Gerrymandering: Redrawing Voting Ways

In The Week article “How to rig elections, the legal way”, The week staff describes how parties gain an advantage by redrawing voting districts. This process of redrawing voting districts to favor one’s political party is considered gerrymandering. It creates districts that are irregularly shaped and is a legal process unless it violates the 1965 voting rights act which makes it illegal to redistrict based off of minority voters. Gerrymandering has been successful in recent years because in 2012 gerrymandered states such as Pennsylvania won 49% of the vote and took 72% of house seats. Redistricting is overseen by whoever controls the state legislature and happens every ten years with data collected from the recent census. This process is hard to stop because the state legislature, in most cases, districts to favor their own political party. …show more content…
The process of gerrymandering started in 1788, before Congress even existed. Henry drew the fifth congressional district in Virginia to include as many Anti-Federalists as possible. However, Henry didn’t have the resources to prevent Madison, his opponent, from beating him. Today, Henry would have been able to ensure victory because of detailed census results and voter tallies. Political parties use two specific techniques to gerrymander which are “packing” and “cracking” districts. Parties in charge of redistricting will attempt to pack opposing voters into very few districts. In cracking, however, opposing voters are spread out among several