Gerrymandering Essay

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Gerrymandering Steven Howell Florida International University Section 1 What is gerrymandering? According to Christina Greer, assistant professor of political science at Fordham University, it is the process of giving one political party the advantage over another political party by re-drawing district lines, a practice intended to establish a political advantage. Each party wants to gain as many districts as possible so that they can control different things such as the budget, and other ongoing policies, or to set their party up to gain more districts in the future. Gerrymandering has three potential goals; one goal is achieved by partisan gerrymandering which is to help one party win more seats in the House of Representatives, …show more content…

Elbridge Gerry supported and signed into law a plan for dividing the legislative districts in his state so that it would benefit his political party, the Democrat-Republican party which no longer exists. The word gerrymandering was created from his last name and the word salamander due to the strange looking district lines in his state which formed a shape of a salamander. For the past 200 years, many state legislatures have used their line re-drawing to map out districts to support their political advantage to help them in their political run. This policy has given the politicians the power to alter their districts every ten years to favor their political party to gain more seats in elected …show more content…

Rush, professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University, a consequence of gerrymandering is that representation is denied to the voters. Meaning that the true desire of the voters is not fulfilled and that their votes essentially end up wasted, rather than supporting the politicians they vote for during a political run. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the proportions of votes received by a political party do not result in an equal proportion of legislative seats. As a result of gerrymandering “the fate of specific representatives of a political party is of only secondary importance…and [results in] denial of representation” (1992). Overall, evaluations of voters on government and the overall trust in government is a determining factor whether they would cast a ballot for their candidate. Christopher Anderson and Andrew Lotempio’s study has shown that voters whose presidential candidate has won have higher levels of trust in government as opposed to those voters whose presidential candidate who has lost

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