How Districts are Gerrymandered

In its long history, American gerrymandering has taken on several different forms. Changes in the law resulted in the elimination of certain forms, as well as the growth of others.

For much of this country’s history, gerrymandering issues arose from the unequal distribution of voters between districts. Rural areas were often over-represented in state legislatures because, unlike for US House districts, there was no law requiring that each elected official have the same number of constituents. State legislative districts were created based on geographical features, counties, or other non-population-based factors. This meant that in some states, there were neighboring districts each with one State Representative, but with populations differing by a factor of five. A vote in one of these districts was worth five times as much as a vote in the other.

This week, I studied the Supreme Court decisions that illegalized this type of population-based gerrymandering. These decisions, however, did not end gerrymandering as a whole, since racial and partisan gerrymandering soon became dominant forces on the American political stage.