Gerrymandering (**3/4)

If you’re like me, “gerrymandering” was a word you came across in school and then more or less forgot about. Named for Founding Father Elbridge Gerry (who pronounced his name with a hard g, like in get), it refers to the process of shaping a political district in such a way as to gain political advantage. This documentary gives several examples of how it’s done, and the consequences. There’s the state senator elected with two votes because nearly everyone in his district was a prisoner and therefore ineligible to vote. There’s the Brooklyn congressman whose house was put in a different district so he couldn’t challenge the incumbent. And, perhaps most famously, there’s the Texas state legislature, whose Democratic contingent fled the state in 2003 to avoid giving the Republicans a quorum with which they could push through a new redistricting plan.

The movie’s big drama centers around a California proposition, voted on in 2008, intended to replace the state’s partisan system of creating districts. With the notable exception of Iowa, the states’ existing systems allows incumbents to re-create districts when new census figures are released. (Other democracies, including the UK, have gotten rid of such partisan schemes, or never adopted them in the first place.) The party in power can use this to split voters who might otherwise form powerful voting blocs, or to concentrate the opposition in one or two districts and give its own representatives easy re-election everywhere else. The only thing they can’t do—and the film doesn’t mention this—is to use redistricting to dilute the voting power of minorities in “majority-minority” districts.

This documentary is a clear polemic on the side of ditching partisan redistricting schemes that wind up protecting incumbents and producing unnatural political maps. I wish it had concentrated more on ways to fix the problem, and the problems created by each fix. Should competitive districts be the primary goal? Should members of minority groups be grouped together to allow them to elect one of “their own” to represent them? Or is it better to have these minorities in different districts so they have some influence everywhere, though nowhere a majority?


IMDB link

Link to watch the movie free online

viewed at Rave UPenn [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/16/10