The political strife that defines today’s America derives its energy from the feeling among many that their voices are not being heard. By and large, Americans do not trust Congress and often vote to send a message, hoping to get their opinions represented. The reality is that the political parties do all they can to stay in power, with achieving fairness and democracy not their primary goals.
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing the borders of voting districts to favor specific candidates or political parties. It can make a difference in the number of representatives of each party that a state sends to Washington. In essence, using these strategies can allow one party to keep winning the majority of districts (and representatives) without having the most votes.
Jonathan Mattingly, a mathematician from Duke University in North Carolina, has been working for the past several years to figure out mathematical solutions to the problem. He would like to take the job of drawing voting district lines away from self-serving politicians.
As part of that goal, Mattingly created an algorithm that produces random iterations of the state’s election maps to show the impact of gerrymandering. This is not just a hypothetical exercise. The mathematician says that partisan gerrymandering is having a serious effect on our democracy.
“Even if gerrymandering affected just 5 seats out of 435, that’s often enough to sway crucial votes,” he said in an interview with the journal Nature, referring to the number of representatives in Congress.
Two of the most used methods in gerrymandering are packing and cracking. When they employ packing, legislators try to draw the map in such a way that the opposing voters would be packed into the fewest districts possible.
Cracking means dividing the other party’s voters into several districts, making it harder for them to elect a representative. This tactic helps the party in power to stay in power.Here’s a useful graphic from Washington Post on how gerrymandering works:
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