Gerrymandering is nothing new. The first gerrymander was 1810, and has been happening ever since. Its ill effects have been slowly accumulating over the years, and are all the more present today than ever before. Decreased voter participation, problems within state legislatures, all are symptoms of the underlying problems of one of politicians’ many attempts to gain reelection.
Gerrymandering is the act of manipulating voting boundaries to serve some sort of political purpose. Most of the time it is in order to secure easy seats for your political party. Gerrymandering in this case would result in the politician attempting to divide the voters in such a way that it minimizes the other party’s votes by spreading out their voters in such a way that it will cause them to lose every district. Sometimes it’s about securing a seat for yourself or for someone else, in which case you would simply draw the districts in such a way that would be made up of the areas that most voted for you, while removing the areas that least voted for you. Both these forms of gerrymandering have become more common in recent years due to easily available polling data for who supported who in elections, allowing politicians to measure down to the meter where they need to lay their districts to give themselves the best chance to achieve their goals. This has increased the effectiveness of gerrymandering and made it easier to do so. The results of this create the increasing problems with state legislatures.
The root of the problem with gerrymandering is the idea of safe seats. The seat is now guaranteed to the incumbent candidate, effectively removing all competition. The politician now is no longer subject to the demands of his electorate because even if a good deal of his electorate is angry with him they will never be able to overcome his large party majority in the district. This leads to increasing complacency and arrogance on the part of the benefiting politician, who is safe in the knowledge that he can never be dethroned. He becomes increasingly corrupt with every reelection, as with his complacency comes greed. Soon much of what he has done will not be for his constituents, but rather for any corrupt interests that were willing enough to pay him. This kind of corruption also can result in systemic corruption among an entire government as nepotism begins to set in. Extremism also begins to become a problem, as people in these gerrymandered are usually strictly voting for a party and not the candidates, so people with more extreme ideals are able to win elections because of who they run as, rather than the reasonability of their ideas. This causes the legislature to become increasingly extreme, and thus less representive of their continuants. Gerrymandering is also painful to voters. By exploiting the wasted vote effect present in first past the pole democracies, gerrymanders can nullify huge numbers of votes. People get discouraged because their candidates will never win in gerrymandered districts, so they stop voting. This worsens effect of gerrymandering on voter balance, and now makes the gerrymandered district nearly impossible to lose.
Gerrymandering also completely destroys the democratic process. Voters are supposed to pick their representatives, not the other way around. The whole idea is government is for the people, not for people to exploit for personal gain. The whole idea that politicians would be able to decide their own districts also seems to be a conflict of interest, as any politician ambitious enough would take advantage of it with time. This means that the power of drawing district lines should be kept away from those who would benefit most from its misuse, and instead give it to a nonpartisan board to draw the boarders
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