Kingdom Voting (Part 5): Gerrymandering

One reason representative systems of government are imperfect is the way voters elect their representatives for the different houses of Congress. The United States’ House of Representatives has 435 members, while its Senate has only 100 members. That means every Congressman represents an average of 760,000 people (data on voting citizens vs total residents is much harder to find), with a range of about 542,000 per representative (Montana) to about 990,000 per representative (Delaware). Every senator, on the other hand, represents an average of 3.3 million people, with a range of about 294,000 per senator (Wyoming) to about 20 million per senator (California). 

These numbers are not meaningless. They represent individual people with unique experiences and perspectives. One of the problems with every citizen being a king is that people often disagree. It is interesting that you can talk to your family, friends, and neighbors, and agree on almost everything, but people in other places seem to be on the other side of just about everything. In the modern world, people tend to clump together with others who share their beliefs. Politicians understand this and draw electoral districts to maximize their chances of being elected. The result is that legislative districts tend to lean towards one party or the other, because a cluster of swing voters does not guarantee anyone’s desired outcome.

The whole process of gerrymandering—drawing election districts that favor one outcome over another—gets a lot of bad publicity, but it is a necessary evil, and demonstrates to some degree that our imperfect system works. Thus far, the experts have not agreed on a truly equitable way to draw the districts, so each district inevitably favors a particular outcome. Voters may not love gerrymandering, but they tolerate it because the majority of voters in a state would rather have districts that favor their preferred representatives than someone else’s version of “fair” that they believe disenfranchises them.