Gerrymandering.

It is a word only a sitting legislator in the majority party can love. For everyone else, it is a word that can send us into a deep sleep lasting the duration of any given election year. Yes, it is a boring concept for most of us, but make no mistake. When it comes to gerrymandering — you snooze, you lose.

Here is a quick tutorial. The US Constitution requires an actual count of how many people live in our nation taken every ten years, and that count is called a census.

The first census was taken in 1790 and found just under four million newly minted Americans. The 2020 census found almost 334 million of us. Census data has many uses, but their most important role is determining representation in the US House of Representatives and state legislatures.

For example, our least populous state, Wyoming, has only one member of the US House, while North Carolina, the 9th most populous state, now has 14 members of the House to represent us in Washington.
Redistricting based on census data is done in all states, mostly by partisan legislatures, including the NC General Assembly.

The idea is that each citizen has roughly equal representation — that no state’s and no citizen’s political clout is appreciably greater than any other’s based on population.

It is a simple stab at fairness that has been polluted from the birth of our nation. Simply put, the party in power at any given moment manipulates the census information to ensure that more candidates representing its point of view get elected than candidates from other parties and points of view. It has been done by political parties that no longer exist, and more recently, by both Democrats and Republicans.

At its basest definition, gerrymandering means politicians select their voters and not the other way around.

And why should you care? Isn’t gerrymandering just politics, as usual, no matter who is doing it? You should care because the people doing the gerrymandering may well be taking your vote away from you.

Consider this. If you are a Democrat in a congressional or legislative district heavily gerrymandered to be Republican, there is really no reason for you to make an effort to vote. The Democrats you support are not going to be elected. It works the other way, as well, for Republicans in heavily gerrymandered Democratic districts. Gerrymandering is a theft of a basic right of citizenship — your right to vote and choose who represents you.

But it is complicated. Over time, various and sometimes conflicting court rulings have made the redistricting process consider the rights of minority voters, the wholeness of communities both by geography and culture and other factors.

These are often difficult to assess and balance and are virtually impossible for average voters to grasp, which translates into a national sleeping potion.

Complicated though it is, legal redistricting and its ugly twin, gerrymandering, are facts of American life that affect each and every voter and those they love. You should care because not caring and opposing gerrymandering essentially gives your vote to others whose viewpoints and goals may well be the exact opposite of yours and may promote policies that harm you and your family.

More cynically, if you agree with the current gerrymanderers, legislators in North Carolina and throughout the nation, the political pendulum always swings. They, and you, will eventually be on the receiving end of gerrymandering, and you may not like that — not one little bit!

Much less painful and much more palatable is redistricting reform to rein in out-of-control gerrymandering birthed by vicious and out-of-control political partisanship.