{"id":1018,"date":"2013-06-08T15:26:02","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T20:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/?p=1018"},"modified":"2013-06-06T15:44:11","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T20:44:11","slug":"how-does-gerrymandering-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/2013\/06\/08\/how-does-gerrymandering-work\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Gerrymandering Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine commented on Facebook and was questioning when we’ll be able to get rid of the congress that we have now (which has the lowest approval rating for a congress ever<\/a>).\u00a0 I found a really good example that helps explain the concept and thought I would go ahead and write it out.<\/p>\n

Most of us will have to think back to middle school political science to remember gerrymandering.\u00a0 It’s when a political party redesigns the political district boundaries in order (or attempt) to create a more favorable district for itself.<\/p>\n

In the case of the US, a state may be 50% Republican and 50% Democrat (for example).\u00a0 But if one party gets to redistrict the voting map, then they can put all of the opposing party into a few small districts and then their party will have a majority (even if it’s a slim one) in the remaining districts.\u00a0 So, even though the popular vote is 50\/50, the state representatives may be 8 Republicans to 2 Democrats.<\/p>\n

They are able to do this by analyzing the district votes very carefully.\u00a0 For example, in Texas, the vast majority of democrats (which may be up to 45% of the population) are centered in the higher population centers (Austin, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and SE Texas (for a weird reason that’s not important now)).\u00a0 While the rest of the state is Republican.<\/p>\n

So, the controlling party (the Republicans) makes a very few “Democrat” districts centered in those areas, then makes large swaths of the rest of the state.\u00a0 In a bad year, the Texas Democrats may only get 9 out of 32 seats (29%) even though the split in the state is closer to 40% Democrats.<\/p>\n

This article<\/a> helps explains the concept. During the 2012 US election, President Obama received 41% of the popular vote in the State of Texas.\u00a0 You would think that about 40% of the counties would have a majority democratic vote.\u00a0 But in reality, just over 10% of the counties were majority Democrat (26 out of 254).<\/p>\n

\"File:Texas
Brighter blue is more Democratic, while brighter red is more Republican.
from http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Texas_presidential_election_results_2012.svg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, counties are ‘districts’ that are supposed to be equal in population, but you get the picture.\u00a0 If a party can create voting districts that divide the population in a few solid opponent districts and a whole bunch of most likely ‘ours’ districts, then they will (in general) get a majority of the representatives for that state in the US house (or the state house as well).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine commented on Facebook and was questioning when we’ll be able to get rid of the congress…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[451,241],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","tag-gerrymandering","tag-government-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}