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Tarter GERRYMANDERS CH1 PDF
Tarter GERRYMANDERS CH1 PDF
This short book presents for the first time the full history of
more than two centuries of the gerrymandering of legislative and
congressional districts in Virginia. A gerrymander is a deliberate
drawing of electoral districts to give an advantage to one polit-
ical candidate or party, to influence who gets elected and who
does not, and thereby to further or hinder the chances of par-
ticular public policies being adopted or defeated. Gerrymanders
have taken place at all levels of government, from district lines
for the election of members of Congress and state legislatures to
city and county governing bodies, school boards, and judges in
some states. Most of the scholarship on gerrymanders focuses on
how gerrymanders have influenced which political party controls
Congress, but gerrymanders of state legislative districts are argu-
ably even more important. In most states, legislatures not only
draw congressional district lines but also draw their own district
lines as well as, sometimes, district lines for other elective bodies.
Gerrymandered legislatures are therefore of the utmost conse-
quence in local, state, and national politics and government. Ger-
rymanders affect our taxes, our public schools, and every other
public policy decision.
Partisan gerrymandering to give one political party or group
a long-term advantage is not essentially different from allowing
changes in the rules of baseball to give the home team four strikes
per out and four outs per inning but limit visiting teams to three
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GERRYMANDERS
strikes and three outs. Teams limited to three strikes and three
outs could theoretically still win and occasionally would, but they
would be at a serious and permanent disadvantage. The rules of
baseball guarantee that both teams and all players have a free and
equal chance to win by virtue of their skills. Partisan gerrymanders,
however, disrupt or prevent a fair electoral process that should al-
low a majority of voters to elect the candidates who best represent
their beliefs and interests. Legislators who draw electoral district
lines are always the home team. That is what makes partisan gerry-
manders extremely important and almost always unpopular except
among the politicians who benefit from them. As is often said, in
a representative democracy voters should select their representa-
tives; representatives should not select their voters—but that has
often been the case.
Just such an event led to the coining of the word gerrymander.
It entered the English language on March 26, 1812, in a Boston
Gazette article that showed that the peculiar shape of a new Mas-
sachusetts Senate district resembled a dragon, a salamander, or a
“gerry-mander.” The new word for the “new species of Mon-
ster” included the surname of Governor Elbridge Gerry, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence who was elected vice president
of the United States later that year. His allies in the Massachu-
setts General Court (the state legislature) designed the district in
hopes of retaining a Senate majority for their political faction.1
The pronunciation of the word has since changed. Gerry’s name
was pronounced with a hard g, but the word for the practice is
pronounced with a soft g.
In the 1907 book The Rise and Development of the Gerryman-
der, the first scholarly study of the subject, Elmer C. Griffith de-
scribed the practice as “a political device” that “sets aside the will
of the popular majority. It is a species of fraud, deception, and
trickery which menaces the perpetuity of the Republic of the
United States.” The gerrymander, Griffith repeated, is a “corrupt
2
The Gerrymander Monster
Fig. 1. Detail of a broadside that reproduced the March 26, 1812, Boston
Gazette image and description of the original gerrymander. (Collec-
tions of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
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GERRYMANDERS
4
The Gerrymander Monster