Gerrymandering

Every 10 years, after a national census is done, Congressional representation is reapportioned among the 50 states based on population shifts. When a state gains or loses Congressional seats, the districts for the representatives must be redrawn to account for more, or fewer, Congresspeople.  Because this process is political, the party in power in each state has a disproportionate say in how the House seats will be divided up. In theory, each Congressional district should contain the same number of votes as any other district within the state. But by compressing all of the votes in one party into a particular congressional district, using even some pretty strange geographical boundaries, the party in charge can diminish the opposition party's ability to win seats.

For example, political party A can, instead of having two districts with a 60% majority of political Party B in them, rearrange boundary lines so that there is one district with a 95% majority of party B, and a second district with a 40% minority of party B - thus gaining one more Congressional seat for their party.

The problem with this, when viewed from a distance, is that you might well have 60% of the people in a state voting for party B, yet 60% of the Congressional representatives in the state are from party A. In fact, this is what happened in the election of 2012 - nationally there were 1,000,000 more votes for Democratic members of Congress, but the Republicans held the majority in Congress by about a 60% to 40% split. It hardly seems democratic, does it?

What could be even more concerning is if Republicans continue to gerrymander and move this process over to the Electoral College within each state. If this were to happen in just a few key states, it could become an issue with Republican presidential candidates winning every election while losing every popular vote. Will Americans tolerate that crap for long?

This process is so important in the election of our representatives that it is bound to draw out some crooked behavior.

Here's a post from Cognitive Dissidence

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2013
Republican's Gerrymandering Scandal Deepens
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting that the scandal involving the Republicans' unethical gerrymandering just got a whole lot deeper. The Republicans, who have been rather less than cooperative with the federal court, are now suspected of having destroyed an untold amount of digital evidence:

In the two weeks the plaintiffs have had hard drives, forensic examiner Mark Lanterman has determined documents were deleted in June, July and November. He also found some of them contained "wiping" software meant to delete files so that they cannot be recovered.

The internal and external hard drives come from the three computers that legislative aides, lawyers and consultants used to draw the maps. One of the nine hard drives had a stripped screw, dents and scratches and is unreadable.

Lanterman did not tell the court how many documents had been deleted from the hard drives, but a lawyer for the plaintiffs called the number "substantial." This is on top of the fact that we've learned that the Republicans all had to sign oaths of silence regarding the gerrymandering process: