Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Gerrymandering

Starting point is 00:00:00 Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Churchill was on to something. While I'm sure the vast majority of people listening to this would support the idea of democracy in theory, how democracy is implemented can be very tricky. Change the rules, and you can totally change the outcome of an election, even if voters vote exactly the same way. And this is especially true with geographical representation. Learn more about gerrymandering. It's history, how it works, and measures to get rid of it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:54 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. Unless you happen to have a very small group of people, direct democracy where everyone can vote on everything is very difficult and hard to manage. To solve this problem, representative democracy was created.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Instead of everyone voting on everything, you vote for people who then vote on your behalf. In most places, representatives are elected on the basis of geography. People who live in one place for one representative and people from another place. place vote for another. While that sounds very straightforward, the problem comes when we try to define what a place is. The story of gerrymandering, but not the practice, began in 1812 in the state of Massachusetts. The governor at that time was Elbridge Gary. Gary was one of the founding fathers of the United States, albeit one of the lesser known ones. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He attended the Constitutional Convention, but actually refused to

Starting point is 00:02:12 sign the document because it lacked a bill of rights. The next year, he would go on to become the fifth vice president of the United States under James Madison, although he died in office after 21 months. Gary was a staunch anti-federalist and a member of the Democratic Republican Party. While he was governor of Massachusetts, the Democratic Republicans made an attempt to try to completely shut out the federalist from the Massachusetts State Senate. A plan was contrived that would redraw the legislative districts such that, the Democrat Republicans would win control of the Senate. In order to do this, they had to draw the lines of several districts in such a way that looked extremely odd. Prior to this, district boundaries

Starting point is 00:02:55 in the state of Massachusetts always followed the boundary of the lines of counties. The redistricting plan wasn't Gary's idea, but he did approve the idea as governor. On March 26, 1812, the Boston Gazette, a federalist newspaper, published an editorial cartoon showing the shape of the election district of South Essex, which curved along the western and northern parts of the city of Boston. The cartoon compared the oddly shaped district to a winged monster. They dubbed the monster a gerrymander, which is a portmanteau of gary and salamander. The original term was pronounced gerrymander, as it was named after the governor, Elbridge Gary. The term, caught on quickly as other federalist newspapers published it. Before the month was out, the term was used in newspapers outside of Boston. In April, it was being used outside of Massachusetts,

Starting point is 00:03:49 and in May it was being published outside of New England. By October, the term had been adopted to describe oddly shaped districts in other states as well, and by the end of 1812, the term had been used in 80 different American newspapers. By 1820, the word was in common use, and in 1864, it was added to the Webster's Dictionary. The only reason it wasn't in the dictionary sooner, it's been said, is because the family of Noah Webster, who produced the dictionary, was friends with the widow of Elbridge Gary, who outlived her husband by 35 years. The actual Massachusetts gerrymandar of 1812 was effective. Gary lost the next election for governor, but the Democratic Republicans retained the Massachusetts state senate. Needless to say over time, the pronunciation of

Starting point is 00:04:37 gerrymander evolved into the word we know today, gerrymander. The Massachusetts redistricting of 1812 is where the name came from, but it was hardly the first instance of gerrymandering. There were cases of gerrymandering that actually predated the first U.S. Congress. Supposedly, in 1788, Patrick Henry and other anti-federalists in the Virginia House of Delegates drew lines for Virginia's 5th Congressional District in an attempt to keep James Madison and out of Congress. Their plan failed. After the U.S. Civil War, gerrymandering was used to create districts in the South that would ensure black voters would have their votes diluted. Republicans after the war used gerrymandering in the creation of states to increase their power. The existence of two

Starting point is 00:05:22 different Dakotas was basically a form of gerrymandering. So how exactly does gerrymandering work? Why does redrawing district lines affect the outcome of elections? Let's demonstrate how, how, it works with a hypothetical example. Let's assume there's a region with a population of 1 million voters who have four representatives in some legislature. Let's also assume that the entire population of eligible voters is evenly split between the two parties, the gold and silver parties, 500,000 members of the gold party and 500,000 members of the silver party. Of the four representatives from the region, who would be elected? How many from each party? You might say, that each political party would get two representatives each, and that would certainly make sense.

Starting point is 00:06:10 But that is by no means certain. Let's say that the Gold Party is in charge of redistricting for one year. They get to set the boundaries of the four representative districts. In order to benefit themselves, they create a district that is a population that is overwhelmingly made up of members of the Silver Party. Each district will have 250,000 people, and in this district, they draw the lines to include 225,000 silver party voters and only 25,000 gold party voters. That means almost half of the members of the Silver Party will be lumped together in a single district that they will win overwhelmingly. However, the remaining 275,000 Silver Party members are now going to be distributed between the three remaining districts, where they will have approximately 91,000 members in each district.

Starting point is 00:07:00 The Gold Party will now have approximately 150,000 voters. in each of the three remaining districts. So just by drawing the lines differently, the balance between the parties went from two each to three to one. Depending on the number and distribution of voters and the number of districts, it's possible to define districts such that a minority of voters actually holds the majority of the seats. In larger districts with larger populations,

Starting point is 00:07:29 it's actually possible to get extremely varied results depending on just how you draw the district lines. Before I go any further, I should note that while the phenomenon of gerrymandering was coined in the United States, it is hardly an American phenomenon. Anywhere you have geographical districts is going to be subject to gerrymandering. There are cases of gerrymandering that can be found on every continent other than Antarctica. Sometimes they have occurred infrequently, and in other cases they've been very common occurrences. gerrymandering used to happen frequently in Canada until each province eventually established independent

Starting point is 00:08:05 electoral boundary commissions. Nonetheless, for reasons you'll see in a bit, it is something that has had a unique history in the United States. Throughout the 20th century, both political parties were guilty of gerrymandering. Democrats and Republicans alike use the power of creating electoral boundaries to their benefit. However, for most of the century, there was a limit to how much they could do. This was due to the fact that election districts were changed infrequently, and everything had to be calculated by hand. The U.S. Supreme Court decision that changed gerrymandering, although nobody realized that at the time, was the 1964 case of Westbury v. Sanders.

Starting point is 00:08:46 The court ruled six to three, finding that congressional districts must have nearly equal populations to ensure that, quote, as nearly as is practical, one man's vote in a congressional election is to be as worth a, as much as another's." End quote. Having each district be similar in population seems quite reasonable at first glance. However, what it meant is that after every census was taken, once every 10 years, districts would have to be redrawn to reflect the changes in population. Now all of a sudden, there was a gerrymandering opportunity that would appear like clockwork every decade. And whoever controlled the body that made the districts after the census would suddenly have enormous power. There was another thing that helped to create more gerrymandered districts.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Computers. By putting data into a computer, it was possible to create far more elaborate districts that defied all geographic sense. There were literally gerrymandered districts that would go down a single road without including the houses on either side of the road. Most people can look at the outline of a gerrymander district and see immediately that something doesn't look right. Humans do not group together in such odd shapes.

Starting point is 00:10:03 Moreover, the idea of gerrymandering strikes most people as unfair, as it's the elected officials choosing their voters, not the voters choosing their elected officials. This has been brought to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court on several occasions. As early as 1946, the case of Colgrove v. Green came before the court by three Illinois voters who claimed that the districts at the time, quote, lacked compactness of territory and approximate equality of population. The court upheld the lower court's decision to dismiss the case

Starting point is 00:10:34 because there was nothing in the Constitution about compactness of districts. For the most part, the courts have declared that the electoral boundaries are political and legislative decisions and not under the purview of the courts. So, assuming you don't want to have gerrymandered districts, how do you get rid of them? One option that's been tried is bipartisan electoral boundary commissions. And these tend not to work because there is an incentive for each party to create districts that are just safe for incumbents. And this is a big reason why the rate of incumbency is so high in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Starting point is 00:11:14 Another solution is to have an independent commission create the boundaries. Iowa has actually done this. The Iowa Commission is tasked with creating congressional districts that have balanced populations are reasonably compact and that follow the boundaries of existing counties. The idea of compact districts is an appealing one because it eliminates the lengthy, strung-out monstrosities that were responsible for the name gerrymander to begin with. However, there is a problem, actually a really big problem. It turns out you don't need to create ridiculous-looking districts to gerrymander effectively. It can be done using districts that are reasonably

Starting point is 00:11:54 shaped such that most people wouldn't think of them as gerrymanders. In the process of researching this video, I came across one computer programmer who developed a program using a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulated anil. Now, that's a mouthful, but suffice it to say, using census data and precinct voting data for the entire state of North Carolina, he was able to create not just a map, but multiple maps that all appeared to have compact legislative zones. None of the districts looked like a gerrymander. However, he was able to get maps that could get results as lopsided as 11 to 2 or as flipped as 5 to 8.

Starting point is 00:12:34 They were the exact same voters but with dramatically different results. So the demand for compact districts isn't really a solution to gerrymandering so long as there's enough computational power available. You can have compact districts of approximately equal size that are still drawn to favor one point. party over another. So the popular solution to gerrymandering might not be a solution at all. So long as representative democracies use geographical districts for elections, where to draw the boundaries is always going to be a problem. So long as the creation of those boundaries is a political process, there's a good chance that you will wind up with gerrymanders. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers

Starting point is 00:13:25 are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in everything everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server.

Starting point is 00:13:47 Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Gerrymandering

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