Gerrymander

• Author: Ward E. Y. Elliott
• Pages: 1187-1188

Page 1187

A gerrymander is a political district drawn to advantage some and disadvantage others: candidates, parties, or interest groups. The name comes from a particularly spectacular partisan apportionment engineered by ELBRIDGE GERRY in 1812. Technically, any winner-take-all district can be called a gerrymander, for district lines inevitably favor some against others. But common usage limits the term to districts deemed unnatural in form or unfair in intent or effect. The Supreme Court boldly and unanimously attacked a blatant racial gerrymander in GOMILLION V. LIGHT-FOOT (1960), but it has been almost uniformly acquiescent since then.

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Gomillion voided an "uncouth, 28-sided figure" surgically excluding almost all of the blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama, from voting in the city while retaining every white. It cleared the way for BAKER V. CARR (1962) and the REAPPORTIONMENT revolution. But, apart from a few cases of municipal expansion challenged under the VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965, the Court has never since been able or willing to find "cognizable discrimination" in gerrymandering cases.

The leading cases, Wright v. Rockefeller (1964) and UNITED JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS V. CAREY (1977), both involved packing of New York black and Puerto Rican voters into what dissenting Justice WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS (in Wright) called a "racial borough." Its packed nonwhite majority, if unpacked and spread to adjacent districts, might have formed two or three nonwhite majorities.

But it is difficult to tell clearly what packing does to a group's power, because "wasted" surplus votes in good years can be badly needed in bad years. In Wright the black plaintiffs wanted more "effective" black votes through dispersion, while the black incumbent, siding with the defendants, argued for strength through concentration: better one safe seat than two marginal ones. The baffled Court claimed it could find "no evidence of racial discrimination" in the obvious gerrymander, but the Court's real lack was simple rules for making sense of the evidence it had.

It is also impossible to equalize everyone's effective REPRESENTATION, short of ordering proportional representation, which could be a cure worse than the disease. In UJO v. Carey the United States attorney general had found the ethnically packed district discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to create two more districts with nonwhite majority quotas. To do so, the state...