Joey Ferguson

Unit 4 Political and Urban Geography

Elections have changed dramatically since we first started holding them

when this country was founded. Rather than basing elections off who gets the most
total votes, otherwise known as a popular vote, they are using a system called the
Electoral College. This uses voting by region and then they combine all the regions
to decide which candidate should be elected.
It seems like the Electoral College would be fair, and it makes sense why they
would want to try it out in our system. However, it often offers unfair advantages to
certain parties. Gerrymandering is a process that involves drawing district borders
to give one party an advantage when it comes to election time. This involves
redistricting regions to either spread out the other partys voters or confine them in
very few regions. For example, lets say Party A has two million voters and Party B
has 3 million voters. If it was strictly a popular vote with no regions, the candidate
from Party B would easily win. However, due to the flaws and loopholes of the
election system, Party A wont make it so easy for the candidate from B. Party A
decides to draw the districts in a way that most of the voters from Party B are
concentrated. Theyre basically allowing the voters from Party B to win the vote in
one or two regions. Little do they know, the three remaining regions are drawn in a
way that the majority of voters will be from Party A, thus allowing Party A to win the
election. Even though they have only 40% of the popular vote, they are able to win
the election because they had three districts where Party B had two.
In addition to concentrating Party B into a few regions, there is also another
method that could allow Party A to win the election. This involves spreading Party B
out into many regions and making the vote barely edged out by Party A in each
region. Politicians get really creative with border drawing, and it makes it entirely
obvious when Gerrymandering is actually occurring. The problem is, most people

Joey Ferguson

Unit 4 Political and Urban Geography

believe this is unfair because not only would they not have won the popular vote,
but districts are often drawn so ridiculously that it seems that they went to absolute
extremes to win the election. However, Gerrymandering isnt everything. Our
country is also largely bipolar. However, if you take the politics out of
Gerrymandering completely, and draw districts that are heterogeneous with respect
to voter ideology. This would create not only districts that are fair, but encourage
independent candidates to run for office much more than they currently do. Finally,
it would make polarization a thing of the past in our country, which is currently a
huge dilemma that needs to be solved.
Overall, Gerrymandering can be seen as a huge problem in todays world of
government and elections. It is a problem that needs to be addressed because
elections in the United States these days are often altered by politicians to make
their party win more seats or make sure their candidate wins the election. If
Gerrymandering was eliminated completely, it would offer a much more accurate
representation of the actual vote.