Pros And Cons Of Gerrymandering To The American Political System

Another major flaw inherent to the American political system is gerrymandering. The two-party system already reduces the potential ways voters to express their political interests and preferences, gerrymandering further reduces the value of votes. For the purposes of voting and elections, voting electorates are divided up into districts. How those district lines are drawn up can be dangerous for representation. Politicians can manipulate the system and redraw lines in a way where politicians can in essence, guarantee their position by packing their loyal voting base into their district and marginalize the minority party. What’s especially powerful about gerrymandering these days is the ability to run computer simulations with statistics models

This means that the minority party in many congressional districts are just trapped and will always be underrepresented in their political interests as their Senator or House representative decades ago carved out a “safe” district for the majority party. This applies in reverse as well. With these “safe” districts the senators and representatives faces the challenges not from the minority party, but from within their own party. Challengers within the party in the primary will proclaim to be more ideologically thus pushing both the politicians and the district itself to become more radical and ideologically stratified. Part of the reason of ideology based gridlock which afflicted Congress, gerrymandering hardening political ideology of a district and the representation the interests of the voters divided up into “safe”

Structurally, first pass the post systems are not particularly effective systems to represent the interests of voters. There are in fact, other alternative voting systems which could potentially be used to better represent the interests of American voters. There is the alternative vote where voters can select multiple different candidates and rank their voting based on preferences. Then under the alternative vote runoff elections can be run where the candidates with the least number of votes are eliminated and their votes goes to the next candidate preferred. This system is flawed as well, but at least eliminates the spoiler effects of third parties as the votes are transferred to another party. Another system of voting is Mixed-Member Proportional Representation where the number of representative are double and voters will vote for candidates in their district and also cast a vote for their preferred party. Each district is still first past the post, however the new, doubled seats are filled in by the preferred parties. Seats are filled in by margin of underrepresentation until the seats as close as possible best represents the percentages of preferred party voting. These assigned representatives are themselves assigned to those seats by their political party leaders. This system gives political party leaders more power and makes political parties part