Gerrymandering

[8] Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district.

Historians widely believe that the Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale and Benjamin and John Russell coined the term, but there is no definitive evidence as to who created or uttered the word for the first time.

In the 1812 election, both the Massachusetts House and governorship were comfortably won by Federalists, losing Gerry his job, but the redistricted state senate remained firmly in Democratic-Republican hands.

For example, in 2002, according to political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, only four challengers were able to defeat incumbent members of the U.S. Congress, the lowest number in modern American history.

This effect can significantly prevent a gerrymandered system from achieving proportional and descriptive representation, as the winners of elections are increasingly determined by who is drawing the districts, rather than the voters' preferences.

As an example, much of the redistricting conducted in the U.S. in the early 1990s involved the intentional creation of additional "majority-minority" districts where racial minorities such as African Americans were packed into the majority.

[37] While it is but one example of how gerrymandering can have a significant effect on election outcomes, this kind of disproportional representation of the public will seems problematic for the legitimacy of democratic systems, regardless of one's political affiliation.

One study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School found that over one ten-year period, as many members of the state legislature died in office as were defeated in elections.

[43] Open party-list proportional representation makes gerrymandering obsolete by erasing district lines and empowering voters to rank a list of candidates any party puts forth.

In the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution, several constituencies that had been fixed since they gained representation in the Parliament of England became so small that they could be won with only a handful of voters (rotten boroughs).

Neither of these metrics take into consideration other possible goals,[57] such as proportional representation based on other demographic characteristics (such as race, ethnicity, gender, or income), maximizing competitiveness of elections (the greatest number of districts where party affiliation is 50/50), avoiding splits of existing government units (like cities and counties), and ensuring representation of major interest groups (like farmers or voters in a specific transportation corridor), though any of these could be incorporated into a more complicated metric.

The introduction of modern computers alongside the development of elaborate voter databases and special districting software has made gerrymandering a far more precise science.

If the ruling party is in charge of drawing the district lines, it can abuse the fact that in a majoritarian system all votes that do not go to the winning candidate are essentially irrelevant to the composition of a new government.

[72] Possible consequences of gerrymandering in such a system can be an amplification of polarization in politics and a lack of representation of minorities, as a large part of the constituency is not represented in policy making.

[79] Several western democracies, notably Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia employ an electoral system with only one (nationwide) voting district for election of national representatives.

[83] In the state of Queensland, malapportionment combined with a gerrymander under Country Party Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at his own request) became nicknamed the Bjelkemander in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1987 he was eventually forced to resign in disgrace after the Fitzgerald Inquiry revealed wide-ranging corruption in his cabinet and the Queensland Police, resulting in the prosecution and jailing of Country Party members.

The Western Australian Legislative Council was long gerrymandered via a malapportionment that clearly favored the rural conservative National Party, with the state split into electoral regions with significant differences in voter numbers.

[97][98] For the Chamber of Deputies (lower house), 60 districts were drawn by grouping (mostly) neighboring communes (the smallest administrative subdivision in the country) within the same region (the largest).

The unelected senators were eliminated in the 2005 constitutional reforms, but the electoral map has remained largely untouched (two new regions were created in 2007, one of which altered the composition of two senatorial constituencies; the first election to be affected by this minor change took place in 2013).

[108][109][110] On 20 February 2023, Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro announced that the Nuevas Ideas (NI) political party was formally evaluating a proposal to reduce the number of municipalities as suggested by Bukele.

Pasqua's drawing was known to have been particularly good at gerrymandering, resulting in 80% of the seats with 58% of the vote in 1993, and forcing Socialists in the 1997 snap election to enact multiple pacts with smaller parties in order to win again, this time as a coalition.

Another scenario in which gerrymandering can affect German federal election is when a party wins more constituenies than their overall share of the popular vote—those extra seats, called "Überhangmandate", remain.

The ruling coalition at that time, Barisan Nasional (BN; English: "National Front"), has been accused of controlling the election commission by revising the boundaries of constituencies.

[135] These practices finally failed BN in the 14th General Election on 9 May 2018, when the opposing Pakatan Harapan (PH; English: "Alliance of Hope") won despite perceived efforts of gerrymandering and malapportionment from the incumbent.

[143] In recent decades, critics have accused the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) of unfair electoral practices to maintain significant majorities in the Parliament of Singapore.

[151] After the Francoist dictatorship, during the transition to democracy, these fixed provincial constituencies were reestablished in Section 68.2 of the current 1978 Spanish Constitution, so gerrymandering is impossible in general elections.

[154][155] In fact, there is not even a direct translation of the term "gerrymandering" into Spanish and first-generation Hispanic and Latino Americans have struggled with such an unfamiliar concept in the Spanish-speaking world.

Currently, in Northern Ireland, all elections use STV except those for positions in the Westminster Parliament, which follow the pattern in the rest of the United Kingdom by using "first past the post."

This practice, also called "affirmative gerrymandering", was supposed to redress historic discrimination and ensure that ethnic minorities would gain some seats and representation in government.