Gerrymandering - the process of carving up an electorate so voters you don’t agree with can GET STUFFED! Into a small number of seats, while the voters you do agree get spread luxuriously across more seats. It’s just like man spreading on the subway, but a lot more annoying – because it essentially destroys democracy.

We all know Gerrymandering is sh*thouse – but new research shows Gerrymandering may be more sh*tt*er than we thought.

Research published in the Election Law Journal says Gerrymandering can actually shift the political culture of a whole state. It can turn moderate voters into Republicans, and moderate Republicans into tiki-torch-weilding crazy conservative nationalists!

Gerrymandering - the shithouse political double-threat! Let’s get knee-deep in it, shall we?

SCIQ SWOOSH

This new research - led by a very clever team from MIT, UCLA and George Washington University measured how much a state had been Gerrymandered. They then looked at the local districts, the conservatism of the median lawmakers, and how conservative the policies of that state were overall. They found was that for each additional seat the Republicans won through gerrymandering, the policies of that state become more conservative, but no only that - the citizens themselves became more conservative (on average).
You always kinda expect the ruling party to choose which laws get made, but what makes this research interesting is that the influence of the winning party is up to three times higher when a state has been heavily gerrymandered. Onya, gerrymandering - deadset dominating that democracy!

What the study also found was that gerrymanding could cause a state that was once a little bit right of center to become more a whole lot more right wing. And just to reiterate, this isn’t just the government, this is actually the ideology of the people.

So, just for example - imagine a state that’s exactly moderate, completely 50% vote democrat, 50% vote republican. Hahahaha! But just imagine. In this magical world of equally distributed viewpoints – the republicans gerrymander the seats so the distribution of votes becomes 51 for the republicans, 49 for the democrats. The republicans get elected and have more influence over the government, bringing in laws they like, setting the political agenda, making more media cameos … and this influence seems to actually influence the political identity of the voters, so at the next election, that state isn’t moderate anymore, it’s permanently become more republican. Just like Stockholm syndrome, only with less kidnapping.

Now this study makes it very clear that the effect works both ways, Democrats can gerrymander just as easily as Republiblicans. (but we all know who like to do it more ;))

So why don’t we do something about Gerrymandering? Well, we’ve tried! A lawsuit recently made it all the way to the Supreme Court - but for now, Gerrymandering is still legal, and ridiculously gerrymandered district maps will be used this November.

So No matter which party is doing it, data shows us gerrymandering is more harmful than we previously imagined. This election, vote for representatives who publicly oppose gerrymandering…. while your vote still counts for something.


SOURCES
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.108...

Supreme court: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...

Republicans gerrymander:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/us...

Dems V Reps.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...

This video is presented by Jayde Lovell. Editor: Brandon Palmieri. Production assistant: Frankie Cuadrado

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