Both political parties gerrymander. The portrayal has almost always been that the Republicans are solely responsible for this problem, but this is clearly not true. The secondary portrayal is that the Republicans are benefitting overall from the process. When you look at overall voting and compare to representation, this makes sense.
There's one serious problem with these arguments. What would voting look like if we managed to rid politics of gerrymandering? How should districts be drawn, and what would we expect?
A lot of people who look at those questions will see one of two possibilities. Both are severely flawed. Both would also require manipulation of the system to achieve political goals.
One possibility would be to try to ensure every district is as equal as possible in terms of politics. In other words, if one party appeals to 51% of the voting population, each district would have a 51% chance of going to that party. The problem with this approach is that accuracy of these divisions could be disastrous. If each district truly represents the overall population, districts would tend to disproportionately represent the more successful of the two parties. In other words, if every single district gave 51% of the vote to the stronger party, 100% of elected officials could potentially represent the party that wins 51%. No rational person will call that fair.
Another possibility would be to try to ensure that representation matches votes. In this case, that would mean a party winning support from 60% of the population would have 60% of the representation. For this to happen, districts would have to be drawn specifically to determine the outcomes instead of having the parties to compete. As I have said before, one thing worse than a two-party system is a one-party system. The winning party doesn't have to put its best candidates on the ballot because they will win anyway. Supporters of the opposing party will have absolutely no representation in their districts.
So what would a system look like that draws these maps fairly? It's hard to say, but I believe they would respect existing political boundaries. County lines and city limits should be taken into consideration. In any fair system, it's nearly impossible for representation to be proportional to the support of voters.
What would a fair system do to voting? Democrats tend to populate in high densities in big cities. Republicans tend to be more spread out. One of the most effective ways to gerrymander is to give up districts and load them up with voters of the opposing party. This increases the odds of winning the other districts. Even without gerrymandering, this is likely to influence outcomes. Without gerrymandering, Republicans would almost certainly have an advantage over Democrats. This raises an interesting question. Are we really sure that gerrymandering is legitimately skewing results in favor of the Republicans?
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