voting districts, redistricting, and gerrymandering

• internal boundaries within states can determine legislators’ areas of control in representative democracies (such as the United States)

• elected officials represent electorates (groups of people that are eligible to elect them) determined by censuses which occur once per decade in the US and determine reapportionment and redistricting (the changing of districts based on their populations)

• each state is always guaranteed one representative in the national House and two senators in the national Senate

• gerrymandering (redistricting done to benefit a certain party) is and has been used to influence political happenings, and is legal in the United States

  • used on nearly every scale of politics nationwide

  • types of gerrymandering

    • cracking: dispersing a group of like-minded voters into several districts to prevent a majority in any

    • packing: combining like-minded voters into one district to prevent them from affecting elections in other districts

    • stacking: diluting a minority populated district with majority populations

    • hijacking: redrawing two districts in order to force two elected representatives of the same party to run against each other

    • kidnapping: moving a representative’s district from somewhere they have support to an area where they do not have support