

Every 10 years, Hexapolis redraws its congressional district lines — just like the United States does. But Hexapolis is a simpler place.

Lawmakers in either the Purple Party or Yellow Party control redistricting. To increase their advantage in upcoming elections, they have been known to gerrymander egregiously — even if it means leaving some voters disenfranchised.

Hexapolis has nine districts. Even though a majority of voters favor the Purple Party, that does not mean that the Yellow Party can’t shift the state’s partisan tilt.

Ground rules

First, here’s how to draw a district..

Each represents a person. Group 15 adjacent ones to make a congressional district.

Tap or drag to draw a district.

Districts must have equal populations.

Dividing 45 into three groups of 15 would give each district the same number of residents.

Some, by law, must protect underrepresented voters.

A represents a voter who belongs to a minority group in Hexapolis. A mostly minority district is one where more than half its hexagons are .

Districts can lean Yellow or Purple.

A is a voter who favors the Purple Party and a favors the Yellow Party. More than half the hexagons in two districts here lean Purple.

Try to make districts compact.

A district is compact when are near one another, keeping neighbors in the same districts. Compact districts are usually shaped like circles or squares.

Most compact

Least compact

Could be better

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clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

This is the best explanation of gerrymandering you will ever see

How to steal an election: a visual guide

Gerrymandering -- drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party -- is a difficult process to explain . If you find the notion confusing, check out the chart above --   adapted from one  posted to Reddit this weekend  -- and wonder no more.

Suppose we have a very tiny state of fifty people. Thirty of them belong to the Blue Party, and 20 belong to the Red Party. And just our luck, they all live in a nice even grid with the Blues on one side of the state and the Reds on the other.

Now, let's say we need to divide this state into five districts. Each district will send one representative to the House to represent the people. Ideally, we want the representation to be proportional: if 60 percent of our residents are Blue and 40 percent are Red, those five seats should be divvied up the same way.

Fortunately, because our citizens live in a neatly ordered grid, it's easy to draw five lengthy districts  -- two for the Reds , and three for the Blues. Voila! Perfectly proportional representation, just as the Founders intended.  That's grid 1 above, "perfect representation."

Now, let's say instead that the Blue Party controls the state government, and they get to decide how the lines are drawn. Rather than draw districts vertically they draw them horizontally, so that in each district there are six Blues and four Reds. You can see that in grid 2 above, "compact but unfair."

With a comfortable Blue majority in this state, each district elects a blue candidate to the House. The Blues win 5 seats and the Reds don't get a single one. Oh well! All's fair in love and politics.

In the real world, the results of this latter scenario are similar to what we see in New York, though there are no good examples of where a majority party gives itself a clean-sweep. In 2012, Democrats received 66 percent of the popular House vote. But they won 21 out of 27 House seats, or three  more than you'd expect from the popular vote alone . And from a purely geometric standpoint, New York's congressional districts aren't terribly irregular -- at least not compared to other states .

Finally, what if the Red Party controls the state government? The Reds know they're at a numeric disadvantage. But with some creative boundary drawing --   the type you see in grid 3, "neither compact nor fair" --  they can slice the Blue population up such that they only get a majority in two districts. So despite making up 40 percent of the population, the Reds win 60 percent of the seats. Not bad!

In the real world, this is similar to what we see in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Democrats won 51 percent of the popular House vote. But the only won 5 out of 18 House seats -- fewer than one third . This was because when Pennsylvania Republicans redrew the state's Congressional districts, they made highly irregular districts that look like the one below, PA-7, one of the most geographically irregular districts in the nation.

Now, this exercise is of course a huge simplification. In the real world people don't live in neatly-ordered grids sorted by political party. But for real-world politicians looking to give themselves an advantage at redistricting time, the process is exactly the same, as are the results for the parties that gerrymander successfully .

The easiest way to solve this issue, of course, would be to take the redistricting process out of human hands entirely. There is already software capable of doing just that -- good luck getting any politicians to agree to it, though.

More on gerrymandering: This computer programmer solved gerrymandering in his spare time » America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts » What 60 years of political gerrymandering looks like » One easy way to end gerrymandering: Stop letting politicians draw their own districts »

Note: The chart above was adapted from one posted to Reddit this weekend . Credit to redditor N8theGr8 for finding the original image.   He couldn't track down the original creator using a reverse image search, and neither could I. If you made the original chart, drop me a line so I can give you credit!   UPDATE:  The original creator reached out -- his name is Stephen Nass, and he posted the original chart on Facebook on Feb. 21 . 

Update: An earlier version of this post used California as an example of a majority party giving itself a bigger majority through redistricting. California's districts are drawn by an independent commission, not by the parties.

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Gerrymandering Explained

The practice has been a thorn in the side of democracy for centuries, and with the new round of redistricting it’s a bigger threat than ever.

• Redistricting

After the Census Bureau released detailed population and demographic data from the 2020 census, states and local governments began the once-a-decade process of drawing new voting district boundaries known as redistricting. And gerrymandering — when those boundaries are drawn with the intention of influencing who gets elected — followed.

The latest redistricting cycle was the first since the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling that gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court. Here are six things to know about partisan gerrymandering and how it impacts our democracy.

Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic.

Every 10 years, states redraw their legislative and congressional district lines following the census. Because communities change, redistricting is critical to our democracy: maps must be redrawn to ensure that districts are equally populated, comply with laws such as the Voting Rights Act , and are otherwise representative of a state’s population. Done right, redistricting is a chance to create maps that, in the words of John Adams, are an “exact portrait, a miniature” of the people as a whole.

But sometimes the process is used to draw maps that put a thumb on the scale to manufacture election outcomes that are detached from the preferences of voters. Rather than voters choosing their representatives, gerrymandering empowers politicians to choose their voters. This tends to occur especially when line drawing is left to legislatures and one political party controls the process, as has become increasingly common. When that happens, partisan concerns almost invariably take precedence over all else. That produces maps where electoral results are virtually guaranteed even in years where the party drawing maps has a bad year.

There are multiple ways to gerrymander.

While legislative and congressional district shapes may look wildly different from state to state, most attempts to gerrymander can best be understood through the lens of two basic techniques: cracking and packing.

Cracking splits groups of people with similar characteristics, such as voters of the same party affiliation, across multiple districts. With their voting strength divided, these groups struggle to elect their preferred candidates in any of the districts.

Packing is the opposite of cracking: map drawers cram certain groups of voters into as few districts as possible. In these few districts, the “packed” groups are likely to elect their preferred candidates, but the groups’ voting strength is weakened everywhere else.

Some or all of these techniques may be deployed by map drawers in order to build a partisan advantage into the boundaries of districts. A key note, however: while sometimes gerrymandering results in oddly shaped districts, that isn’t always the case. Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party.

Gerrymandering has a real impact on the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures.

In 2010, Republicans — in an effort to control the drawing of congressional maps — forged a campaign to win majorities in as many state legislatures as possible. It was wildly successful, giving them control over the drawing of 213 congressional districts. The redrawing of maps that followed produced some of the most extreme gerrymanders in history. In battleground Pennsylvania, for example, the congressional map gave Republicans a virtual lock on 13 of the state’s 18 congressional districts, even in elections where Democrats won the majority of the statewide congressional vote.

Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House.

On the state level, gerrymandering has also led to significant partisan bias in maps. For example, in 2018, Democrats in Wisconsin won every statewide office and a majority of the statewide vote, but thanks to gerrymandering, won only 36 of the 99 seats in the state assembly.

Though Republicans were the primary beneficiaries of gerrymandering last decade, Democrats have also used redistricting for partisan ends: in Maryland, for instance, Democrats used control over map-drawing to eliminate one of the state’s Republican congressional districts.

Regardless of which party is responsible for gerrymandering, it is ultimately the public who loses out. Rigged maps make elections less competitive, in turn making even more Americans feel like their votes don’t matter.

Gerrymandering affects all Americans, but its most significant costs are borne by communities of color.

Residential segregation and racially polarized voting patterns, especially in southern states, mean that targeting communities of color can be an effective tool for creating advantages for the party that controls redistricting. This is true regardless of whether it is Democrats or Republicans drawing the maps.

The Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause greenlighting partisan gerrymandering has made things worse. The Voting Rights Act and the Constitution prohibit racial discrimination in redistricting. But because there often is correlation between party preference and race, Rucho opens the door for Republican-controlled states to defend racially discriminatory maps on grounds that they were permissibly discriminating against Democrats rather than impermissibly discriminating against Black, Latino, or Asian voters.

Targeting the political power of communities of color is also often a key element of partisan gerrymandering. This is especially the case in the South, where white Democrats are a comparatively small part of the electorate and often live, problematically from the standpoint of a gerrymanderer, very close to white Republicans. Even with slicing and dicing, discriminating against white Democrats only moves the political dial so much. Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage.

Gerrymandering is getting worse.

Gerrymandering is a political tactic nearly as old as the United States. In designing Virginia’s very first congressional map, Patrick Henry attempted to draw district boundaries that would block his rival, James Madison, from winning a seat. But gerrymandering has also changed dramatically since the founding: today, intricate computer algorithms and sophisticated data about voters allow map drawers to game redistricting on a massive scale with surgical precision. Where gerrymanderers once had to pick from a few maps drawn by hand, they now can create and pick from thousands of computer-generated maps.

Gerrymandering also looks likely to get worse because the legal framework governing redistricting has not kept up with demographic changes. Before, most people of color in the country’s metro areas lived in highly segregated cities. Today, however, a majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans  live in diverse suburbs . This change has given rise to powerful new multiracial voting coalitions outside cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston that have won or come close to winning power. Yet the Supreme Court has not granted these multiracial coalition districts the same legal protections as majority-minority districts, making them a key target for dismantling by partisan map drawers.

Federal reform can help counter gerrymandering — so Congress needs to act.

The Freedom to Vote Act , a landmark piece of federal democracy reform legislation that has already passed the House, represents a major step toward curbing political gamesmanship in map drawing. The bill would enhance transparency, strengthen protections for communities of color, and ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting. It would also improve voters’ ability to challenge gerrymandered maps in court.

With redistricting now beginning in many states, the need for Congress to pass reform legislation is more urgent than ever. Fair representation depends on it.

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Insufficient Data

Redistricting Season is Open

Every 10 years, U.S. states redraw their congressional and state legislative maps to account for changes in population. In many states, the politicians who control this process draw district lines in a way that maximizes their party’s partisan advantage and makes it effectively impossible for their opponents to win power.

This practice is called gerrymandering.

Visual tool with powerful analytics

In response to the 2021 redistricting cycle, the Gerrymandering Project developed this report card as a tool to help the public identify gerrymandered maps. The Redistricting Report Card uses a powerful and unique set of analytics to grade each state’s newly-drawn maps during the redistricting process.

Select a map from the dropdown above to view its report card, or select a state to view report cards for maps as they become available.

Holistic and Interpretable Scoring System

In addition to scoring maps on competitiveness and geographic features, the Redistricting Report Card uses a cutting-edge algorithm to provide unprecedented analysis of a map's partisan fairness. Along with grading maps in these categories, the tool takes a holistic look at the partisan and minority composition of proposed districting plans.

Powered by A Million Maps

Our algorithm generates around one million potential districting plans for each state, providing us with a baseline of what’s possible to draw in a state given its political landscape and redistricting rules. We have also enlisted a collection of 75 advanced mappers with intricate knowledge of specific states and communities to incorporate local geographic expertise in our final grades.

As politicians increasingly turn to powerful computer software to make gerrymandering harder to detect, we believe it’s vital that the public has access to tools that can keep up.

Want us to score a map you don't see here? Email us with a link to the digital map files and we'll see what we can do!

Data sources: U.S. Census Bureau, state legistlatures, OpenPrecincts , MGGG , VEST , Princeton MapCorps , and All About Redistricting

The Redistricting Report Card is a collaboration between the Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab and RepresentUS