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Gerrymonstered (Mike Thompson):
Source: Freep
He served as vice president of the United States and as governor of Massachusetts, but Elbridge Gerry is most remembered as the man whose name is memorialized in the ghoulish practice of distorting electoral district boundaries to give one party an advantage: gerrymandering.
The legislative map Gerry signed into law in 1812 created an especially contorted district that to cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale resembled a frightening-looking salamander. Gerry’s political opponents dubbed it the gerry-mander, a term that has since been used to describe any district configured to tip the scales in one party’s favor. In the spirit of the original drawing, I’ve reimagined the 14 districts in Michigan’s convoluted electoral map as monsters.
Federal law mandates that every congressional district contain roughly the same number of residents. But it’s up to each state to reconfigure its own district lines after every Census. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gerrymandering case that could invalidate Wisconsin’s political map and have repercussions across the country.
In Michigan, the party that controls the state Legislature has historically used its map-making power to pack the opposing party’s voters into the fewest possible districts and distribute its own voters as advantageously as possible among the rest. This is most noticeable in metro Detroit. The map Michigan’s Republican legislative majority drew after the 2010 Census has allowed the GOP to maintain a 9-5 advantage in Congress even when Democratic congressional candidates get more votes statewide.
The legislative map Gerry signed into law in 1812 created an especially contorted district that to cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale resembled a frightening-looking salamander. Gerry’s political opponents dubbed it the gerry-mander, a term that has since been used to describe any district configured to tip the scales in one party’s favor. In the spirit of the original drawing, I’ve reimagined the 14 districts in Michigan’s convoluted electoral map as monsters.
Federal law mandates that every congressional district contain roughly the same number of residents. But it’s up to each state to reconfigure its own district lines after every Census. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gerrymandering case that could invalidate Wisconsin’s political map and have repercussions across the country.
In Michigan, the party that controls the state Legislature has historically used its map-making power to pack the opposing party’s voters into the fewest possible districts and distribute its own voters as advantageously as possible among the rest. This is most noticeable in metro Detroit. The map Michigan’s Republican legislative majority drew after the 2010 Census has allowed the GOP to maintain a 9-5 advantage in Congress even when Democratic congressional candidates get more votes statewide.
More: http://www.freep.com/pages/interactives/mike-thompson-gerrymandering/