Gerrymander

The term gerrymander originated in 1812 to describe the practice of manipulating election district boundaries to benefit a certain incumbent or political party. Today the term is most often used in connection with controversies over racial redistricting.

Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a former vice president of the United States, inadvertently gave the practice his name. When his Democratic-Republican Party carved out a misshapen Essex County district, artist Gilbert Stuart penciled a head, wings, and claws onto the district map and exclaimed, “That will do for a salamander!” Whereupon editor Benjamin Russell replied, “Better say a Gerrymander!”

In the ensuing 1812 election the opposing Federalists, packed largely into the outlying district, won 51 percent of the vote but gained only eleven of forty Senate seats. Politicians ever since have tried to emulate Gerry's success with the mapping process.

Whether gerrymandering is legitimate, however, has never been settled. By one argument it is unconstitutional because it can deprive voters of the right to make an effective choice between candidates of both parties. If a district is set up to make election of a Democrat virtually inevitable, then Republicans there have lost the right to cast anything more than a symbolic vote for their candidate.

No one questions that gerrymandering has important implications for the political process. Thanks to the growing power of computers, state lawmakers have become increasingly adroit at drawing districts to protect incumbents. As a result, so few House districts were competitive in the 2002 midterm elections that political analyst Charlie Cook rated only about a dozen in the “toss-up” column that could go to either party. A decade earlier, he had rated about four times as many closely contested races. Some analysts worried that the long-term impact could be status quo elections and an increasing tilt toward overwhelmingly Republican and Democratic districts at the cost of politically moderate districts.

The Supreme Court has been reluctant to address gerrymandering directly, viewing the issue as a political question for governors and legislatures to address. So long as districts are sufficiently similar in population, the Court has been reluctant to judge whether they were unfairly gerrymandered, except where racial discrimination is at issue.

Until the 1960s the Court avoided all types of reapportionment and redistricting cases. In Colegrove v. Green (1946) Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people…. Courts ought not to enter this political thicket.”

But by 1962 the Court had changed its collective mind. In Baker v. Carr it ruled that malapportionment is a matter for judicial review, while leaving open the standards to be applied in such cases. A year later, in Gray v. Sanders, the Court began spelling out the most basic of those standards: one person, one vote. Different-sized populations in a state's legislative districts violate the principle of equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore are unconstitutional, the Court said. In 1964 it extended the one-person, one-vote test to congressional elections, and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 further reinforced the notion of equality in districting.

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