Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) is one of the governors of Massachusetts who left his name in American history. During the presidential election of 1812, he was accused of wanting to redistribute the electoral constituencies of his state to favor his camp, the Republican-Democratic Party, against the Federalist Party. The Boston Gazette publishes a caricature to make fun of this electoral slaughter, under the title The Gerry-Mander, portmanteau created from the name of the governor and the word “salamander” (salamander in English), because of the quirky form of the constituency concerned.
Public opinion is shocked. In 1812, the governor was not reelected and the term “gerrymandering”, denoting the partisan division of constituencies, was born. It is a question of redistributing the State by confining the voters of the rival camp in the fewest possible constituencies so that the opponent wins them and to make sure to win the other constituencies with the smallest possible majority.
More than two centuries later, this practice – which is not exclusively American – remains relevant and weighs again in the campaign for the presidential election of November 3: the current redistribution of constituencies should favor Republican candidates. in the House of Representatives.
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A ten-year redistribution
The US Constitution requires a census every ten years, which is used to determine the number of elected for each state in the House of Representatives, each state, even if it is very sparsely populated, must have at least one representative. This census is used for the division of electoral constituencies organized at the discretion of the legislative power, at the state level, with the approval of the governor. The risk is that, according to the majority in place, these will be redistributed in a partisan way.
Not all countries have this practice: Canada, for example, created in 1920 the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, commonly known as “Elections Canada”. It is an independent and non-partisan body dealing both with the organization of the elections but also with the division of constituencies.
In the United States, the last redistribution took place in 2011, a year after the November 2010 elections and the Tea Party wave, which gave the Republican Party the overwhelming majority in Congress and in the states. He was thus able to create an electoral map that is lastingly favorable to him in twenty-one of the fifty states.
The Supreme Court turns away from the issue
In June 2019, Supreme Court justices overwhelmingly ruled that these North Carolina (which favor Republicans) and Maryland (which favor Democrats) were not “Extreme” and that it was not his role to comment on this. Nonetheless, Judge Elena Kagan (nominated by Bill Clinton) lamented that “The Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it considers that this task exceeds its judicial mandate”.
In the state of Wisconsin, Republicans win the majority of seats, election after election, even though they do not have a majority of the votes. Thus, in 2018, they won five of the eight seats to be filled in the House of Representatives (just like in 2016), while they obtained only 1.17 million votes, against … 1.37 million for the Democrats, thanks to the partisan division that brings together Democratic voters in only three of the eight constituencies.
The example of North Carolina
If the Supreme Court is careful not to rule, three federal judges in North Carolina in August condemned this state on the grounds of constitutionality, and asked that the constituencies be redistributed. North Carolina, which is governed by a Republican majority, had redistributed its districts in 2016, having already done so in 2011. And despite a proportion of Democratic and Republican votes roughly the same from one election to one. other, and close to 50/50, the division largely favors the party of those who redistributed.
The 2016 partisan cut offered Republicans a ten-to-three majority in the 2018 midterm election, as North Carolina voters leaned only 50.39% in favor of Republicans, up from 53% in 2016 : as much to say that representativeness is not respected.
