Gerrymandering in the USA: Where politicians choose their voters

In some parts of the country, who gets elected in the USA depends less on the will of the voters than on the design of the electoral districts. In some places they are tailored by politicians themselves – with consequences for large parts of the population.

The closer the US elections get, the more Americans are seeing election commercials on television. However, not everywhere: In the state of Mississippi in the south of the USA, the expensive advertising is hardly worth it. Because the state has always gone to the Republicans for decades. And this despite the fact that in Mississippi the proportion of the population made up of African Americans is larger than in any other state. Traditionally, many African Americans tend to vote Democratic. Nevertheless, the party has little influence here in the south.

And that’s also due to the electoral system, says Andre Wagner, director of the Democratic Party in Mississippi: “If African Americans make up 40 percent of the population and we have four representatives in the House of Representatives, then in my opinion two of them should be African Americans or Democrats. But because basically “Since all African-Americans are in District 2, their influence has been so diminished that there is only one Democratic representative.”

What Wagner describes here is a system that repeatedly causes severe criticism and even lawsuits: the so-called gerrymandering. And it works like this: The party that has the majority changes the constituencies to its advantage – for example, so that almost all neighborhoods in which predominantly African Americans live are packed into a single constituency. All other constituencies will then be dominated by whites.

Victory for the Republicans was virtually guaranteed

This means that the constituencies are sometimes completely confusing patchworks, says Bobby Harrison. The journalist has worked as a political reporter in Mississippi for almost 30 years: “We have many neighborhoods where, for example, one side of the street is in one electoral district and the opposite side is in another electoral district. In the Hinds County region, this was a problem in the last election “Some of the ballot papers were missing because they were delivered to the wrong polling station.”

A Republican victory is also virtually guaranteed in the state elections in the state. Because of the majority voting system, it is enough if you have a single vote more than the Democrats in a constituency to appoint the representative.

“The Republicans have an overwhelming majority of representatives in both chambers of our state parliament. They can therefore block any new law from even being debated,” says Wagner, describing the effects. “And this despite the fact that we Democrats received 48 percent of the vote in the election. So we should at least be able to start a parliamentary debate.”

Aftermath of segregation

The electoral system ensures that many African Americans in particular do not even cast their votes, says Jarvis Dortch. He is the head of the civil rights group ACLU in Mississippi.

“Politicians shouldn’t choose their voters, voters should choose their political representatives,” says Dortch. “But the heated mood around the issue of whites and blacks makes it easier for politicians to choose the right neighborhoods that will ensure they don’t lose the election.”

The civil rights representative says the suppression of black voters has a long tradition, especially in the southern United States. Mississippi used to be one of the centers for slavery in the USA – with effects that continue to this day: Election campaigns are usually not about content, says Jarvis Dortch, but about fear. You have to defend “your people” against “the others”: “If politicians are elected because they only rely on the vast majority of white voters, then they ignore the problems of black voters because they don’t need their votes anyway. That “It shouldn’t be like that.”

Lawsuits against gerrymandering

Civil rights activists repeatedly bring gerrymandering to court – with varying degrees of success. They failed before the US Supreme Court. But in individual states, courts have stopped unfairly distributed electoral districts and thus set limits for both major parties.

“Both sides are doing it, the Republicans in conservative states and the Democrats in liberal states,” emphasizes political reporter Bobby Harrison. “I think if we had more fairly divided electoral districts, then we would also have more politicians who could strive for the middle and implement more instead of extremists who make everything more complicated.”

Individual states such as Arizona have changed their rules: There, a politically balanced commission is now forming new electoral districts. In many other states, politicians are still allowed to choose their voters.