How does gerrymandering benefit incumbents

Incumbency protection can also preserve existing partisan balances. Legislative leaders agree to ensure reelection for everyone possible. Bipartisan gerrymandering packs some districts with minorities—racial, ethnic or political—ensuring reelection of minority party candidates. For incumbents, this reduces challenges in both general and primary elections. It also garners votes from the minority party for the redistricting plan.

When incumbents are in the room where plans get drawn, incumbency protection moves from partisan strategy to individual self-interest. That can mean drawing potential opponents or problematic constituents out of the district.

That is truly where legislators choose their voters—or their opponents. Incumbency protection also flourishes in local jurisdictions: counties, municipalities, school boards and boards of public works.

Until now, redistricting has not been one of them. When the lines were ultimately drawn, they moved about , Latino voters out of one district in order to protect an incumbent who was beginning to lose the support of the Latino population. Latinos had recently become the majority of the eligible population in the district, when they were replaced by voters more likely to support the incumbent. In , Texas had another opportunity to redraw district lines.

The legislature effectively did the same thing, in the same place, to the same Latino voters. In , race riots in Los Angeles took a heavy financial toll on businesses in many neighborhoods, including the area known as Koreatown.

The redistricting map, it appeared, had fractured Koreatown — an area barely over one square mile — into four City Council districts and five state Assembly districts. As a result, no legislator felt responsible to the Asian-American community.

Goodwill poisoned by the redistricting process can spill over into the entire rest of the legislative term. Indeed, in Illinois, this sort of behavior seems well within the norm. In , in a dispute over the handling of a redistricting plan, a legislator on the floor of the Statehouse charged the Senate President — whereupon a legislative colleague and former Golden Gloves boxer punched him in the face.

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Home Process Redistricting Why should we care? It particularly favors incumbent congresspersons because they generally influence the drawing of the voting boundaries—and the effects are far from trivial. For example, if two parties have an equal number of votes, it is possible to gerrymander so that one party gets almost two times as many seats as the other.

Sophisticated computer mapping systems, which require substantial financial support, design gerrymandering today. Consequently, special interest money is again crucial.

Voters should choose which political party should be in power; instead, congresspersons, special interests and political parties choose their voters to assure their power. Today in the House of Representatives, about sitting members are safe for each party, leaving only 55 seats i. There are several well documented, tested, and reliable solutions to this problem. But it is unlikely that a congress , with 87 percent of its sitting members and probable incumbent benefits from gerrymandering , will ever change the law.

So, if the people want to remedy the problem, it will require a Constitutional Amendment today, or if we have the Initiatives Amendment , in can be done simply with a Direct Legislative Initiative.