The History of Gerrymandering & How We Stop It
- Kevin Lankes
- Aug 5
- 10 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/B28kAQJdHKQ
So we all know there’s this practice of drawing voting districts in like, Rorschach Test shapes, and we know this is done so that one particular political party can win more seats in Congress. In the 2024 election, just 9% of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives were considered competitive. The rest were safe, firmly belonging to one party or the other. Why are just okay with this? Like, how long has this been going on, and are there no alternatives to just letting people sketch out elongated boogers over sections of the state they like the best? Like, what is this?
Well, I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m going to dole out some information about where gerrymandering came from and what we could possibly do to stop it. Because nobody likes it. Except for the people who win, but only that time, because next time the shapes will be different. It’s so stupid. And now Texas is threatening to redraw districts right now, which is crazy for a few different reasons. And California Governor Gavin Newsom is responding that he might redraw districts in his state, too. But why can we do this at all?
It turns out that the practice of gerrymandering dates back to the very beginning of U.S. politics, back to the original colonies of America. And even before that, there was a term in 18th-century England to describe the voting districts that resulted from gerrymandering, and they called them “rotten districts.” The deal was that the political party who was currently doing the redrawing would put as few eligible voters as possible into a district, and that way they could be more easily paid off or intimidated. There weren’t as many voters back then, don’t forget, because of the money and racism. You had rich and white and male to vote.
So when it came to America, it was the same thing. And then one particularly egregious attempt to change the party advantage through weird shapes inspired the term gerrymandering that we all know and love today. The year was 1812, and the Boston Gazette published a cartoon on March 26th reacting to the Massachusetts state senate where the Democratic-Republican party, also known as the Jefferson republicans, had redrawn a voting district to their advantage. The cartoonist, Elkanah Tisdale, had noticed that the district looked a lot like a mythical salamander. So here’s the drawing that showed up in the paper, with the tail and the wings, and I don’t think the tongue was any voters, but it could have been. The governor of Massachussetts at the time, who signed off on this new district, his name was Elbridge Gerry, with a hard ‘g,’ but over time that g has softened and now the term we all know is gerrymandering. The Gerrymander being this new creature that the state senate had drawn into their voting districts. Kind of sucks for Governor Gerry, because not only do we all pronounce his name wrong these days, he also didn’t like what the democratic-republicans were up to and was just pressured into going along with it.
And then the gloves were off. We couldn’t put the gerrymander back in the…tree stump? Salamanders live in logs. Fun fact, but most salamanders live in the northeastern United States, how weird is that? As a result of their new districts, the democratic-republicans received 49% of the vote, so not even half, but they came away with 29 out of 40 seats in the state senate, or an equivalent of 72.5% of the governing body. People were not happy about this result, because back then, they paid attention, as opposed to now, when this happens by default and nobody cares. So when the Federalists won control the next year and they redrew the districts to something more reasonable. After the election in 1813, cartoons popped up everywhere that pictured the gerrymander as a skeleton, implying that the monster had been slain. And that’s a claim that in today’s parlance, we would say aged like milk. Because it just kept getting worse after that.
In 1874, South Carolina was the first state to draw a noncontiguous district, or a district that wasn’t contained in just one shape. It did turn out that this was too much for some people in power. They were like, whoa. The House of Representatives told South Carolina it would refuse to seat members elected from that district, so they had to change it back. It seems important to take the time to note that legislators had a spine back then. These days, they just all pretend their hands are tied these days. You know, following high-road politics and precedent that doesn’t actually exist while other people who feel more brazen about their grifting just walk all over everything.
I mean it didn’t even really work back then. Because here’s what happened in South Carolina. They came back in 1876 with the seventh congressional district, that people nicknamed the Boa Constrictor District. It was called that because it snaked across the state to loop in as many Black families as possible in order to keep them in just one district. Mississippi famously did the same thing with their so-called “shoestring district.”
And this was the biggest single ingredient in the gerrymandering soufflé at that time: racism. We know this because we can see it directly. After the end of the Civil War when Black men won the right to vote, the practice of gerrymandering exploded. Lots of bizarre, random shapes, some quote “long stringy districts” as historians have called them, popped up all over the place, particularly in southern states, in order to continue to suppress the voting power of Black Americans. This was when states also introduced poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation and fraud tactics in order to keep Black voters away from the polls. Because just like the tactics used by the English inside the “rotten districts” of old, collecting people in one place made it easier to control them.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the government actually decided that maybe this whole thing was bad. One thing that happened was the Great Migration. Lots of people of color moved into more urban areas. And the voting districts hadn’t changed much for a really long time, especially not enough to account for a massive population influx. The situation gave oustized power to rural white voting districts. Back then, the supreme court was actually interested in democracy and not all the super expensive gifts and debt payouts they could get for ruling a certain way. The Warren court made a series of decisions in the 1960s that were collectively known as the “redistricting revolution.” One of them importantly decided that disenfranchising Black voters was a violation of the 15th Amendment, and they also decided that electoral districts should be drawn based on uniform population. They also required that districts be redrawn after every 10-year census to keep voter populations from shifting and maintaining the same number of representatives representing the same number of people. None of this fixed the weird shape issue, though. There was another decision in the 90s that tried to fix it but really didn’t.
And then humans got more and more technologically advanced over all the time, and so then so did our gerrymandering schemes. The rules didn’t keep up for long because we just used predictive modeling software to rig voting districts for us. In one case, North Carolina’s 12th District became known as the “I-85 District” because it just ran along the highway, and it even narrowed at one point so that it was thinner than the highway itself, so that it could claim to be contiguous while it came out the other side of the bottleneck.
We all know that the supreme court has made a heel turn lately. In 2019, they decided that the federal government shouldn’t have a say in congressional districts at all, and the states should get to resolve their own redistricting issues. Of course, the states have a vested interest in making those districts as stupid as they can so they can ensure the results of elections and determine who wins before anyone votes at all.
So why are we fighting about this? What’s the big deal, that we can’t figure things out and are constantly arguing and redrawing stupid shapes on the map? What are the actual rules about voting districts?
The Constitution says that states should elect representatives, but it doesn’t say how. Article I, Section 4 says that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” So basically, each state can do whatever the hell it wants. The very next phrase says that Congress reserves the right to pass laws to change the process, but it doesn’t dictate the process from the start.
When we started this whole America thing, the formula for the house of representatives was one representative for 30,000 residents. As an example of how things worked then, Pennsylvania got eight reps. And PA decided that they would elect them all on a statewide general ticket, so all voters in the state had a say in electing all eight of their representatives. Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New Jersey also held their votes the same way. Some states had a mix of general ticket and district system, where everyone could vote for all reps, but the reps themselves had to live within districts that they’d represent. All the rest of the states chose to draw districts and hold votes specifically within those for representatives, and they were all immediately thrust into a battlefield that has never let up to this day.
Because not even the system had to be consistent, since the constitution did not specify. The statewide ticket in PA meant that Federalists were dominating the state elections because of their strong support in the urban center of Philadelphia. And without districts, population centers controlled voting outcomes. So Western PA forced the state to switch to a district system in 1790. Federalists switched things back to statewide elections in 1792, because they wanted to win some more. And then PA went back to districts again in 1794. This scenario was really common in the early years of the U.S. political system, because again, there were no rules about how to elect representatives, so the party in power just did it however it would benefit them the most. States also did the same thing with their electoral college votes, either allocating them statewide or by congressional district, whichever would benefit the party in power. So all these rules or systems of etiquette we abide by now were changed swiftly and often depending on who was in charge. Now only one party speaks the language of ruthless political opportunism today, and the other party watches it happen and just does nothing. At least part of the chaos was reigned in when Congress mandated that all states use the district system in 1842 with the passing of the Apportionment Act.
Is there something we can do to fix more of it? What can we do to get rid of gerrymandering? The current solutions that are being implemented right now are very few. One involves appointing independent commissions to redraw state voting districts. And a few states do this now. It gets us a little closer to proportional representation but it’s also not perfect. And sometimes these commissions can be so politically deadlocked that they don’t succeed in drawing a new map at all. Sometimes it fails from the start because party leaders can’t even decide who the independent commission should be. Who does everyone trust to redraw the districts fairly? Well, sometimes no one.
A more radical solution that’s being discussed but not implemented is to just do what every other democracy in the world does. Wait, are you telling me that Americans just insist on doing things our own way, and it doesn’t work? America insists on playing on hard mode? American exceptionalism is really just like, unnecessarily enduring easily fixable hardship? That’s crazy.
In 2016, a study of 54 democracies across the globe found that single-member districts like the kind we have in the U.S. are uniquely susceptible to gerrymandering. It turns out it’s just harder to do everywhere else, because they don’t make districts with only one representative inside. So, one of the easiest ways to fix gerrymandering is to create multi-member districts, where voters elect multiple representatives instead of just one. You could create a sort of hybrid system that isn’t a statewide ballot, so population centers don’t just run the elections each time, but it’s not one member per district, either. Then it’s harder to draw weird shapes around literally just Bob’s house so that he can keep a certain representative in office. Research has found that districts are basically immune to gerrymandering when they reach five representatives. We can see this work in the United States, even. Because Illinois used to do it. They had a semi-proportional district system based on population, and only when it switched away from that in the 1980s did it become prone to gerrymandering, and all the competitive voting districts disappeared. So that’s kind of a no-brainer. But it would be very difficult to enact this, because we’d have to convince our representatives to agree to make reelection more challenging for themselves.
And then there are totally new systems thought up by researchers that could make redistricting a complete non-issue going forward. A trio from Harvard, Yale, and Boston University came up with something called the Define-Combine Procedure. It’s a simple two-step process that gives both parties a chance to even things out. In the first step, one party draws twice as many districts as they need. Then the second party looks at those districts and combines pairs of them together to make the final voting districts. So parties get a hand in the process and nobody gets to pull one over on anyone. They have a website at definecombine dot com, and you can even go through a mock redistricting to see how it would work.
Whatever we do, we should probably do something soon. We’re living in an extraordinarily challenging political climate right now, and the deadlocked two-party system of feckless octogenarians who exist solely to take lobbying money and go on vacation 90% of the year just isn’t working. We live in a political stalemate where only corporate power and greed ever breaks through. There’s only so much of that we can take before we’re out of time. Fixing America’s gerrymandering problem is a great first step to get some momentum going. So as you keep hearing about Governor Abbot and Texas redrawing districts, and California doing the same, think about these fixes for American voting districts, and make sure you voice your own opinion about solutions to your elected officials. Let’s do some f*cking good about partisan politics rigging elections through gerrymandering.
Sources:
Bonus: Salamander density in the Eastern United States: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/salamanders-are-surprisingly-abundant-northeastern-forests-study-finds
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