Gerrymandering

The deliberate drawing of electoral district boundaries to favor one party or group over another, typically by concentrating the opposing side's voters into as few districts as possible, known as packing, or spreading them thinly across many districts where they fall short of a majority, known as cracking. The term originates in an 1812 Massachusetts redistricting law enacted under Governor Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, that consolidated Federalist Party voters into a small number of districts and thereby gave disproportionate representation to Gerry's own Democratic-Republican party. A satirical cartoon in the Boston Gazette by Elkanah Tisdale drew one of the resulting district outlines, thought to resemble a salamander, as a fantastical creature dubbed the Gerry-mander, and the name stuck to the practice generally rather than only to that one map. Gerrymandering is possible only where representatives are elected from geographically defined single-member districts, the defining structural feature of first past the post, since a district's boundary has no effect on a party's seat count under proportional representation, where seats track vote share directly rather than depending on where a district line happens to fall.