Why do politicians gerrymander districts

With redistricting now beginning in many states, the need for Congress to pass reform legislation is more urgent than ever. Unless that happens, we risk another decade of racially and politically discriminatory line-drawing.

But time is running short. The Census Bureau released data to the states for redistricting on August If new laws are to have the maximum impact, Congress needs to act quickly.

Fair representation depends on it. Latinos powered population growth in the last decade, but it remains to be seen whether they get the political representation they deserve. Explore Our Work. Here are six things to know about partisan gerrymandering and how it impacts our democracy. Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic.

There are multiple ways to gerrymander. Gerrymandering has a real impact on the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures. Gerrymandering affects all Americans, but its most significant costs are borne by communities of color. Gerrymandering is getting worse. Federal reform can help counter gerrymandering — but Congress needs to act soon. Fortunately, the solution is simple: require each state to draw districts that accurately reflect the political views of the American people.

Accordingly, in a state in which voters are split between Republicans and Democrats, the representatives would also be split Depending on the number of districts, and where people live, it may not always be possible to perfectly align the population and its representation. But the purpose of voter-determined districts is to align them as closely as possible.

And thanks to map-drawing software, map drawers are better able to do that now than ever before. States simply have to take the tools that have been employed in recent decades to gerrymander and use them to draw fair districts instead. However, to ensure that the process is not manipulated to the benefit of a particular political party, the maps should be drawn by an independent commission, not elected officials.

The redistricting process should also prioritize ensuring fair representation for communities of color, who continue to be drastically underrepresented in Congress and even more underrepresented in state legislatures. After Democrats controlled Texas redistricting in the s, Republicans took charge in The redistricting battles were so fierce that Democratic legislators actually fled to Oklahoma and New Mexico in an attempt to prevent the legislature from meeting to draw lines. The Democrats hid out in Oklahoma in a Holiday Inn, under assumed names.

Until now, redistricting has not been one of them. When the lines were ultimately drawn, they moved about , Latino voters out of one district in order to protect an incumbent who was beginning to lose the support of the Latino population.

Latinos had recently become the majority of the eligible population in the district, when they were replaced by voters more likely to support the incumbent. In , Texas had another opportunity to redraw district lines. The legislature effectively did the same thing, in the same place, to the same Latino voters. In , race riots in Los Angeles took a heavy financial toll on businesses in many neighborhoods, including the area known as Koreatown.

The redistricting map, it appeared, had fractured Koreatown — an area barely over one square mile — into four City Council districts and five state Assembly districts.

As a result, no legislator felt responsible to the Asian-American community. Goodwill poisoned by the redistricting process can spill over into the entire rest of the legislative term. They can try suing, but the Supreme Court has limited their legal options.

Their last resort will be to try to win by much more than they did last time. With the help of changing voting patterns and court decisions, Democrats were able to overcome that disadvantage in and But now the GOP has the chance to shake things up before the midterms.

For many state legislatures , the importance of new maps is even higher. That is, after all, how gerrymandering works. Every 10 years, after the US Census, district lines for the House of Representatives and for state legislature chambers are redrawn.

The two parties are increasingly polarized, politics is increasingly nationalized, and voters with firm partisan loyalties are increasingly sorted geographically. More and more, the party that wins a US House seat is determined by how the district is drawn. Basically, you want to maximize the number of districts where your party wins by a comfortable but not too big margin.

This is a simplified example, but a map with a similar outcome was used in North Carolina , where Democrats won half the vote in but just three of 13 House seats.

In real-life redistricting, several sometimes conflicting factors often come into play:. The tricky part lies in determining how to balance all those interests.

And Democrats face an added challenge. Because of where Democratic and Republican voters happen to live in swing states — with much of the Democratic vote packed into urban areas — it is usually easier to draw state maps that favor Republicans.

Drawing balanced or competitive maps is certainly possible, but the line-drawers often have to make a concerted effort to achieve that end, and it can often get harder to do so if they want cleanly shaped and compact districts preserving county and town boundaries. Republican legislators will be disinclined to make such an effort, and the various independent redistricting commissions may vary in how they approach this challenge.

The last round of redistricting was an utter disaster for Democrats. It happened just after the midterm election wave, which cost the party more than state legislature seats and gave the GOP total political control of most swing states. The resulting maps gave Republicans a net advantage in the House — though experts disagreed on exactly how much of one, the GOP likely gained several seats at minimum because of it.

In swing-state legislatures, the situation was starker — Republicans gerrymandered and have held legislatures in states like Michigan , Wisconsin , and Pennsylvania ever since. They launched a multi-pronged effort to overcome those gerrymanders — an effort that has had mixed success. Lawsuits got state courts to overturn several of the worst pro-GOP gerrymanders Democrats likely would not hold the House today if not for those decisions.