Gerrymandering ( JERR-ee-, originally GHERR-ee-), defined in the contexts of representative electoral systems, is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency.
The manipulation may involve "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins, a professor at Morgan State University, describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
The term gerrymandering is a portmanteau of a salamander and Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States until his death, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisanly-drawn district in the Boston area that was thought to be similar to the shape of a salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process.
The word gerrymander can be used either as an action verb or to describe the process of creating a gerrymander.
The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander; a portmanteau of the name Gerry and the animal salamander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. This word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a salamander. Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting the oddly shaped district as a strange animal with claws, wings, and a dragon-like head.
The cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early-19th-century painter, designer, and engraver who lived in Boston at the time. Tisdale had the engraving skills to cut the woodblocks to print the original cartoon. These woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress. The creator of the term gerrymander, however, may never be definitively established. Historians widely believe that the Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale and Benjamin and John Russell coined the term, but no definitive evidence shows who created or uttered the word for the first time.
The redistricting was a notable success for Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1812 election, both the Massachusetts House and governorship were comfortably won by Federalists, losing Gerry his job, but the redistricted state senate remained firmly in Democratic-Republican hands.
The word gerrymander was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide for the rest of 1812. This suggests an organized activity by the Federalists to disparage Gerry in particular and the growing Democratic-Republican Party in general. Gerrymandering soon began to be used to describe cases of district shape-manipulation for partisan gain in other states. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word's acceptance was marked by its publication in a dictionary (1848) and in an encyclopedia (1868). Since the eponymous Gerry is pronounced with a hard g /ɡ/ as in get, the word gerrymander was originally pronounced , but pronunciation as , with a soft g /dʒ/ as in gentle, has become dominant. Residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry's hometown, continue to use the original pronunciation.
From time to time, other names have been suffixed with -mander to tie a particular effort to a particular politician or group. Examples are the 1852 "Henry-mandering", "Jerrymander" (referring to California Governor Jerry Brown), "Perrymander" (a reference to Texas Governor Rick Perry), "Tullymander" (after the Irish politician James Tully), and "Bjelkemander" (referencing Australian politician Joh Bjelke-Petersen).
Gerrymandering's primary goals are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and minimize the effect of opponents' votes. A partisan gerrymander's main purpose is to influence not only the districting statute, but also the entire corpus of legislative decisions enacted in its path. These can be accomplished in a number of ways:
"Cracking" involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. Political parties in charge of redrawing district lines may create more "cracked" districts as a means of retaining, and possibly even expanding, their legislative power. By "cracking" districts, a political party can maintain, or gain, legislative control by ensuring that the opposing party's voters are not the majority in specific districts. For example, the voters in an urban area can be split among several districts in each of which the majority of voters are suburban, on the presumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the suburban voters would be far more likely to get their way in the elections.
"Packing" is the practice of concentrating a large number of similar voters into a single district, thereby limiting their influence in other districts. This approach can sometimes be used to ensure representation for a community, such as by creating a majority-minority district. However, it can also be used to diminish a group's overall electoral impact. When the party in control of redistricting holds a statewide minority, packing may be used strategically to concede a few districts while maintaining greater control over the remaining ones.
"Hijacking" is a redistricting tactic that merges two districts, forcing two incumbents to compete for the same seat, ensuring that one of them loses.
"Kidnapping" moves an incumbent's home address into another district. Re-election can become more difficult when the incumbent no longer resides in the district or faces re-election in a new district with a new voter base. This is often employed against politicians who represent multiple urban areas; larger cities are removed from the district to make it more rural.
These tactics are typically combined in some form, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type to secure more seats and greater representation for voters of another type. This results in candidates of one party (the one responsible for the gerrymandering) winning by small majorities in most of the districts, and another party winning by a large majority in only a few. Any party that endeavors to make a district more favorable to voting for it based on the physical boundary is gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. Wasted votes are votes that did not contribute to electing a candidate, either because they were in excess of the number needed for victory or because the candidate lost. By moving geographic boundaries, the incumbent party packs opposition voters into a few districts they will already win, wasting the extra votes. Other districts are more tightly constructed, with the opposition party allowed a bare minority count, thereby wasting all the minority votes for the losing candidate. These districts constitute the majority of districts and are drawn to produce a result favoring the incumbent party.
A quantitative measure of the effect of gerrymandering is the efficiency gap, computed from the difference in the wasted votes for two different political parties summed over all the districts. Citing in part an efficiency gap of 11.7 to 13.0%, a U.S. District Court in 2016 ruled against the 2011 drawing of Wisconsin legislative districts. In the 2012 election for the state legislature, that gap in wasted votes meant that one party had 48.6% of the two-party votes, but won 61% of the 99 districts.