Gerrymandering - Trickery At The Polls
By James Donahue
January 2018
Gerrymandering has become a major political issue as candidates line up for 2018 local, state and federal district elections. A ruling in the Pennsylvania Federal District court against Republican manipulation of state election district boundaries has put the word gerrymandering in the spotlight. But do many people understand what it is?
Gerrymandering is described as a practice used to establish a political advantage for a particular party by redrawing the boundaries of election districts. Every candidate for political office serves an election district, whether it is for school board, a county office, state elected position or federal legislative job. All states and counties, towns and townships are divided by districts. By law these districts must be established to provide a fair number of registered voters in occupancy, thus creating a form of fairness during the election process.
The complexities of accomplishing “fair” districts can be extreme. Special local and regional redistricting boards are established to establish the proper demographics in districts following a national census that occurs every ten years. The census takers gather not only head counts but determine ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious and even class groups. All of this information is used by redistricting boards to create legal voting districts.
This job of serving on these boards often gets highly political and consequently, it can become a major controversial battleground before those final voting districts are established. That is because the issue of party affiliation also becomes a key part of the decision making. And it is considered so important that the redistricting has become a special science where representatives of each board turns to a variety of methods in an attempt to dilute the voting power of opposing parties against one another. When one party is predominant within a region this form of “trickery” is called gerrymandering, cracking or packing. It is designed to make sure that incumbents remain in power or the predominant party maintains its power for the next ten year cycle.
In an effort to clarify this process we will describe a personal experience covering redistricting board meetings in Michigan’s Sanilac County in the early 1960s.
Sanilac County, a rural region located about 100 miles north of Detroit, has always been a predominantly Republican district. The G.O.P. operates such a closed shop there that it was long said that Democrats had to lie about their party affiliation if they ever hoped to get elected to public office.
For years congressional seats were reapportioned based on state population changes. But after the 1960 Census the question arose as to whether state legislators were required to ensure that state congressional districts also were roughly equal in population. Thus emerged the infamous “one person, one vote” rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. They determined that reapportionment needed to be conducted in each political district from the top down.
That first redistricting board in my county was comprised of five people. There was a chairman. I think I remember it was the county prosecutor who was supposed to be impartial. There were two prominent Republicans and two prominent Democrats appointed to make up the rest. This small committee then spent hours studying the statistics gathered from the local Census and then create legal reapportionment plans. Once finalized, the plans were sent to state level offices for final approval before the district lines were legally established.
Even at a county level, and this early in the game, it was amazing how much study and manipulating occurred among those five delegates. The meetings went on for weeks, each time with new plans presented to the group to be considered. As a reporter covering those meetings I admit the news stories that emerged became so complex and routine that they were boring to read. My editors complained that I was wasting my time covering them. Yet even then I recognized that what was happening was an important part of the county election process that needed to be told.
When the final maps were drawn the districts were so bent and twisted that they were hard to recognize. School districts crossed over township and county lines. County Board districts crossed township lines. State districts crossed into and out of Sanilac County, as did federal election districts. The maps were a complex maze of information that only the professional election coordinators attempted to interpret and understand.
And there lays the rub, to coin a Shakespearean phrase. The entire process is far too complicated for the general public to understand, or wish to try to interpret. Thus the stage was set for massive voter fraud.
The Republicans have wasted no time utilizing the redistricting complexities to slide in their own sneaky kind of gerrymandering. Some experts say this is how the G.O.P. seized power in the last two big elections. They warn that if we don’t get control of those distorted election maps the Republicans will retain power again this year, and may still maintain control of the government after 2020 elections.
By James Donahue
January 2018
Gerrymandering has become a major political issue as candidates line up for 2018 local, state and federal district elections. A ruling in the Pennsylvania Federal District court against Republican manipulation of state election district boundaries has put the word gerrymandering in the spotlight. But do many people understand what it is?
Gerrymandering is described as a practice used to establish a political advantage for a particular party by redrawing the boundaries of election districts. Every candidate for political office serves an election district, whether it is for school board, a county office, state elected position or federal legislative job. All states and counties, towns and townships are divided by districts. By law these districts must be established to provide a fair number of registered voters in occupancy, thus creating a form of fairness during the election process.
The complexities of accomplishing “fair” districts can be extreme. Special local and regional redistricting boards are established to establish the proper demographics in districts following a national census that occurs every ten years. The census takers gather not only head counts but determine ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious and even class groups. All of this information is used by redistricting boards to create legal voting districts.
This job of serving on these boards often gets highly political and consequently, it can become a major controversial battleground before those final voting districts are established. That is because the issue of party affiliation also becomes a key part of the decision making. And it is considered so important that the redistricting has become a special science where representatives of each board turns to a variety of methods in an attempt to dilute the voting power of opposing parties against one another. When one party is predominant within a region this form of “trickery” is called gerrymandering, cracking or packing. It is designed to make sure that incumbents remain in power or the predominant party maintains its power for the next ten year cycle.
In an effort to clarify this process we will describe a personal experience covering redistricting board meetings in Michigan’s Sanilac County in the early 1960s.
Sanilac County, a rural region located about 100 miles north of Detroit, has always been a predominantly Republican district. The G.O.P. operates such a closed shop there that it was long said that Democrats had to lie about their party affiliation if they ever hoped to get elected to public office.
For years congressional seats were reapportioned based on state population changes. But after the 1960 Census the question arose as to whether state legislators were required to ensure that state congressional districts also were roughly equal in population. Thus emerged the infamous “one person, one vote” rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. They determined that reapportionment needed to be conducted in each political district from the top down.
That first redistricting board in my county was comprised of five people. There was a chairman. I think I remember it was the county prosecutor who was supposed to be impartial. There were two prominent Republicans and two prominent Democrats appointed to make up the rest. This small committee then spent hours studying the statistics gathered from the local Census and then create legal reapportionment plans. Once finalized, the plans were sent to state level offices for final approval before the district lines were legally established.
Even at a county level, and this early in the game, it was amazing how much study and manipulating occurred among those five delegates. The meetings went on for weeks, each time with new plans presented to the group to be considered. As a reporter covering those meetings I admit the news stories that emerged became so complex and routine that they were boring to read. My editors complained that I was wasting my time covering them. Yet even then I recognized that what was happening was an important part of the county election process that needed to be told.
When the final maps were drawn the districts were so bent and twisted that they were hard to recognize. School districts crossed over township and county lines. County Board districts crossed township lines. State districts crossed into and out of Sanilac County, as did federal election districts. The maps were a complex maze of information that only the professional election coordinators attempted to interpret and understand.
And there lays the rub, to coin a Shakespearean phrase. The entire process is far too complicated for the general public to understand, or wish to try to interpret. Thus the stage was set for massive voter fraud.
The Republicans have wasted no time utilizing the redistricting complexities to slide in their own sneaky kind of gerrymandering. Some experts say this is how the G.O.P. seized power in the last two big elections. They warn that if we don’t get control of those distorted election maps the Republicans will retain power again this year, and may still maintain control of the government after 2020 elections.