Gerrymandering is endangering our democracy. (part one, what it is)
Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic"
....... gerrymandering empowers politicians to choose their voters. This tends to occur especially when line drawing is left to legislatures and one political party controls the process, as has become increasingly common. When that happens, partisan concerns almost invariably take precedence over all else. That produces maps where electoral results are virtually guaranteed even in years where the party drawing maps has a bad year.
Yeah, I know that the United States is NOT a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic, but I used 'democracy' because most people don't know any better. It also makes a cooler headline.
What is Gerrymandering you ask? Good question, glad you asked it. Follow the hyperlink and read the article or perhaps I can explain it in another way with the help of an analogy. Polls. You've all heard of polls. The media polls, the one we hear so much about are rigged. It's rigged in order to get the answer they want. It's rigged in many ways but let's just consider one. Typically the poll is skewed. That means that in any given poll they pick the majority of people who will answer the way they want. For example, if it's a political poll (aren't they all?) they will ask 80% democrats and 20% republicans to take the poll. When the answers are tabulated. SUPRISE! 80% of those who took the poll answered the way they wanted them too.
That's why the Hildebeast was leading in the polls right up until the election. The pollsters effectively only asked democrats who they wanted for president.
How does this related to Gerrymandering? Same thing on a broader scale. If those redistricting want a democrat to win they draw the borders of the district in such a way that there are more democrats in it.
For example, Texas Congressional District ThirtyFive.
The term gerrymandering is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States at the time of his death, who, as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. "
(coming soon, part 2: a modest proposal, how to fix it)