How does redistricting impact the voting patterns and outcome of an election? Why do some legislatures choose to gerrymander districts? What suggestions would you give with regard to the restriction or regulation of gerrymandering attempts?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Redistricting, which is a legal redrawing of voting district boundaries in response to population changes as measured every 10 years by census, has important implications on the voting patterns of a state. Since the states themselves are responsible for overseeing and conducting elections, it is the privilege of the state legislature to conduct such redistricting every 10 years, or more often in some cases. But when redistricting is done so as to impact voting patterns of specific ethnic, political, or demographic groups, we refer to this as gerrymandering. Partisan gerrymandering is done when a state’s legislature wishes to give advantage to the party in power within that state. Ethnic and demographic gerrymandering refer to attempts to improve or dilute the specific voting power of a group of people on the basis of race or demographic characteristics. For instance, if a district is gerrymandered so as to give voting advantage to whites at the detriment of minorities, this is ethnic gerrymandering, and the impact is to malapportion the voting patterns within that district. A third type of gerrymandering is incumbent gerrymandering, which is carried out to allow an incumbent to stay in office, but this is the rarest type. Any such gerrymandering attempts can lead to very strange-looking boundaries which is how the name gerrymandering was derived in the first place. The Justice Department has, in the past, overseen such attempts to gerrymander, and federal judges have often stepped in to tell a state that it must redistrict again in order to proportionally apportion a specific district based on ethnic and demographic characteristics.