Stuff You Should Know - Gerrymandering: How to Stifle Democracy

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

No matter which side of the political spectrum you fall on, you should be outraged about the practice of gerrymandering. Redrawing voter district maps to ensure political dominance is about as undemocratic as it gets. Please enjoy Josh and Chuck getting unusually worked up about this abhorrent practice.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.

Jerry Mander. Yeah, that's right. Our pet salamander, Jerry Mander, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That was a dad joke right out of the gate. Man, apparently that's all I've got these days are dad jokes. There's nothing wrong with that. I guess not. Which is really just a way of saying middle-aged dude jokes.

Sure, sure. Because I think our senses of humor decline and we get less funny. Look at Jim Gaff again. But we think we're funnier. Right. Hot pockets? Actually, I tease Jim. I love your work.

Oh, are you pals? No. Oh, OK. No, but I do love his work. I'm just a fan. Yeah. What's he like? Like absolutely zero.

There is zero not to like about Jim Gaff again. You know my buddy Jim, I say he's sort of pals with him. He says he's a good guy. Like there's no way he's not. Yeah. You know, you can't make up that level of coolness and niceness and approachability, affability even maybe. Gaffability.

Nice. He just went, that's genius. I'm going to trademark that. Totally. As if he listens to this show. So here we're diving into politics, which we keep saying like, let's not do that because it's political. But this is very newsy.

And not everyone understands gerrymandering. And I think this file is under PSA because it's a big deal and it stinks. And it's been going on for a long time. Yeah, I'm definitely one of those people who didn't understand it. Like I knew, yeah, it had to do with drawing maps. And you could draw them so that they're unfair. And I never thought, well, how do you do that?

And I found out thanks to researching this episode. And apparently it's gotten way, way worse in recent years. Sure. So to understand gerrymandering, though, you have to understand a little bit about the House of Representatives. One of the two Houses of Congress. One's the Senate.

One's the House of Representatives. And Webster's defines, yeah, so the deal with the House is, is that the founding fathers invented the House, or established, let's say, the House to be a much more sort of of the moment reactive, fair, ultra-democratic group of governing body. And that it's only every two years. And the idea was to have a lot of turnover

and have them really, because there's 435 of them, have them really, really tied to their constituents. So it's just a super fair way for things that really matter to you on a smaller level are heard as opposed to the Senate, which is far, far fewer. Right. And there are a couple of ways that they did this. One, like you said, elections are held every two years.

All Congress people are up for re-election every two years. And they're elected directly by the people they represent. Right. And when they started, I think there were 65 seats in the House of Representatives. And by 1912, I think it was up to 435. And they added seats, because they established the House of Representatives

to represent a set proportion of population. So each Congressperson represents one chunk of America from their state. So the larger and larger America grew, the more and more Congress people you needed. And then finally, in 1912, they said, oh, we can't do this anymore. We're just going to, if you have too many Congress people,

they're going to, you're not going to be able to do anything. It's just going to be too many. Right. So they capped it at 435. And that does something. It means that if you have a state that keeps growing, because it's not like America stopped growing in population in 1912, so as your population keeps growing,

that means that as one state keeps growing, proportionately speaking, that means another state is smaller. Whether people move from that state to the other larger state, or the other larger state just by contrast attracted more people, that means that the smaller state, or the one that didn't grow as much, is going to actually lose congressional seats. And that the bigger state, the one that's growing,

will actually gain congressional seats. Because again, a Congressperson represents a set amount of the American public from their home state. And right now, it's about, I think the average is 711,000 people, is how many people a Congressperson represents in the US today. Yeah, and they did this through what was called the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which basically

set up, all right, here's an automatic system now. Every 10 years, we do a census. And they will just redistribute and allocate seats according to that census every 10 years. And like you said, if you're growing, we're going to nip some away from the places that aren't growing or shrinking. And it seemed like a pretty fair way

to redistribute and allocate these seats. It is, it's extremely fair. And so as a result, you've got like Montana, that the whole state has one congressional district that represents about a million people. Whereas New York State, which is a third of the size of Montana, has 27 congressional districts, and hence seats in Congress, right?

It's a very fair system. Here's the problem. When the Census Bureau figures out all these figures, and they say, well, this state actually should get two new Congresspeople, and this state should lose one, and another state loses one, they have to redraw the maps of the state to show what these new districts are.

Because population has shifted over the 10 years since the last census, so you have to update the maps to make sure that each congressperson is representing roughly the same number of people, and so everybody is accounted for. Again, makes sense, right? Yeah, but the problem came in when they were very vague as far as the rules

for drawing these boundaries. It says something like geographically contiguous, compact in shape, roughly equal in population. All these things are subjective. So when partisan politics become involved, the people that redraw these maps, it seems can't help themselves, but be like, hey, if we move over 10 blocks this way,

and a couple of miles that way, and shape it like this, which looks really weird, but hey, that's OK, because these rules are vague, then we, even though there may be a majority of one party, we could still win if we draw this thing the right way. Right, like the big problem with this whole process for apportioning the House of Representatives seats is that they left in each state the dominant political party

who happened to be in power at the time when the maps needed to be redrawn. It was left up to them. There's no federal oversight. I can't believe they let that get by. There's no oversight whatsoever, and the whole premise of it was, well, OK, the voters will see what they're doing, and will vote those guys out.

The problem is, if you control the congressional maps, you can draw them in such a way that even the voters can't vote you out. And this is gerrymandering, and this is the current state of politics right now. And has been for a very long time. Actually, we've been gerrymandering for a while, but again, like I said, supposedly,

it's gotten way worse in the last decade. Yeah, all right, I'm a little worked up already. Yep. You've got a, interestingly, you're crying blood. I'm trying not to, but it's not helping. So we're going to take a little break, and maybe let's jump back and talk history, if that's all right with you.

I would love that, Chuck. And then we will go back forward in time to study the current mess that we're in right after this. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like the Joshua Hunchuck. All right, we're in the wayback machine.

Yep. It's 1788. Virginia ratifies the Constitution of the US. And former Governor Patrick Henry convinces his state legislators to redraw the fifth congressional district to force his foe, James Madison, to run against James Monroe, because he figured he could easily win. It backfired on him.

Madison came out on top. But this kind of kickstarted at the onset of our founding of our country and the Constitution, the process of gerrymandering, even though at that point it wasn't quite known as gerrymandering yet. No, it wasn't. It was known as gerrymandering after, I think, the 1820s, I believe.

And the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. 1812. 1812. Elbridge Gerry, he was the governor of Massachusetts, right? Correct. He came up with a map that he drew to help keep his party the Democrat Republicans, I think.

Which is just Democratic Republicans. Beyond confusing, right? But he drew a map that was just abhorrent. It was just so clearly partisan and drawn just to keep his party in power in Massachusetts. But I think the Boston Gazette published a picture of this map and proclaimed that it looked like a salamander. And so they said, this isn't a salamander.

This is a gerrymander, which is a million times worse, because it's politically toxic and a lizard. I'd love that little tidbit. That's where the name came from. Yeah, it never had any idea. But that's where gerrymandering came from. Not a pretty word, but it definitely rolls off the tongue like a oil.

So it grew to be a very common practice and very blatant. And Congress, at one point, early on in 1842, tried to get it under control with that apportionment act that I talked about. And that said, those vague things, like let's draw these things as contiguous and compact as possible. But it just apparently no one, I guess the rules were so vague

and outlined in such a nebulous manner that there was no way to enforce it, such that at one point, they carved out two separate states, North and South Dakota. The Republican-controlled Congress, so they could get more seats in the Senate. Yeah, at the time, if you were a state, you had three electoral college votes,

no matter your size or anything like that. And the Dakota territories were Republican-leaning. So the Republicans said, hey, you guys, welcome to the union. And by the way, we're going to carve you into two states. So now we have six electoral votes rather than just the three if you were one big state. Yeah. Pretty clever.

Pretty sneaky, sis. So one thing that this article, I think, this is a Patrick Keiger article, I think it's smart to point out is that this is not just a Republican technique. This has been done throughout history by both the parties, both the two main parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, apparently also the Democratic Republicans,

and to the same effect, which is we're drawing these maps to make sure that you guys don't have a fighting chance in the next congressional elections. Right. I did some digging, though, because I was curious about these days, like who, it's interesting, because you can say who is worse with gerrymandering, or more correctly, maybe, who is better at gerrymandering as far as getting it pushed

through more. And every political science and mathematician will tell you that across the board, sort of Republicans are either better at it or doing it way more. Or that the recent elections over the last, I think, like three or so have favored the GOP in ways that they ended up with something like 20 extra seats

that they wouldn't have otherwise had had the maps not been gerrymandered. Yeah, and in some of these, I think Maryland was one case where, even though it was at Maryland, where the Democrats held like a 52% majority, yet the maps are drawn in such a way that they would have to get like an 8 to 10 point. Oh, I'm sorry, that's Wisconsin.

Yeah, Wisconsin, an 8 to 10 point victory in order to overcome those gerrymandered maps. Yeah, which is just not going to happen, because Wisconsin is pretty close to being down the middle. And that's actually a really good example of the modern gerrymandering that's going on. Patrick Keiger points out, when you think of gerrymandering, this kind of thing, you think of guys in a back room

smoking cigars and poking each other in the chest, saying, this is my district. And you can have this one, that kind of thing. But this is actually like, there are very specialized political consultants who go around the country after each census and help states draw their maps. And they do so with like really sophisticated software that has like block level census data.

So like just like by the block, the people who live on a block, they can carve it out like that so that they can more accurately create these maps. And then when they create these maps, they can create dozens, as many as you want. And when they use them as a model, they can feed them into their computers

and run a simulation of future elections based on this map. It's crazy. And then they can, this is why it's gotten so bad. And then they can adjust, take this block out. What happens if we take this block out and put this one in instead? And now all of a sudden, oh, well, we'll win for the next 10 years.

And they have this map. And the reason that I started talking about this, apparently Wisconsin has a map that's in effect right now. That is so well done that even if the Democrats get 52% of the vote statewide, the Republicans would still control 60 seats in the state assembly, that they would not lose any seats whatsoever,

even if the Democrats got 52% of the vote. Yeah, and the one kind of, the one thing where it kind of stings them, even though there haven't been any real repercussions yet, is that one political scientist said, it's getting so sophisticated though, and they're drawing these maps in such a weird way that you can then go back and look and say,

this is clearly an outlier because this thing looks like a sidewinder rattlesnake across the state. And that is neither contiguous or compact. And it's just so obvious what's going on because you're using these computer programs to just distort these maps to your favor. And this is where I just get so burned up on both sides

because it just completely subverts the process in place, which is you were supposed to be able to vote for the person that represents you and that vote count. I'm glad you said that, man, because it's absolutely true. This is not like lip service, like both sides do it, so we're mad about it. No, this is genuinely like neither side of this should be doing this.

This is a inherent flaw in the political system that back in the day when things were different, we could get along with it. It was a stumbling block, it was kind of hamstrung the democratic process some. Now, with a couple of things, it has gone into hyperdrive. Like so many things have, like normal political weirdness put through certain filters,

like incredibly powerful computer programs that just hyper-tailor things like this. That's a big problem. The other problem is the polarization of politics to a degree that hasn't been for well over a century or so. That has made gerrymandering all the worse because before you could gerrymander all you want, but there were such things as moderate Democrats

and moderate Republicans. And if it was a reasonable piece of legislation, they would cross the aisle to vote for it. They would break ranks. That does not exist anymore. If you're a moderate, within the last 10 years, wealthy interests basically carved you out. They created upstart political parties

to run against you in the primaries. So you would lose your seat or your national convention would collude with their favorite candidate against you. There's no middle any longer. So the fact that the current political power, whoever's in charge of that state can gerrymander, makes it all the worse

because it just makes those divisions even deeper because the parties get what they want one way or the other. There's no middle ground anymore. So gerrymandering has become a real, real problem in the 21st century. Well, yeah, and it's just, the other thing that burns me up is it's just a smack in the face of the average citizen.

It's done behind closed doors with zero thought to, geez, what is this country supposed to be about? And it just really burns me up. There was a report last year by the Brennan Center for Justice, and this just really kind of shows exactly what's going on. It's not like we needed this proof,

but almost all gerrymandered districts in this country are in seven states. Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. And Texas aside, what do those other states have in common with one another? I don't know. They're the swing states.

Oh yeah, yeah. So the swing states have been lost as a result of gerrymandering, huh? Yeah, those seven states are where these gerrymandered districts are happening. And they're all swing states. It's just like, it's literally they're going in and targeting how can we rig this thing as much as possible?

Right, it's just, it's disgusting. Plus also, the next time you hear a politician talk about the founding fathers and what they wanted and their view of everything, like this runs so far a foul of what the framers of the Constitution were looking for when they established the House of Representatives. It's mind boggling.

Like they were probably generating usable energy through the spinning in their graves that's going on right now because they created the House of Representatives so that there would be, like you said, Chuck turnover every couple of years that they were the pulse of the people. They were elected directly by the people.

They were meant to be the voice of the people at any given time. And the fact that gerrymandering has been allowed to go on like this means that there are safe seats now, seats where you can reasonably expect the party and maybe even a single politician to hold on to for a decade or more.

Yeah, which is not how it was supposed to be in the House. No, and I saw that these days in the US and in congressional races, maybe a hundred of the 435 seats are actually competitive races. The rest have been so firmly made safe through gerrymandering over the years that they're not even competitive anymore.

Either that one candidate or their one party is going to control that district. All right, I see another trick of blood coming out of your eye. Just one? So let's take another break and we're gonna come back and start up with the two main gerrymandering techniques

right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like it's just a little shock. All right, so I promised talk of techniques. You hear gerrymandering and redrawing maps.

There are a couple of ways that you can do this. They're called cracking and packing. Cracking is when you scatter the political supporters across a lot of different districts so that they just never get a majority in any of them. Like, let me just snake it up this way for a mile, then back down here. And we pretty much know

that they're not gonna get a majority and we're gonna win. The other one's called packing. And that's when they jam everyone into just a few districts and essentially just say, fine, we're gonna lose those districts, but we're gonna win overwhelmingly everywhere else, the majority of the other districts.

So we're gonna be fine. Right, and cracking and packing just sound like a political consultant came up with those to explain it to legislators. They probably thought it was like the most clever, you know, get it, it rhymes even. Right, so here's the thing with that, right? You can use those techniques in a couple of different ways,

but with the advent of those same computer programs that can crack people or pack people more efficiently into all different maps or whatever, you can use those same ones to kind of expose that kind of thing, right? Sure. And so you can actually, with those same computers, I think you were saying,

you can use to expose this kind of stuff and that political scientist you mentioned, not George, Nicholas Stephanopoulos. Yeah, is this Nick Cousin? I looked, I don't think they're related. No, I don't think so either. Well, leave it or not, but Nicholas Stephanopoulos came up

with that efficiency percentage. And so what you do, Chuck, is you, let's say that we have, and here's the part where I confuse everybody, you ready? Yeah, I was waiting on this. Okay, good. So let's say that you have five districts

and you have 10 people in a district and there's just two parties. I'm already lost. Because you said a number. I'm just kidding. No, I've got it, I've got it. I'm gonna start over. I just scratched out the old stuff.

All right. Starting anew, when you pack a district, meaning you take basically a huge chunk of the other party supporters and put them into one or two districts, what you're doing is, like you said, you're giving up those districts. You know you're gonna lose them.

But as long as there's only a couple in the larger scheme of things, as far as Congress is concerned, you're actually coming out on top because you're gonna win more because you've packed all of the opposition into just a couple of districts, right? So in any one of those districts,

you have some wasted votes. You have your people's wasted votes because you're gonna have some people who live in that district and their votes cannot possibly change the outcome of those district's elections. So their votes are literally what they call wasted votes.

You also have some of the opposition's people's votes because all they need is the majority of the vote or the most votes and they're gonna win. But whatever goes over that 51%, that's wasted votes too. So there's a bunch of wasted votes in there. And then similarly with cracking, when you dilute the other party's voters

and you pack them in with your people, but you have way more people, their votes are wasted and you've got some people whose votes are wasted either. So if you take all the wasted votes in a state and you put them together, subtract them from one another and then divide that by 100,

you've got what's called this efficiency percentage. And it's actually a usable number that when you look at it, it shows you very clearly which party is favored. It's a negative or a positive percentage and it will show you who's favored and they're trying to come up with a rule of thumb now that says that anything over a 7% efficiency percentage

is basically undemocratic and should be outlawed. Yeah. That wasn't too confusing, was it? No. Okay. Not at all. Here's something that isn't confusing at all. Prison gerrymandering.

This is mind blowing that this is allowed. Certain states have counted prison populations as part of these efforts to redraw these districts even though prisoners cannot vote. They're not eligible to vote. So there's a ward in Iowa that has 1,400 residents, 1,300 of whom are prisoners and that counts and only a few states so far have ruled this unconstitutional

and the rest are just playing ball. Right. And by doing that, you give those 100 that can vote way more power because you're actually, their vote is the opposite diluted. It's concentrated by the addition of that non-voting block. Yeah, and again, all this is happening because from the beginning political parties

are in charge of doing this and the only thing that's gonna stop this is, because I would think any sensible, reasonably intelligent American would say this is bad for democracy. No matter which party is doing it. And the only way to possibly break this up is to have non-partisan commissions

in charge of redrawing these maps. Yeah, and supposedly they tried that in Canada. I guess they had rampant gerrymandering and in the 60s they said, no, we're done. Your political parties can't be trusted with this anymore because Chuck, it's as simple as that. There's no reason to put it any other way. Neither of the political parties can be trusted

with this very, very important task. They've just proved it, both of them, over and over again. And in Canada in the 60s, they finally just came out and said it and put their foot down. And they created a non-partisan, unelected commission who's in charge of drawing all the maps for all the districts in the whole country. Yeah, and they've tried it so far in six states,

California, Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Jersey, and Hawaii have passed over control to commissions. And these maps don't even need approval, final approval from governors or state legislators. But apparently even there, these people are appointed by somebody. So it's even hard to clean it up then. And they've shown that so far, like in California,

I mean, it hasn't swung any elections. It has made some of them closer. So maybe it's working a little bit. It sounds like it, I think that point is worth making. Yeah, what, the elections that historically were not closer, closer? Yeah, like Darrell Issa used to get like 63% of the vote. That's what he got in 2010.

And once they instituted these non-partisan commission maps, in 2016, he got a margin of less than 1%. Yeah. So like he had a 12% drop in votes once they changed these maps. That's significant to me. Yeah, so maybe it hasn't swung an election in California yet, but that could be a sign

that if we continue to do this, it could work. Right. But you would think, Chuck, okay, so if this is just such obvious, like anti-constitutional, anti-democracy, skull-duggery, of course the Supreme Court's gonna have something to say about this, right? Yeah, that's where it's gotten really weird this year,

is that there's a case, Gil versus Whitford, that I believe was, didn't the Supreme Court just say they're not even gonna hear it? Yeah, they actually kicked it back down to the lower courts on a technicality, saying that the people involved hadn't shown that they have standing. Right.

Because they hadn't been directly harmed by it. Right. And they said, you go prove that your vote was actually wasted because of a gerrymandered map, which actually wouldn't be that hard to do these days, and let another lower court rule on it, and maybe we'll hear it next time, but they've been punting on it.

Yeah, I mean, and that's the way our political system works. I'm not saying subvert that, but it seems like at some point, we as a nation should be able to come together and say, hey, kind of like money and dark money and stuff. Like, can we just clean this up? But here's the thing, Chuck, if you got gerrymandered maps, even if everybody turns against the dominant political party,

you have to have like 60% of the vote, a massive voter turnout with like 60% of the vote voting against you to actually overwhelm the gerrymandering that these maps produce, or that the political tenacity that these gerrymandered maps produce. And you just don't have that. You could do it with that,

but it's just as the current political reality is it's just not gonna happen. And so as long as they're allowed to keep these maps, whoever's in power, whenever they redraw the maps, actually gets to hang onto it. Yeah, and this is just another example of like feeling powerless

because this stuff is being decided among very few people in these closed door sessions. And I'm sure they all think they're very clever in how they're taking advantage of the system, like right in front of our stupid faces. And the Supreme Court too, not swinging in. On the one hand, it's like, come on. But on the other hand,

a lot of times we don't really want necessarily activist justices. It depends on the topic probably, or the issue and how you feel about it. But they have a long history of saying, that's political, that's not constitutional. You guys go handle it yourself. But one thing I saw as an explanation

for why the Supreme Court has yet to get involved is because there's no standard for what constitutes a congressional or a state district map. There's no standard that the Supreme Court can look at and say, this is the standard. This doesn't live up to that standard. Therefore we're gonna rule this way.

So that's why they haven't done that. But they tend more often than not to uphold maps. Very, very infrequently do they overrule them. And there was like a whole spate of maps from Texas, North Carolina, Maryland, and Wisconsin that they basically said, yep, they're fine, whatever. And in Texas, they demonstrated that these gerrymandered maps had been used

to dilute the voting power of Hispanics who live in Texas and are the majority of Texas now. The maps have been drawn specifically with the purpose of diluting their voting power, which goes against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That's one thing they say, like you can't mess with minorities' voting rights. And for a long time they've said,

well, that includes gerrymandering. Well, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas are both starting the, I guess in this most recent one from, I think, Texas, they added on their own opinion saying, we don't think the Voting Rights Act actually prohibits that. And I think racial gerrymandering is totally fine under the law, which is a big problem.

Yeah, so then go back and amend that act. Yeah, you could do that. But then again, you have to overcome the gerrymander. Right, exactly, man. It's a, what's the snake that eats its tail? What's that called? The Uroboros. This is a Uroborialis.

The 28th district of Maryland probably is what you call it. It's what it looks like. Oh, it's depressing, huh? Yeah, there's one more thing too. This has been used actually to the opposite effect too. I think during the first Bush administration, they were really big on drawing maps that were called affirmative gerrymandering,

which made sure that majority minority, meaning that areas where most of the people who lived there were minorities, that they had very, very strong voting power that they went out of their way to reflect it. And they actually overreached in that way too. And sometimes the courts would throw those out, but it's gone both ways for sure throughout history,

but it just needs to stop entirely because people aren't able to actually vote or be represented in Congress like they should be. Yeah. You got anything else? No, I see the blood has crusted up nicely. I know, I can't open my eyes. You settled down.

I was pretty worked up in this one too. You were, and I was glad, I was glad. Everybody should be worked up about this one. Everybody. Yep. If you want to know more about gerrymandering, we'll look up this article on how stuff works. It's pretty good.

Since I said it's pretty good, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, this is a very sad one, but I'm trying to get the word out to a listener here, for a listener. Guys, after a six year battle, my father passed away last week from AML,

acute myeloid leukemia at only 65 years old. In the middle of his struggle, however, he was able to achieve about two years of remission through the help of a bone marrow stem cell treatment. While the treatment ultimately failed, his remission gave him two more years to be relatively healthy life where he was able to meet the absolute apple of his eye

and my new baby daughter, Sersha. Oh, congratulations. Love that name. She will be one year old, July 1st, which is kind of right around when this is coming out, probably, and spend time with my other two kids, Gavin and Grayson, doing one of the things he loved most in the world, which is being a grandfather.

So hoping maybe you guys could give a shout out to the Be The Match bone marrow registry. It only takes a few minutes to register and they send you a little cheek swab kit that you send back in and boom, you're now eligible to get the call to possibly give someone more time with their friends and family

or possibly even save their life. You can go to www.bethematch.org and check it out. And that is from Chris. And we're back to Chris, very sorry to hear about his father and definitely a worthy organization to check out. Yeah, thanks for telling everybody, Chris. That's a good one.

I'm gonna check that out myself. Yep, me too. If you want to let us know about something that we and everybody who listens to this podcast can do to make the world a better place, we really, really want to know about it. You can tweet to us. You can join us on Instagram, on Facebook, all that jam.

You can find all those links at our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com. You can also send us an email, send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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