Gerrymandering

In representative democracies, gerrymandering (, originally ) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The manipulation may involve "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

The term ''gerrymandering'' is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States at the time of his death, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a ''gerrymander'' (). The word is also a verb for the process.

Etymology

The word ''gerrymander'' (originally written ''Gerry-mander''; a portmanteau'') was used for the first time in the ''Boston Gazette'' on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. This word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander. 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.

The cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early-19th-century painter, designer, and engraver who lived in Boston at the time. Tisdale had the engraving skills to cut the woodblocks to print the original cartoon. These woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress. The creator of the term ''gerrymander'', however, may never be definitively established. 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.

The redistricting was a notable success for Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. 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.

The word ''gerrymander'' was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide for the rest of 1812. This suggests an organized activity by the Federalists to disparage Gerry in particular and the growing Democratic-Republican party in general. ''Gerrymandering'' soon began to be used to describe cases of district shape manipulation for partisan gain in other states. According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' the word's acceptance was marked by its publication in a dictionary (1848) and in an encyclopedia (1868). Since the eponymous ''Gerry'' is pronounced with a hard g as in ''get'', the word ''gerrymander'' was originally pronounced , but pronunciation as , with a soft g as in ''gentle,'' has become dominant. Residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry's hometown, continue to use the original pronunciation.

From time to time, other names have been suffixed with ''-mander'' to tie a particular effort to a particular politician or group. Examples are the 1852 " Henry-mandering", "Jerrymander" (referring to California Governor Jerry Brown), "Perrymander" (a reference to Texas Governor Rick Perry), " Tullymander" (after the Irish politician James Tully), and "Bjelkemander" (referencing Australian politician Joh Bjelke-Petersen).

Tactics

Gerrymandering's primary goals are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and minimize the effect of opponents' votes. A partisan gerrymander's main purpose is to influence not only the districting statute but the entire corpus of legislative decisions enacted in its path.

These can be accomplished in a number of ways:

* "Cracking" involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. Political parties in charge of redrawing district lines may create more "cracked" districts as a means of retaining, and possibly even expanding, their legislative power. By "cracking" districts, a political party can maintain, or gain, legislative control by ensuring that the opposing party's voters are not the majority in specific districts. For example, the voters in an urban area can be split among several districts in each of which the majority of voters are suburban, on the presumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the suburban voters would be far more likely to get their way in the elections.
* "Packing" is concentrating many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases, this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest (such as to create a majority-minority district), rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness (and, when minority groups are involved, to avoid lawsuits charging racial discrimination). When the party controlling the districting process has a statewide majority, packing is usually not necessary to attain partisan advantage; the minority party can generally be "cracked" everywhere. Packing is therefore more likely to be used for partisan advantage when the party controlling the districting process has a statewide minority, because by forfeiting a few districts packed with the opposition, cracking can be used in forming the remaining ones.
* "Hijacking" redraws two districts in such a way as to force two incumbents to run against each other in one district, ensuring that one of them will be eliminated.
* "Kidnapping" moves an incumbent's home address into another district. Reelection can become more difficult when the incumbent no longer resides in the district or faces reelection in a new district with a new voter base. This is often employed against politicians who represent multiple urban areas: larger cities are removed from the district to make it more rural.

These tactics are typically combined in some form, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure more seats and greater representation for voters of another type. This results in candidates of one party (the one responsible for the gerrymandering) winning by small majorities in most of the districts, and another party winning by a large majority in only a few. Any party that endeavors to make a district more favorable to voting for it based on the physical boundary is gerrymandering.

Effects

Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. ''Wasted votes'' are votes that did not contribute to electing a candidate, either because they were in excess of the number needed for victory or because the candidate lost. By moving geographic boundaries, the incumbent party packs opposition voters into a few districts they will already win, wasting the extra votes. Other districts are more tightly constructed, with the opposition party allowed a bare minority count, thereby wasting all the minority votes for the losing candidate. These districts constitute the majority of districts and are drawn to produce a result favoring the incumbent party.

A quantitative measure of the effect of gerrymandering is the efficiency gap, computed from the difference in the wasted votes for two different political parties summed over all the districts. Citing in part an efficiency gap of 11.69% to 13%, a U.S. District Court in 2016 ruled against the 2011 drawing of Wisconsin legislative districts. In the 2012 election for the state legislature, that gap in wasted votes meant that one party had 48.6% of the two-party votes but won 61% of the 99 districts.

The wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, but gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.

Effect on electoral competition

Some political science research suggests that, contrary to common belief, gerrymandering does not decrease electoral competition and can even increase it. Some say that, rather than packing the voters of their party into uncompetitive districts, party leaders tend to prefer to spread their party's voters into multiple districts so that their party can win more races. (See scenario (c) in the box.) This may lead to increased competition. Instead of gerrymandering, some researchers find that other factors, such as partisan polarization and the incumbency advantage, have driven the recent decreases in electoral competition. Similarly, a 2009 study found that "congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences."

One state in which gerrymandering has arguably had an adverse effect on electoral competition is California. In 2000, a bipartisan redistricting effort redrew congressional district lines in ways that all but guaranteed incumbent victories; as a result, California saw only one congressional seat change hands between 2000 and 2010. In response to this obvious gerrymandering, a 2010 referendum in California gave the power to redraw congressional district lines to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which had been created to draw California State Senate and Assembly districts by a 2008 referendum. In stark contrast to the redistricting efforts that followed the 2000 census, the redistricting commission has created a number of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.

Increased incumbent advantage and campaign costs

The effect of gerrymandering for incumbents is particularly advantageous, as they are far more likely to be reelected under conditions of gerrymandering. 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. Incumbents are likely to be of the majority party orchestrating a gerrymander, and are usually easily renominated in subsequent elections, including incumbents among the minority.

Mann, a Senior Fellow of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, has also noted that "Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)". The bipartisan gerrymandering Mann mentions refers to the fact that legislators often draw distorted legislative districts even when doing so does not give their party an advantage.

Gerrymandering of state legislative districts can effectively guarantee an incumbent's victory by "shoring up" a district with higher levels of partisan support, without disproportionately benefiting a particular political party. This can be highly problematic from a governance perspective, because forming districts to ensure high levels of partisanship often leads to higher levels of partisanship in legislative bodies. If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.

Gerrymandering can thus have a deleterious effect on the principle of democratic accountability. With uncompetitive seats/districts reducing the fear that incumbent politicians may lose office, they have less incentive to represent their constituents' interests, even when those interests conform to majority support for an issue across the electorate as a whole. Incumbent politicians may look out more for their party's interests than for those of their constituents.

Gerrymandering can affect campaign costs for district elections. If districts become increasingly stretched out, candidates may incur higher costs for transportation and campaign advertising across a district. The incumbent's advantage in campaign fundraising is another benefit of having a gerrymandered seat.

Less descriptive representation

Gerrymandering also has significant effects on the representation voters receive in gerrymandered districts. Because gerrymandering can be designed to increase the number of wasted votes among the electorate, the relative representation of particular groups can be drastically altered from their actual share of the voting population. 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.

Gerrymandering may be advocated to improve representation within the legislature among otherwise underrepresented minority groups by packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, as it may lead to those groups' remaining marginalized in the government as they become confined to a single district. Candidates outside that district no longer need to represent them to win elections.

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. This "maximization policy" drew support from both the Republican Party (which had limited support among African Americans and could concentrate its power elsewhere) and by minority representatives elected as Democrats from these constituencies, who then had safe seats.

The 2012 election provides a number of examples of how partisan gerrymandering can adversely affect the descriptive function of states' congressional delegations. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 83,000 more votes than Republican candidates, yet the Republican-controlled redistricting process in 2010 resulted in Democrats losing to their Republican counterparts in 13 of Pennsylvania's 18 districts.

In the seven states where Republicans had complete control over the redistricting process, Republican House candidates received 16.7 million votes and Democratic House candidates received 16.4 million. The redistricting resulted in Republican victories in 73 out of the 107 affected seats; in those seven states, Republicans received 50.4% of the votes but won in over 68% of the congressional districts. 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.

In Michigan, redistricting was conducted by a Republican legislature in 2011. Federal congressional districts were designed so that cities such as Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Lansing, and East Lansing were separated into districts with large conservative-leaning hinterlands that diluted the Democratic votes in those cities in Congressional elections. Since 2010, not one of those cities is within a district in which a Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives has a reasonable chance of winning, short of Democratic landslide.

Incumbent gerrymandering

Gerrymandering can also be done to help incumbents as a whole, effectively making every district a packed one and greatly reducing the potential for competitive elections. This is particularly likely to occur when the minority party has significant obstruction power: unable to enact a partisan gerrymander, the legislature instead agrees to ensure its own reelection.

In an unusual occurrence in 2000, for example, the two dominant parties in the state of California cooperatively redrew both state and federal legislative districts to preserve the status quo, insulating the incumbents from unpredictable voting. This move proved completely effective, as no state or federal legislative office changed party in the 2004 election, although 53 congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats were potentially at risk.

In 2006, the term "70/30 district" came to signify the equitable split of two evenly split (i.e. 50/50) districts. The resulting districts gave each party a guaranteed seat and retained their respective power base.

Prison-based gerrymandering

Prison-based gerrymandering occurs when prisoners are counted as residents of a district, increasing its population with non-voters when assigning political apportionment. This phenomenon violates the principle of one person, one vote because, although many prisoners come from (and return to) urban communities, they are counted as "residents" of the rural districts that contain large prisons, artificially inflating the political representation in districts with prisons at the expense of voters in districts without them. Others contend that prisoners should not be counted as residents of their original districts when they do not reside there and are not legally eligible to vote.

Changes to achieve competitive elections

Due to the perceived issues associated with gerrymandering and its effect on competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous countries have enacted reforms making the practice more difficult or less effective. Countries such as the U.K., Australia, Canada and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies. In Spain, they are constitutionally fixed since 1978. 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. This method is used in Austria, Brazil, Sweden, and Switzerland.

In the U.S., such reforms are controversial and face particularly strong opposition from groups that benefit from gerrymandering. In a more neutral system, they might lose considerable influence.

Redistricting by neutral or cross-party agency

The most commonly advocated electoral reform proposal targeted at gerrymandering is to change the redistricting process. Under these proposals, an independent and presumably objective commission is created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the legislature do it.

This is the system used in the U.K., where independent boundary commissions determine the boundaries for constituencies in the House of Commons and the devolved legislatures, subject to ratification by the body in question (almost always granted without debate). A similar situation exists in Australia, where the independent Australian Electoral Commission and its state-based counterparts determine electoral boundaries for federal, state and local jurisdictions.

To help ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be appointed from relatively apolitical sources, such as retired judges or longstanding members of the civil service, possibly with requirements for adequate representation among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the board can be denied information that might aid in gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns of the population.

As a further constraint, consensus requirements can be imposed to ensure that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of fairness, such as a requirement for a supermajority approval of the commission for any district proposal. But consensus requirements can lead to deadlock, as occurred in Missouri following the 2000 census. There, the equally numbered partisan appointees were unable to reach consensus in a reasonable time, and so the courts had to determine district lines.

In the U.S. state of Iowa, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau (LSB, akin to the U.S. Congressional Research Service) determines electoral district boundaries. Aside from satisfying federally mandated contiguity and population equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities. Consideration of political factors such as location of incumbents, previous boundary locations, and political party proportions is specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are chiefly regularly shaped polygons, the LSB process has led to districts that follow county lines.

In 2005, the U.S. state of Ohio had a ballot measure to create an independent commission whose first priority was competitive districts, a sort of "reverse gerrymander". A complex mathematical formula was to be used to determine the competitiveness of a district. The measure failed voter approval chiefly due to voter concerns that communities of interest would be broken up.

In 2017, Representative John Delaney submitted the Open Our Democracy Act of 2017 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a means to implement nonpartisan redistricting.

Redistricting by partisan competition

Many redistricting reforms seek to remove partisanship to ensure fairness in the redistricting process. The I-cut-you-choose method achieves fairness by putting the two major-parties in direct competition. I-cut-you-choose is a fair division method to divide resources amongst two parties, regardless of which party cuts first. This method typically relies on assumptions of contiguity of districts but ignores all other constraints such as keeping communities of interest together. This method has been applied to nominal redistricting problems but it generally has less public interest than other types of redistricting reforms. The I-cut-you-choose concept was popularized by the board game Berrymandering. Problems with this method arise when minor parties are shut-out of the process which will reinforce the two-party system. Additionally, while this method is provably fair to the two parties creating the districts, it is not necessarily fair to the communities they represent.

Transparency regulations

When a single political party controls both legislative houses of a state during redistricting, both Democrats and Republicans have displayed a marked propensity for couching the process in secrecy; in May 2010, for example, the Republican National Committee held a redistricting training session in Ohio where the theme was "Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe". The need for increased transparency in redistricting processes is clear; a 2012 investigation by The Center for Public Integrity reviewed every state's redistricting processes for both transparency and potential for public input, and ultimately assigned 24 states grades of either D or F.

In response to these types of problems, redistricting transparency legislation has been introduced to US Congress a number of times in recent years, including the Redistricting Transparency Acts of 2010, 2011, and 2013. Such policy proposals aim to increase the transparency and responsiveness of the redistricting systems in the US. The merit of increasing transparency in redistricting processes is based largely on the premise that lawmakers would be less inclined to draw gerrymandered districts if they were forced to defend such districts in a public forum.

Changing the voting system

As gerrymandering relies on the wasted-vote effect, the use of a different voting system with fewer wasted votes can help reduce gerrymandering. In particular, the use of multi-member districts alongside voting systems establishing proportional representation such as single transferable voting can reduce wasted votes and gerrymandering. Semi-proportional voting systems such as single non-transferable vote or cumulative voting are relatively simple and similar to ''first past the post'' and can also reduce the proportion of wasted votes and thus potential gerrymandering. Electoral reformers have advocated all three as replacement systems.

Electoral systems with various forms of proportional representation are now found in nearly all European countries, resulting in multi-party systems (with many parties represented in the parliaments) with higher voter attendance in the elections, fewer wasted votes, and a wider variety of political opinions represented.

Electoral systems with election of just one winner in each district (i.e., "winner-takes-all" electoral systems) and no proportional distribution of extra mandates to smaller parties tend to create two-party systems. This effect, labeled '' Duverger's law'' by political scientists, was described by Maurice Duverger.

Using fixed districts

Another way to avoid gerrymandering is simply to stop redistricting altogether and use existing political boundaries such as state, county, or provincial lines. While this prevents future gerrymandering, any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained. The United States Senate, for instance, has more competitive elections than the House of Representatives due to the use of existing state borders rather than gerrymandered districts—Senators are elected by their entire state, while Representatives are elected in legislatively drawn districts.

The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however, in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in population. Individual voters can come to have very different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This malapportionment can greatly affect representation after long periods of time or large population movements. 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''). Similarly, in the U.S. the Alabama Legislature refused to redistrict for more than 60 years, despite major changes in population patterns. By 1960 less than a quarter of the state's population controlled the majority of seats in the legislature. This practice of using fixed districts for state legislatures was effectively banned in the United States after the ''Reynolds v. Sims'' Supreme Court decision in 1964, establishing a rule of one man, one vote.

Objective rules to create districts

Another means to reduce gerrymandering is to create objective, precise criteria with which any district map must comply. Courts in the United States, for instance, have ruled that congressional districts must be contiguous in order to be constitutional. This, however, is not a particularly effective constraint, as very narrow strips of land with few or no voters in them may be used to connect separate regions for inclusion in one district, as is the case in Illinois's 4th congressional district.

Depending on the distribution of voters for a particular party, metrics that maximize compactness can be opposed to metrics that minimize the efficiency gap. For example, in the United States, voters registered with the Democratic Party tend to be concentrated in cities, potentially resulting in a large number of "wasted" votes if compact districts are drawn around city populations. Neither of these metrics take into consideration other possible goals, 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.

Minimum district to convex polygon ratio

One method is to define a minimum district to convex polygon ratio . To use this method, every proposed district is circumscribed by the smallest possible convex polygon (its convex hull; think of stretching a rubberband around the outline of the district). Then, the area of the district is divided by the area of the polygon; or, if at the edge of the state, by the portion of the area of the polygon within state boundaries.

The advantages of this method are that it allows a certain amount of human intervention to take place (thus solving the Colorado problem of splitline districting); it allows the borders of the district to follow existing jagged subdivisions, such as neighbourhoods or voting districts (something isoperimetric rules would discourage); and it allows concave coastline districts, such as the Florida gulf coast area. It would mostly eliminate bent districts, but still permit long, straight ones. However, since human intervention is still allowed, the gerrymandering issues of packing and cracking would still occur, just to a lesser extent.

Shortest splitline algorithm

The Center for Range Voting has proposed a way to draw districts by a simple algorithm. The algorithm uses only the shape of the state, the number of districts wanted, and the population distribution as inputs. The algorithm (slightly simplified) is:

# Start with the boundary outline of the state.
# Let =A+B where is the number of districts to create, and A and B are two whole numbers, either equal (if is even) or differing by exactly one (if is odd). For example, if is 10, each of and would be 5. If is 7, would be 4 and would be 3.
# Among all possible straight lines that split the state into two parts with the population ratio A:B, choose the ''shortest''. If there are two or more such shortest lines, choose the one that is most north–south in direction; if there is still more than one possibility, choose the westernmost.
# We now have two hemi-states, each to contain a specified number (namely and ) of districts. Handle them recursively via the same splitting procedure.
# Any human residence that is split in two or more parts by the resulting lines is considered to be a part of the most north-eastern of the resulting districts; if this does not decide it, then of the most northern.

This district-drawing algorithm has the advantages of simplicity, ultra-low cost, a single possible result (thus no possibility of human interference), lack of intentional bias, and it produces simple boundaries that do not meander needlessly. It has the disadvantage of ignoring geographic features such as rivers, cliffs, and highways and cultural features such as tribal boundaries. This landscape oversight causes it to produce districts different from those a human would produce. Ignoring geographic features can induce very simple boundaries.

While most districts produced by the method will be fairly compact and either roughly rectangular or triangular, some of the resulting districts can still be long and narrow strips (or triangles) of land.

Like most automatic redistricting rules, the shortest splitline algorithm will fail to create majority-minority districts, for both ethnic and political minorities, if the minority populations are not very compact. This might reduce minority representation.

Another criticism of the system is that splitline districts sometimes divide and diffuse the voters in a large metropolitan area. This condition is most likely to occur when one of the first splitlines cuts through the metropolitan area. It is often considered a drawback of the system because residents of the same agglomeration are assumed to be a community of common interest. This is most evident in the splitline allocation of Colorado.
However, in cases when the splitline divides a large metropolitan area, it is usually because that large area has enough population for multiple districts. In cases which the large area only has the population for one district, then the splitline usually results in the urban area being in one district with the other district being rural.

As of July 2007, shortest-splitline redistricting pictures, based on the results of the 2000 census, are available for all 50 states.

Minimum isoperimetric quotient

It is possible to define a specific minimum isoperimetric quotient, proportional to the ratio between the area and the square of the perimeter of any given congressional voting district. Although technologies presently exist to define districts in this manner, there are no rules in place mandating their use, and no national movement to implement such a policy. One problem with the simplest version of this rule is that it would prevent incorporation of jagged natural boundaries, such as rivers or mountains; when such boundaries are required, such as at the edge of a state, certain districts may not be able to meet the required minima. One way of avoiding this problem is to allow districts which share a border with a state border to replace that border with a polygon or semi-circle enclosing the state boundary as a kind of virtual boundary definition, but using the actual perimeter of the district whenever this occurs inside the state boundaries. Enforcing a minimum isoperimetric quotient would encourage districts with a high ratio between area and perimeter.

Efficiency gap calculation

The efficiency gap is a simply-calculable measure that can show the effects of gerrymandering. It measures wasted votes for each party: the sum of votes cast in losing districts (losses due to cracking) and excess votes cast in winning districts (losses due to packing). The difference in these wasted votes are divided by total votes cast, and the resulting percentage is the efficiency gap.

In 2017, Boris Alexeev and Dustin Mixon proved that "sometimes, a small efficiency gap is only possible with bizarrely shaped districts". This means that it is mathematically impossible to always devise boundaries which would simultaneously meet certain Polsby–Popper and efficiency gap targets.

Use of databases and computer technology

The introduction of modern computers alongside the development of elaborate voter databases and special districting software has made gerrymandering a far more precise science. Using such databases, political parties can obtain detailed information about every household including political party registration, previous campaign donations, and the number of times residents voted in previous elections and combine it with other predictors of voting behavior such as age, income, race, or education level. With this data, gerrymandering politicians can predict the voting behavior of each potential district with an astonishing degree of precision, leaving little chance for creating an accidentally competitive district.

On the other hand, the introduction of modern computers would allow the United States Census Bureau to calculate more equal populations in every voting district that are based only on districts being the most compact and equal populations. This could be done easily using their Block Centers based on the Global Positioning System rather than street addresses. With this data, gerrymandering politicians will not be in charge, thus allowing competitive districts again.

Online web apps such as Dave's Redistricting have allowed users to simulate redistricting states into legislative districts as they wish. According to Bradlee, the software was designed to "put power in people's hands," and so that they "can see how the process works, so it's a little less mysterious than it was 10 years ago."

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can measure the extent to which redistricting plans favor a particular party or group in election, and can support automated redistricting simulators.

Voting systems

First-past-the-post

Gerrymandering is most likely to emerge in majoritarian systems, where the country is divided into several voting districts and the candidate with the most votes wins the district. 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. Even though gerrymandering can be used in other voting systems, it has the most significant impact on voting outcomes in first-past-the-post systems. Partisan redrawing of district lines is particularly harmful to democratic principles in majoritarian two-party systems. In general, two party systems tend to be more polarized than proportional systems. 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. However, not every state using a first-past-the-post system is being confronted with the negative impacts of gerrymandering. Some countries, such as Australia, Canada and the UK, authorize non-partisan organizations to set constituency boundaries in attempt to prevent gerrymandering.

Proportional systems

The introduction of a proportional system is often proposed as the most effective solution to partisan gerrymandering. In such systems, the entire constituency is being represented proportionally to their votes. Even though voting districts can be part of a proportional system, the redrawing of district lines would not benefit a party, as those districts are mainly of organizational value. For example, instead of having three districts, a single large district would exist where the top three candidates in the election would all represent the district. It would be harder to gerrymander a district where there are multiple winners from that district.

Mixed systems

In mixed systems that use proportional and majoritarian voting principles, the usage of gerrymandering is a constitutional obstacle that states have to deal with. In mixed systems, the advantage a political actor can potentially gain from redrawing district lines is much less than in majoritarian systems. In addition, voting districts are mostly being used to avoid that elected parliamentarians are getting too detached from their constituency. The principle that determines the representation in parliament is usually the proportional aspect of the voting system. Seats in parliament are being allocated to each party in accordance to the proportion of their overall votes. In most mixed systems, winning a voting district merely means that a candidate is guaranteed a seat in parliament but does not expand a party's share in the overall seats. Gerrymandering can still be used to manipulate the outcome in voting districts. In most democracies with a mixed system, non-partisan institutions are in charge of drawing district lines and gerrymandering is a less common phenomenon.

Difference from malapportionment

Gerrymandering should not be confused with malapportionment, whereby the number of eligible voters per elected representative can vary widely. Nevertheless, the ''-mander'' suffix has been applied to particular malapportionments. Sometimes political representatives use both gerrymandering and malapportionment to try to maintain power. One of the earliest examples of malapportionment, rotten boroughs, was practiced in England from the 13th century until the 1832 reform act. A striking modern example of malapportionment is the U.S. senate, where states receive equal representation despite widely varying populations.

Examples

Several western democracies, notably Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia employ an electoral system with only one (nationwide) voting district for election of national representatives. This virtually precludes gerrymandering. Other European countries such as Austria, the Czech Republic or Sweden, among many others, have electoral districts with fixed boundaries (usually one district for each administrative division). The number of representatives for each district can change after a census due to population shifts, but their boundaries do not change. This also effectively eliminates gerrymandering.

Additionally, many countries where the president is directly elected by the citizens (e.g. France, Poland, among others) use only one electoral district for their presidential election with the winner of the popular vote winning the position, despite using multiple districts to elect representatives.

Australia

National

Gerrymandering has not typically been considered a problem in the Australian electoral system largely because drawing of electoral boundaries has typically been done by non-partisan electoral commissions. There have been historical cases of malapportionment, whereby the distribution of electors to electorates was not in proportion to the population in several states.

In the 1998 Australian federal election, the opposition Australian Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley, received 50.98% of the two-party-preferred vote in the House of Representatives, but won only 67/148 seats (45.05%). The incumbent Liberal National Coalition government led by Prime Minister John Howard won 49.02% of the vote and 80 of 148 seats (54.05%). Compared to the previous election, there was a swing of 4.61% against the Coalition, who lost 14 seats. After Howard's victory, many Coalition seats were extremely marginal, having only been won by less than 1% (less than 1200 votes). This election result is generally not attributed to gerrymandering or malapportionment.

South Australia

Sir Thomas Playford was Premier of the state of South Australia from 1938 to 1965 as a result of a system of malapportionment, which became known as the Playmander, despite it not strictly speaking involving a gerrymander.

In 2022, the nominally independent South Australian Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission has been accused of favouring the Australian Labor Party, as the party has been able to form government in four of the last seven elections, despite receiving a lower two-party preferred vote.

Queensland

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.

The malapportionment had been originally designed to favour rural areas in the 1930s-1950s by a Labor government who drew their support from agricultural and mine workers in rural areas. This helped Labor to stay in government from 1932–1957. As demographics and political views shifted over time, this system came to favour the Country Party instead.

The Country Party led by Frank Nicklin

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