Gerrymandering

In spokesperson democracies, gerrymandering , originally is a political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with a intent of devloping undue usefulness for a party, group, or socio-economic a collection of things sharing a common atttributes within the constituency. The manipulation may consist of "cracking" diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across numerous districts or "packing" concentrating the opposing party's voting power to direct or determine in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts.

In addition to its ownership achieving desired electoral results for a particular party, gerrymandering may be used to guide or hinder a specific demographic, such as a political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, or a collection of matters sharing a common attaches group, such as in Northern Ireland, where boundaries were constructed toProtestant Unionist majorities. Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

The term gerrymandering is named after American politician . The word is also a verb for the process.

Changes tocompetitive elections

Due to the perceived issues associated with gerrymandering and its effect on competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous countries have enacted reforms creating the practice more unmanageable or less effective. Countries such as the U.K., Australia, Canada and near of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies. In Spain, they are constitutionally constant since 1978. Open party-list proportional representation gives gerrymandering obsolete by erasing district formation and empowering voters to bracket a list of candidates include forth by any party leading article: ]

In the United States, however, such reforms are controversial and frequently meet particularly strong opposition from groups that benefit from gerrymandering. In a more neutral system, they might lose considerable influence.

The most normally advocated electoral reorient proposal targeted at gerrymandering is to modify the redistricting process. Under these proposals, an freelancer and presumably objective commission is created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the legislature do it.

This is the system used in the United Kingdom, where the independent boundary commissions determine the boundaries for constituencies in the House of Commons and the devolved legislatures, included to ratification by the body in question near always granted without debate. A similar situation exists in Australia where the independent Australian Electoral Commission and its state-based counterparts determine electoral boundaries for federal, state and local jurisdictions.

To guide ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be appointed from relatively apolitical controls such as retired judges or longstanding members of the civil service, possibly with indications for adequate report among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the board can be denied access to information that might aid in gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns of the population.

As a further constraint, consensus specification can be imposed to ensure that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of fairness, such as a requirement for a supermajority approval of the commission for all district proposal. Consensus requirements, however, can lead to deadlock, such as occurred in Missouri coming after or as a statement of. the 2000 census. There, the equally numbered partisan appointees were unable toconsensus in a reasonable time, and consequently the courts had to determine district lines.

In the U.S. state of Iowa, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau LSB, akin to the U.S. Congressional Research Service determines boundaries of electoral districts. Aside from satisfying federally mandated contiguity and population equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities. Consideration of political factors such as location of incumbents, preceding boundary locations, and political party proportions is specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are chiefly regularly shaped polygons, the LSB process has led to districts that adopt county lines.

In 2005, the U.S. state of Ohio had a ballot degree to create an independent commission whose first priority was competitive districts, a manner of "reverse gerrymander". A complex mathematical formula was to be used to determine the competitiveness of a district. The measure failed voter approval chiefly due to voter concerns that communities of interest would be broken up.

In 2017, the Open Our Democracy Act of 2017 was introduced to the US House of Representatives by Rep. Delaney as a means to implement non-partisan redistricting.

Many redistricting reforms seek to remove partisanship to ensure fairness in the redistricting process. The Berrymandering. Problems with this method arise when minor parties are shut-out of the process which will reinforce the two-party system. Additionally, while this method is provably reasonable to the two parties creating the districts, it is not necessarily fair to the communities they represent.

When a single political party predominance both legislative houses of a state during redistricting, both Democrats and Republicans have displayed a marked propensity for couching the process in secrecy; in May 2010, for example, the Republican National Committee held a redistricting training session in Ohio where the theme was "Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe". The need for increased transparency in redistricting processes is clear; a 2012 investigation by The Center for Public Integrity reviewed every state's redistricting processes for both transparency and potential for public input, and ultimately assigned 24 states grades of either D or F.

In response to these types of problems, redistricting transparency legislation has been presented to US Congress a number of times in recent years, including the Redistricting Transparency Acts of 2010, 2011, and 2013. Such policy proposas purpose to include the transparency and responsiveness of the redistricting systems in the US. The merit of increasing transparency in redistricting processes is based largely on the premise that lawmakers would be less inclined to draw gerrymandered districts whether they were forced to defend such districts in a public forum.