When it comes to politics, few things bring Americans together, but when it comes to partisan gerrymandering we agree and we don’t like it. But what we don’t talk about is how gerrymandering primarily benefits the Republican party. (It benefits Democrats too, but mostly Republicans.)
These finding where the results of three independent analysis’s done by the Associated Press, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and the Brennen Center for Justice.
A revealing example showing the problem of partisan gerrymandering is Dan Crenshaw’s district in Texas, or the voting districts in my home state of Utah. Both reach into the middle of their state’s largest cities, where the most Democratic voters are, and then split them up and lump them with the more conservative suburban and rural voters to effectively dilute the Democratic vote.
In Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, Republican gerrymandering has gotten so bad that, while Democratic representatives got more votes overall, Republican representatives still won. You can’t have government by the people for the people when you take away their voice through partisan voting maps.
Gerrymandering needs to end and the For The People Act would have done that, but Republicans have filibustered the voting rights bill. Luckily, Senate Republicans may have another chance to do the right thing, with Sen. Joe Manchin’s bipartisan voting rights bill. The bill still ends partisan gerrymandering while making major concessions to Republicans leaving mail-in ballot eligibility up to the states and even requiring voter ID. If senate Republicans are unwilling to vote for Joe Manchin’s bipartisan bill, as Mitch McConnell has indicated is likely, I might start thinking they just don’t want to play a fair game.
Payden Alder, Salt Lake City
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