Question

due Jul 3 Political Participation What is gerrymandering? How does it affect political participation in the United States?

Answer 1

It is a way that governing parties try to cement themselves in power by tilting the political map steeply in their favor. The goal is to draw boundaries of legislative districts so that as many seats as possible are likely to be won by the party’s candidates. Drafters accomplish it mainly through two practices commonly called packing and cracking.A packed district is drawn to include as many of the opposing party’s voters as possible. That helps the governing party win surrounding districts where the opposition’s strength has been diluted to create the packed district.Cracking does the opposite: It splits up clusters of opposition voters among several districts, so that they will be outnumbered in each district. Gerrymandering is when politicians manipulate voting district boundaries to favor one party over another. In most states, state legislators and the governor control the once-a-decade line-drawing process. So what happens when one party controls the state House, the state Senate and the governor's mansion? The party usually does everything in its power to draw the lines in a way that favors them and puts their political opponents at a disadvantage.That's called partison gerrymandering, and it's how you end up with oddly shaped congressional districts.
Gerrymandering, in U.S. politics, the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups (racial gerrymandering). The term is derived from the name of Gov. Elbridge gerry of mass whose administration enacted a law in 1812 defining new state senatorial districts. The law consolidated the Federalist Party vote in a few districts and thus gave disproportionate representation. Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electroal district to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party; the term "gerrymandering" was coined on review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge gerry, so named for its resemblance to a salamander.To reduce or eliminate the temptation to use redistricting as a political weapon, a number of states have taken steps to remove lawmakers from the process completely. From a practical standpoint, that usually means putting mapmaking authority into the hands of a bipartisan independent commission, although states that have done this differ in how much influence the legislature has in creating these commissions.