Questions tagged [gerrymandering]
"a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan or incumbent-protected districts"
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Do more legislative seats make Gerrymandering harder?
In a system of single member districts, elected for an entire legislative body all at once, is it easier to gerrymander the map to favor one party over another in a two party system, with more ...
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Do compactness requirements prevent gerrymandering?
One proposal for redistricting reform is the concept of "compactness". A "compact" congressional district was defined by Ballotpedia as "[a district where] the constituents ...
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Would HR1 pass the US Senate if it only prohibited gerrymandering? [closed]
Would "For the People Act" (aka HR1) get required bipartisan support in the US Senate if it concentrated only on the prohibition of gerrymandering? Which political force is, at the present, ...
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Efficiency gap threshold when there are more than two candidates
I've been working on extending Stephanopoulos-McGhee's definition of the efficiency gap using the method outlined in following Stack Exchange post.
It seems that extending the definition of wasted ...
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Are minority majority districts Republican gerrymanders in disguise?
In the USA, white voters have a tendency to vote Republican (depending on where you live, in places like California and Vermont that is not the case) and nonwhite voters as a whole vote Democratic ...
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Is it possible to gerrymander Maryland's congressional districts such that all eight lean Democratic?
I was thinking about what a gerrymandered map of Maryland's congressional districts would look like if the gerrymanderer tried to ensure that all eight districts would be represented by Democrats.
The ...
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Origin of gerrymandering phrase regarding politicians picking voters
Recently, I had a project involving studying the history of redistricting and gerrymandering.
In my studies, I came across what appears to be a particularly common aphorism in redistricting academia. ...
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Democratic gerrymander in California to remove as many Republican seats as possible? [closed]
I am curious about gerrymandering. In California, there are 53 House seats. Of those 53, only 7 are held by Republicans. I know this won't happen for political reasons. But, is there a picture of a ...
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Is this hypothetical gerrymander legal? [duplicate]
I have a question about a hypothetical gerrymander that has not happened and probably won't. Let's say Alabama's GOP decides during redistricting to draw out the majority black area. (See how multiple ...
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Is the North Carolina 2016 Congressional map gerrymandered?
User Dunk claims that North Carolina is not gerrymandered:
...people are ... ignorant to use North Carolina as some proof of gerrymandering. ... The republicans changed the boundaries into ...
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How would one prevent political gerrymandering?
Inspired by this question and it's answers.
With the recent Supreme Court ruling that punts on the issue of political gerrymandering to the individual States, the dissenting opinion makes the ...
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How far can gerrymandering go?
Gerrymandering can keep a relatively unpopular party in power for longer than it otherwise would be. Assuming the unpopular party becomes even more unpopular, just how unpopular would they need to be ...
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Which states will have different electoral maps in 2020 than they had in 2016?
Michigan's gerrymandered electoral map drawn up after the 2010 redistricting was just found unconstitutional, joining Pennsylvania. There is also a current supreme court case regarding the ...
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Is Baltimore unfair to Republican voters?
Context:
K Dog commented:
You should see what Baltimore has done to exclude GOP voters
Question:
What, if anything, has Baltimore done to exclude Republican voters? If the exclusion involves ...
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Understanding gerrymandering in the Maryland example?
I was reading an article in the NY Times explaining the math behind gerrymandering.
They used the Maryland 6th District as an example, that had 26k wasted votes and all 133k republican wasted votes. ...
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How does the Australian Electoral Commission avoid partisan bias?
I was watching a Vox video on gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, and thought how lucky I am that gerrymandering is not generally considered to be much of a problem here in Australia. Some states had ...
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Does this concept solve gerrymandering? [closed]
What if congressmen only got fractions of votes: the fraction of the
voters who voted for them in the general election? So if they only got
51% of the vote, they only get 0.51 votes in the house.
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is Gerrymandering unconstitutional?
I know I've heard that racial discrimination when drawing district lines is unconstitutional. But where in the constitution does it say that, and are there other rules that gerrymandering has to ...
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Why is the efficiency gap (to measure Gerrymandering) higher when the voter repartition is perfectly uniform?
The efficiency gap, as explained in Stephanopoulos and McGhee (2015), measures Gerrymandering using the notion of wasted votes (see a quick overview at How the Efficiency Gap Works (PDF)). This ...
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Formula for efficiency gap calculation when there are more than two candidates
I've been having trouble finding an authoritative definition of the efficiency gap when more than 2 parties are involved. Ballotopedia points to an article by Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, ...
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How does the argument go that gerrymandering restricts freedom of association?
According to a the Washington Post's The Supreme Court will examine partisan gerrymandering in 2017. That could change the voting map.:
One thing that distinguished Whitford from the many previous ...
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How can citizens learn more about the origin & current process of gerrymandering in the U.S. political system?
I'm looking for educational resources that I can share with others in an effort to engage more citizens in how our election system actually works.
Why does gerrymandering exist, and how does it ...
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Effect of Fair Representation Act
The Fair Representation Act was recently introduced by House Member Don Bayer. The main changes that I've read about were that it would introduce instant-runoff style ranked choice voting and that it ...
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Do any countries use a mathematical formula to divide districts, so that gerrymandering is avoided?
The US is famous for being heavily influenced by gerrymandering, to the point where some of the districts look absolutely ridiculous to the plain eye. The obvious solution is to use some sort of a ...
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Does gerrymandering not affect elections for US Senators?
Gerrymandering is a problem; a Representative could have their voter base diluted across neighboring districts at the whim of the controlling party. But Senate elections are statewide, and states don'...
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Does gerrymandering risk tidal wave reversal?
The voting population of gerrymandered districts is distributed so as to provide "safe" margins of victory in many districts while "wasting" opposition votes concentrated in a few districts. What ...
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Have Republicans ever complained about gerrymandering in the United States?
I have heard a lot of outcry about gerrymandering voting districts.
I know there was a book by David Daley as well as the pending case in Wisconsin declaring the voting districts unconstitutional.
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How does gerrymandering work in the US?
I have a vague idea of what gerrymandering is and that it appears to be common in the US, but I don't really understand where it comes from, how it is applied, how common "common" really is, whether ...
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What is gerrymandering?
What is gerrymandering?
Is Adam Ruins Everything - Why Rigging Elections Is Completely Legal an accurate description of gerrymandering?
What was the original idea behind it?
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What was the Democrats' counter to REDMAP?
For the 2010 elections, Republicans created the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) with the plan of flipping state legislative chambers to take control of the redistricting process. Did the ...
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When courts draw maps, do they gerrymander?
It's well known that when legislatures draw maps, the majority protects members of their own party. When courts do maps, do they do the same thing? If so, what are some modern-day examples where a ...
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How come Gerrymandering is still legal?
I just came across a post on tumblr including some congressional district borders.
How come state courts do not outright throw this out through the window for not following the compactness rule? I ...
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Are there any solid representative district planning strategies that can avoid gerrymandering?
According to Wikipedia's article on Gerrymandering:
In the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering is a
practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a
particular party ...
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Is there any data on how much gerrymandering influences incumbent advantage?
The US Congress has a truly prodigious re-election rate: 80-90% in the House since 1964, and ~80% in the Senate with the exception of the 1970s (when it hit a "low" of 55%-65%)
While there are a lot ...
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What reforms have successfully avoided the issues of Gerrymandering?
In democracies like the United States, Gerrymandering to construct districts with artificial boundaries such that incumbents and their parties are favored to win has been a long standing issue. While ...
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