America’s Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts
29th October 2014
Some of these are pretty entertaining. The chief objection on the part of the Washington Post, of course, is that gerrymandering is beneficial to Republicans. (No mention, of course, that it was invented to benefit Elbridge Gerry, member of the precursor of the Democratic Party.)
Unlike some people, I have no problem with gerrymandering — absent a system in which one could sign up for the candidate of one’s choice, and that candidate had exactly as much power in the legislature as the number of his constituents, it’s the closest thing to pure representation (everybody is represented by somebody who agrees with him) as we are going to get. From the standpoint of democratic representation theory, it’s far better to have a bunch of districts in which the winner gets 90% of the vote than a bunch of districts in which the winner only gets 53%. (News organizations hate gerrymandering because it shoots the ‘horse race’ right in the butt and leaves them with nothing to report on election night; they’d much rather have a bunch of cliff-hangers that keeps the proles glued to their sets.)