The term gerrymander typically refers to the creation of electoral districts that have bizarre shapes in order to condition the outcome of an election. In "Considering the Gerrymander" (1977), Leroy C. Hardy recounts that the term gerrymander was coined after the Jeffersonian-con-trolled legislature of Massachusetts drew contorted senatorial districts in order to ensure the defeat of Federalist candidates in 1812. One particular district located north of Boston was so contorted that it was said to look like the mythical salamander. Since this all took place during Elbridge Gerry’s (1744-1814) term as governor, the district was christened a "Gerrymander," and the term has stuck ever since.
Bizarre district shape is but one manifestation of the real evil of gerrymandering: the conscious attempt by someone to organize voters in a manner will result in the over- or underrepresentation of a particular group or political party. This can be accomplished using very unremarkable district boundaries. In addition, an electoral system can be gerrymandered by other means, such as unfairly altering the rules by which votes are counted and translated into electoral seats or changing the laws governing the qualification of candidates and political parties to appear on ballots.
Gerrymandering takes on benign as well as evil forms. Perhaps the most egregious example of modern gerrymandering in the United States took place in Alabama in 1958. The black population of the city of Tuskegee was about to become a majority of the electorate. White residents petitioned the state legislature to redraw the boundaries of the city to remove the black voters. The state legislature obliged and transformed the city’s border from a simple square to what the Supreme Court of the United States described in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) as an "uncouth" twenty-three-sided figure. The Supreme Court declared that this transformation of Tuskegee amounted to a denial of the black residents’ right to vote.
In 1965 the U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. When it was amended in 1982, it was read by the Justice Department and the Supreme Court (in Thornburg v. Gingles, 1983) to require states to create legislative and congressional districts with voting majorities comprised of minority voters ("majority-minority districts") wherever possible.
With this decision the Supreme Court essentially endorsed a congressional mandate to gerrymander legislative and congressional districts to help minority voters. While the Voting Rights Act was thus regarded as a benevolent attempt to rectify a heinous history of disenfranchisement of minority voters, it nonetheless endorsed a policy of officially mandated manipulation of the electoral system.
Beginning in 1993 with the decision in Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court retreated from its holding in Gingles. In so doing, it placed restrictions on the extent to which the federal government could require states to gerrymander districts on behalf of minority voters. While congres-sionally mandated gerrymandering was clearly benign in its intent, it was nonetheless a clear perversion of the electoral system.
Gerrymandering is unavoidable because it is impossible to draw electoral district lines or change electoral laws without having a clearly favorable or unfavorable impact on someone. Gerrymandering occurs throughout the world and in many different circumstances. Drawing on examples from the United Kingdom and Ireland, Richard Katz (1998) notes that in countries that use other electoral systems (such as proportional representation systems with multimember electoral districts), the size of districts can be manipulated so that particular parties end up wasting their votes and electing fewer candidates than they would in a district of a different size.
In addition, an electoral system can be gerrymandered by making it harder for minor parties or independent candidates to challenge the established political powers. In Canada, for example, the Supreme Court has heard challenges to laws restricting the access of small political parties to government funds (Figueroa v. Canada, 2003), restricting campaign spending (Harper v. Canada, 2004), and allowing for great population discrepancies among voting districts (Reference re Provincial Electoral Boundaries [Sask.], 1991). The first two cases embodied claims that laws unfairly favored incumbent political powers by making it harder for minor political actors to garner enough influence to challenge the government. This not only discriminated against minor parties, it also rendered political competition less robust and the electoral system correspondingly unfair. In the Saskatchewan case, challengers claimed that population disparities among electoral districts unfairly favored rural interests at the expense of urban voters.
In conclusion, the term gerrymander has transformed since the mid-twentieth century from a reference to bizarrely shaped electoral districts to a broader term addressing myriad ways in which an electoral system can be rendered less competitive in hopes of achieving partisan gain. As a result, around the world, the trend is to place the authority to make changes to the electoral system in the hands of nonpartisan commissions or agencies.
