Gerrymandering is done in different ways and for different reasons. The definition of partisan gerrymandering is, “drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party.”(source). There are two main methods of gerrymandering, cracking and packing. Cracking scatters political supporters across different districts so they never have enough people to get the majority. Packing puts all political supporters in just a few districts to ensure they win overwhelmingly in other districts (source). Partisan gerrymandering is not the only type of gerrymandering, but it is the most relevant today. Other examples of gerrymandering are racial gerrymandering and prison gerrymandering. Is when district lines are drawn to give a numeric advantage to one racial group. Prison gerrymandering involves using prison populations to inflate the populations of the districts that contain prison serves to dilute the political power of everyone else. One reason prison gerrymandering is problematic is because under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, legislative voting districts must be the same in population size (source). This is commonly known as “one-person, one-vote”. The idea behind it is that one person’s voting power should be roughly the same as another person’s within the state.
Gerrymandering has a complicated history in the Supreme Court. The origin of the word “gerrymander” was a combination of “salamander” and the last same of Eldridge Gerry, who was a singer of the Declaration of Independence and the government of Massachusetts is 1812. Gerry signed into law a redistricting plan designed to benefit his political party. One district that was redesigned was said to look like a salamander. The current redistricting criteria include: compactness, contiguity, preservations of counties and other political subdivisions, preservation of communities of interest, and preservation of cores of prior districts. These criteria are often loosely interpreted. Some significant Supreme Court cases involving gerrymandering include Baker v. Carr, where the court held that federal courts had the jurisdiction to consider constitutional challenges to state legislative redistricting plans, Gray v. Sanders, where the court established the constitutional standard for equality of representation as “one-person, one-vote”, and Reynolds v. Sims, where it was decided legislative districts should be redrawn to reflect population shifts at least every 10 years.
The Supreme Court allows some partisan gerrymandering. This is for a few different reasons, the first being that gerrymandering is sometimes hard to spot. Most people can look at a map of voting districts and tell whether a district is gerrymandered. Gerrymandered districts often have really weird shapes. But few people, especially judges, seem to agree on what exactly it looks like. Some social scientists have tried to come up with a way of measuring unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. They call it the “efficiency gap”, and it works by looking at how many votes for one party are “wasted” in other words, say a democrat carries a district by 30 percentage points; 29.9 percent of those votes are considered wasted because they are unnecessary for a simple majority win. If there are too many lopsided districts, it shows that there could be some partisan gerrymandering going on. The Supreme Court has always been pretty lenient of partisan gerrymandering. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that racial gerrymandering is illegal. With the 2020 census coming up, partisan gerrymandering is being talked about more. Earlier this year several Supreme Court justices voiced concerns about how much partisan gerrymandering is taking place and how it could get worse when district lines are redrawn after the 2020 census. While some justices are against gerrymandering, the court remains divided. The Supreme Court seems to be lenient in most cases of partisan gerrymandering because they are afraid the courts will become too involved in drawing districts lines. The inability to pin down exactly what a gerrymandered district looks like is another think that makes them lenient.