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Pros And Cons Of Swing States

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Phones have been ringing during dinner, heated debates have been starting in the lunchroom, and new politician masks are available for Halloween. What does this mean? It’s election time and everyone wants to know who you are voting for. However, does your vote actually count? Today we delve deep into the archaic system that is the electoral college and evaluate this for ourselves. By looking at facts regarding swing states, an imbalance of votes, and our representatives, the answer should become clear.

Swing states are what keeps people on the edge of their seat come election time. Thanks to the winner-take-all method many states have adopted, the entire election can be determined by a handful of states. Also known as key battleground states, they hold the most power come election time and everyone knows it -- especially presidential candidates. As recent as the 2008 election, running candidates Obama and Romney spent 55% of their campaign funds on ads for Ohio, Florida, and Virginia (fairvote.org). This leads to non-swing …show more content…

If neither candidate has a majority of the electoral votes, then our House of Representatives votes for our next president. There is a way to exploit this part of the system. Each state is split into a certain number of congressional districts; one for every house member they have. These districts are supposed to be drawn in a way that allows each district to have an equal number of people. However, gerrymandering happens when one party draws these lines in a way that favors their group. For example, in the year 2010, House representatives only won 49% of the popular vote. They ended up walking away with 72% of the house seats (Prokop). If an election through the House of Representatives had to take place, and there was already some gerrymandering involved, then the presidential election would have been

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In advising the Chief Justice, it is obvious that the voting districts should be redrawn for a multitude of reasons. As the system of drawing districts stands, it is highly vulnerable to corruption for the party in power, as they are the ones deciding the districts. Concurrently, those in power are incentivized to maintain their power through any means necessary; which, in a democracy, is obtaining the most votes. Because it is extremely difficult determining whether or not the drawing of a district is preferential to one party over another is, the risk to those in power is minimal while the potential payout is high. Thus, short of any moral reasoning to stop them, the likelihood of someone gaming the design of voting districts is high.

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But, if you were in the same district and opposed the current political party, you might say that gerrymandering is unfair because they give the current party in power an advantage. It gives them an advantage because they are the ones that author the redrawing of districts.

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During political elections, or the presidential election per say, the election process can be hectic. Political parties strenuously work to convince people to favor their candidates. They perform this in order to receive political control and to rise in the governmental system. Two infamous political parties that are always competing are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The lure of gerrymandering is enticing because they take control of a state legislature by advancement of redistricting.

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Gerrymandering is defined as “the dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.” Moreover, the number of Congressional districts in a state is based on the state’s population. Every ten years, the districts can be redrawn as the state’s population number changes. Gerrymandering groups the opposing party’s voters into a few large districts and the controlling party’s voters into various small districts.

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Gerrymandering is drawing political boundaries so that your political party has a numerical advantage over the other party.1 An illustrative example of how to win a district through gerrymandering from a Washington Post article is on the right. Gerrymandering could concentrate opposing votes into a few districts to gain more seats for a majority in certain districts. Gerrymandering can also be used to help or hinder a certain demographic, like a political, racial, linguistic, religious or class group. For example, two terms used in gerrymandering are “packing” and “cracking”.

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But recently gerrymandering has become more controversial because people feel that it has taken away their rights as a voter and it swings the votes to one side by a big percentage. Current cases are before the courts to decide if gerrymandering is legal. Some states have been discussing whether it should still be allowed during elections. “Many efforts are underway to remedy this political

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Again in Document D, George Edwards says about the Electoral College system, “(I)t favors some citizens over others, depending solely upon that state in which voters cast their votes for president.” Though candidate must have 270 of the electoral votes to become president, if there is a tie than the top three candidates are taken to the House of Representatives where each state has only one vote, and they select the president. This particular part of the Electoral College shows absolutely no political equality. In Document F, Bradford Plumer says, “Because each state cast only one vote, the single representative from Wyoming, representing 500,000 voters, would have as much say as 55 representatives from California, who represent 35 million voters.” The fact that one representative has as much power 55 representatives is just one example of the inequality and how the power in the Electoral College system is not divided correctly.

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Gerrymandering Gerrymandering is the redrawing of political boundaries, otherwise known as district lines, in a state to give one party a numeric advantage over the opposing party. This is done by dividing districts up into highly irregular sections to achieve the goal of having voters from a particular party highly concentrated in some areas and thinly scattered in other areas (Donnelly, Fortune). Gerrymandering has been criticized because it violates the two basic principles in electoral designation; compactness and equality of size of constituencies in electoral designation (The Editors, Britannica). There is currently no law against the process of Gerrymandering. However, the current Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford could change that.

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Republicans were able to successfully gerrymander and win elections not only in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but also in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, and Tennessee. Democrats were also able to gerrymander and win in Maryland and Illinois (Gerrymandering Rigged). This shows how gerrymandering can affect the country as a whole, as most states are being heavily influenced by the representatives in office. Gerrymandering can affect not only state representatives, but the can also play a part in national elections. In the 2016 presidential election, this was evident as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million votes, while Donald Trump ended up winning the electoral vote.

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Gerrymandering restrictions is likely to be a key topic of debate for the Supreme Court as partisan lines have tested the constitutionality of the act. While this process of redrawing boundary lines has been around for a long time, it is not the same that it once was. The act of gerrymandering and redrawing boundaries has become more of a drastic partisan act in the modern election world than ever before because of technology. The 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Davis v. Bandemer declared partisan gerrymandering for electoral advantage justiciable under the United States Constitution. The asymmetry standard in testing for gerrymandering states that the act needs to exhibit intentions that partisan gerrymandering would be recognized for its given distribution of popular votes, if parties switch who holds the popular vote and if the number of seats in a district would change unequally based on Supreme Court cases Vieth v. Jubelirer and LULAC v. Perry.

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