Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral maps for political advantage. “If every Man here was a Gerry,” John Adams wrote in July 1776, “the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.”, But Gerry was also a “a nervous, birdlike little person,” wrote biographer George Athan Billias in his 1976 book, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman. Like many Democratic-Republicans, Gerry came to believe that the Federalist opposition were too close to the British and secretly wanted to restore the monarchy. THE MAN WHO INVENTED 'GERRYMANDERING' FRANK WHELAN, The Morning Call THE MORNING CALL The year was 1811 and portrait painter Gilbert Stuart could scarcely believe his eyes. “To the governour the project of this law was exceedingly disagreeable,” Austin wrote in The Life of Elbridge Gerry in 1829. It’s also a cautionary tale about the importance of sticking to one’s values in an era of partisan warfare. Brian Duignan is a senior editor at Encyclopædia Britannica. One district was shaped like a strange salamander like wings. 4)It was then that the power of computing and ever more sophisticated computer software were deployed to promote partisan advantage within the constraint imposed by the equal-population requirement for legislative districts. Gerrymandering, the politicians’ practice of drawing district lines to favor their party and expand their power, is nearly as old as the republic itself. The word “gerrymander” was coined at a Boston dinner party hosted by a prominent Federalist in March 1812, according to an 1892 article by historian John Ward Dean. Gerrymandering is a complex topic, but an interesting one nonetheless. In the October issue of The Atlantic, Robert Draper offers an in-depth analysis of current instances of gerrymandering in U.S. politics. They responded with a satire so piercing, it has overshadowed all of Gerry’s other accomplishments in history. III. The law consolidated the Federalist Party vote in a few districts and thus gave disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans. Omissions? Elected to the Continental Congress in December 1775, Gerry lobbied his fellow delegates to declare independence from Great Britain. In his 1810 inaugural address, Gerry called for an end to partisan warfare between his Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists. 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The plaintiffs argued that efficiency gaps of 7 percent or greater were legally significant because they were more likely than smaller gaps to persist through the 10-year life of a redistricting plan. It looked like a salamander, another dinner guest noted. 5)The pioneers in this effort were two California politicos, Phil He became an Anti-Federalist, arguing that the Constitution had gotten the balance of power between states and the national government wrong. Terms of Use This happens all the time in this country, Democrat or Republican. Cookie Policy James Madison. Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston, covering politics, history, cities, arts, and science. Veasey said the Supreme Court's decisions to allow gerrymandering and Texas have created a system in which the elected officials are choosing their constituents, not the other way around. The word is a combination of the words Gerry, for the state's governor, Elbridge Gerry, and salamander, as a particular electoral district was jokingly said to be shaped like a lizard. As talk turned to the hated redistricting bill,  illustrator Elkanah Tisdale drew a picture map of the district as if it were a monster, with claws and a snake-like head on its long neck. In that case, the plaintiffs argued that the discriminatory effects of the redistricting plan could be measured objectively by comparing the “efficiency” of votes cast for Republican or Democratic candidates in state legislative elections since 2012. It shows how people used to manipulate elections, and how different the election was back when it was invented and how it is now. He could also be a dyspeptic hothead—a trait that got the better of him when he signed the infamous redistricting bill. Gerrymandering, in U.S. politics, the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups (racial gerrymandering). Elbridge Gerry knew all about gerrymandering of political districts - he invented it! You may have heard about this in the news, but how is it affecting you? Gerrymandering has been denounced as long as it’s been practiced. At age 65, Gerry ran for governor, motivated by “his obsessive fears about various conspiracies underway to wreck the republic,” according to Billias. For instance, Gerry argued against directly electing congressmen to the House of Representatives. The first “ gerrymander ” was drawn on a map and signed into law on February 11, 1812. …must not be confused with gerrymandering—a form of arbitrary districting used to benefit the party that at a given time controls the apportionment process. Instead, the justices held unanimously (9–0) that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, and the case was remanded (7–2) to the district court for further argument. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), however, a plurality of the Supreme Court held that political gerrymanders could be found unconstitutional (under the equal protection clause) if the resulting electoral system “is arranged in a manner that will consistently degrade a voter’s or a group of voters’ influence in the political process as a whole.” A majority of the Court also agreed that the instance of gerrymandering before it did not display any of the “identifying characteristics of a nonjusticiable political question” that had been laid out in Baker v. Carr, including, as the Baker Court had put it, “a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it.” Although the majority in Bandemer could not agree on what standards should be used to adjudicate challenges to political gerrymanders, it refused to accept that none existed, declaring on that basis that “we decline to hold that such claims are never justiciable.”, In 2004, in Vieth v. Jubelirer, a plurality of the Court pointedly embraced what the Bandemer Court had declined to hold, on the grounds that “no judicially discernible and manageable standards for adjudicating political gerrymandering claims have emerged” since the Bandemer decision. Meanwhile, the Democratic-Republicans, who controlled the legislature, redrew the state’s Senate districts to benefit their party. Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party. Gerrymandering is just one of the many ways people can manipulate an election. Pointing to the rapid development and routine use of computer-assisted districting, he argued that such technologies “may produce new methods of analysis that…would facilitate court efforts to identify and remedy the burdens” imposed by political gerrymanders, “with judicial intervention limited by the derived standards.”. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration enacted a law in 1812 defining new state senatorial districts. An example of gerrymandering in Maryland’s 3rd congressional district. Map of the Massachusetts 2nd Congressional District, 13th Congress. By “packing”…. There the Court’s conservative majority, over the bitter objections of its more liberal members, declared (5–4) that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”. A merchant’s son from the port town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry had wanted a different kind of fame—the immortality that comes with founding a nation. The word “gerrymander” was coined at a Boston dinner party hosted by a prominent Federalist in March 1812, according to an 1892 article by historian John Ward Dean. In the convention’s second half, he took a different tack, arguing that the proposed central government would be too powerful. Though his push to add a Bill of Rights didn’t win over his fellow delegates, it later won over the country and the new Congress – where Gerry served as a leading anti-Federalist from 1789 to 1793, before serving President Adams in 1798 as a diplomat in France. Mencken’s The American Language. He stammered and had an odd habit of “contracting and expanding the muscles of his eye.” Colleagues respected Gerry’s intelligence, gentlemanliness, attention to detail, and hard work, but his maverick political views and personality sometimes hurt his judgment. Give a Gift. The constitutional significance of the latter principle was set forth in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued in 1962, Baker v. Carr, in which the Court held that the failure of the legislature of Tennessee to reapportion state legislative districts to take into account significant changes in district populations had effectively reduced the weight of votes cast in more populous districts, amounting to a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Political gerrymandering characteristically results in a greater number of “wasted” votes for the disfavoured party (i.e., votes for a losing candidate or votes for a winning candidate in excess of the number needed to win), a discrepancy that can be represented as an “efficiency gap” between the parties when the difference between wasted votes is divided by the total number of votes cast. Well-known in his day, Gerry was a wild-eyed eccentric and an awkward speaker, a trusted confidant of John Adams and a deep (if peculiar) thinker. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership, https://www.britannica.com/topic/gerrymandering, gerrymander - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Lou Ottens, the Philips engineer who invented the cassette tape, has died March 14, 2021 ... “I believe that gerrymandering is an existential threat to the nation,” said Rick Kennedy, who lives in Austin and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020. Long and thin, the redrawn state senate district in Massachusetts  stretched from near Boston to the New Hampshire border, where it hooked east along the Merrimack River to the coast. Both parties benefit from it, so there is no interest to change it. In 1963, in Gray v. Sanders, the Court first articulated the principle of “one person, one vote” in striking down Georgia’s county-based system for counting votes in Democratic primary elections for the office of U.S. senator. Gerry himself called the map he signed “highly disagreeable,” and the Salem Gazette, which coined the term “gerry… The original gerrymander, from an 1812 political cartoon. In his almost two years as vice-president, Gerry attended countless parties in official Washington and handled Democratic-Republicans’ patronage requests. Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. Elbridge Gerry.. The division of districts to produce either fair or gerrymandered results. From his name the term gerrymander later was derived. It sliced up Essex County, a political stronghold for the Federalist Party – all by design of its ascendant political rival, the Democratic-Republicans. (An alternate origin story, which Dean found less credible, credited painter Gilbert Stuart, famed portraitist of George Washington, with drawing the monster on a visit to a newspaper office. In 2006, when gerrymandering was pretty strong, Democrats enjoyed a watershed in the midterm elections. Advertising Notice While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Corrections? The Court’s ruling, however, did not consider whether the efficiency gap amounted to the “judicially discernible and manageable” standard it had been waiting for. The districts will be redrawn for the 2022 election. Boston Sentinel Actual map of the original ger- rymander, a Massachusetts State Senate district drawn in 1812. Stuck With Census Policy, More States Pass Laws To End 'Prison Gerrymandering' : Code Switch The U.S. census counts incarcerated people as residents of where they are imprisoned. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry backed a redistricting plan favoring his own party, the Democrat-Republicans. Today, we see it in Ohio’s “Lake Erie Monster” and Pennsylvania’s “Goofy Kicking Donald Duck.” But where did the name come from, and who was the namesake for the much-maligned process? Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. But when his fears became obsessions, he overreacted and compromised his principles. Just such a standard was proposed in Gill v. Whitford (2018), a challenge to a Wisconsin redistricting law enacted by the Republican-controlled state legislature following the 2010 decennial census. ), Tisdale’s drawing, headlined “The Gerry-mander,” appeared in the Boston Gazette of March 26, 1812. No, a “Gerry-mander,” offered poet Richard Alsop, who often collaborated with Tisdale. In it’s 4-3 finding, the state Supreme Court invented standards not even found in state law. Regarding cases of gerrymandering based on race, the Supreme Court has held (in Thornburg v. Gingles, 1986) that such practices are incompatible with Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (as amended in 1982), which generally prohibits voting standards or practices whose practical effect is that members of racial minority groups “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to…elect representatives of their choice.” In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that electoral districts whose boundaries cannot be explained except on the basis of race can be challenged as potential violations of the equal protection clause, and in Miller v. Johnson (1995) it held that the equal protection clause also prohibits the use of race as the “predominant factor” in drawing electoral-district boundaries. California Do Not Sell My Info Following Kennedy’s retirement in 2018, the Supreme Court once again took up the issue of the justiciability of political gerrymandering claims in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). By the 1820s, to “gerrymander” was already in wide circulation, according to H.L. Even in dissent, Gerry did his part as a framer. The drawing of geographic districts can never be politically neutral; “gerrymandering” is a subjective term that refers to what some people would regard as an abuse of the process. or The outline of one of these districts was thought to resemble a salamander. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration enacted a law in 1812 defining new state senatorial districts. It didn’t take long for Gerry’s namesake to take hold. “The Gerry-mander,” political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale. 19th Century Mass. It’d be easy – too easy – to connect Gerry’s role in gerrymandering to his most famous comment at the Constitutional Convention, “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy.” Actually, across his long career, Gerry took principled stands for the Revolution, the American republic, limited government, and the Bill of Rights. He has written for POLITICO Magazine, Next City, the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and Cleveland Magazine, Continue …rights is racial or partisan gerrymandering. The siblings were at home one day in Austin during summer break 2017, trying to decide which of their various board games to play, when they hit upon the idea of creating one based on how gerrymandered their own Texas 10th congressional district was.“It curls into a bit of Austin, then goes out to the countryside which is much conservative and widens a lot, then narrows back down to the suburbs of Houston,” Josh explains. The law consolidated the Federalist Party vote in a few districts and thus gave disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans. Gerrymandering is the process of redrawing districts to favor your party. Given how gerrymandering has shaped and can shape politics in the United States, calling a Gerry-Mander a monster is no mere exaggeration. The gerrymander did its job, giving the Democratic-Republicans a bigger state Senate majority in Massachusetts’ April 1812 election, even though the Federalists actually got more votes statewide. Below it, a fanciful satire joked that the beast had been born in the extreme heat of partisan anger—the “many fiery ebullitions of party spirit, many explosions of democratic wrath and fulminations of gubernatorial vengeance within the year past.”. A couple of months ago I linked to a bit of research showing the effect of gerrymandering on House races. Elbridge Gerry, then governor of Massachusetts, signed into law a redistricting plan designed to keep his political party in power in the upcoming election. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Democratic governors forced the democratic primary votes to happen despite a pandemic going on where people should stay home because it benefited Joe Biden. Submit now! The term is derived from the name of Gov. Gerrymandering even survived the party that invented it. The USC Game Innovation Lab created the Gerrymandering Game in which you are tasked with redrawing the lines while pleasing a multitude of different bureaucrats on all sides of the political spectrum. The Gerry-Mander: political cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale. Until the 1980s, disputes regarding political gerrymandering were generally considered nonjusticiable (not decidable by federal courts) on the presumption that they presented “political questions” that are properly decided by the legislative or the executive branch. Though Gerry resisted joining a political party in the 1790s, in the 1800s he cast his lot with this new party, which supported a less centralized government and favored France over Britain in foreign policy. One year later, in Wesberry v. Sanders, the Court declared that congressional electoral districts must be drawn in such a way that, “as nearly as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.” And in the same year, the Court affirmed, in Reynolds v. Sims, that “the Equal Protection Clause requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis.”. It will have no bearing on today. Although it does not prevent any person from voting or registering to vote, gerrymandering ensures that a targeted minority group or political party will be permanently underrepresented in a state legislature or in Congress relative to its absolute numbers in the state. He could also be a dyspeptic hothead—a trait that got the better of him when he signed the redistricting. Few districts and thus gave disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans parties benefit from,. 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