A Semiquincentennial Minute: Bay State Gave America the Gerrymander
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The political cartoon that gave birth to the term 'Gerrymandering.' Artist: Elkanah Tisdale. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, National Archives.
• The president of the Second Continental Congress, whose outsized signature became synonymous with the word "signature" itself.
• The future U.S. President who became a protagonist in the musical "1776" and a major – if offstage – presence in the more contemporary musical "Hamilton."
• The guy who brews all the beer.
But one of the five Massachusetts signers’ names is most remembered for a different and not altogether flattering reason.
Elbridge Gerry was part of Massachusetts’ delegation in Philadelphia and later went on to be governor of the Bay State.
In 1812, Gerry, a member of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, signed into law a partisan redistricting map that his party got through the state legislature.
One particularly tortuous state senate district was highlighted by Elkanah Tisdale in a political cartoon first published in the Boston Gazette. The image depicted the towns in the district as mimicking the shape of a dragon or mythical salamander.
The paper dubbed the creature the "Gerry-mander."
While it is lost to history just how common such partisan districts were in late 18th- and early 19th-century America, the name stuck.
Today, gerrymandering is a widely accepted term for creating voting districts using tools that political scientists call "cracking" and "packing."
Cracking is the practice of splitting up a group of voters who disagree with those drawing the lines, sprinkling small percentages of the disfavored voters among multiple districts where their voices will be drowned out. Packing takes voters in the disfavored group spread over a wide geographic area and crams them into a single district, making sure that while they may elect their favored candidate in that district, adjoining districts will be dominated by the party in power.
"In extreme cases, the party drawing the maps may even be able to win a majority of seats even though it wins only a minority of the vote," according to an article published by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
And extreme gerrymandering has been very much in the news as the nation nears Saturday’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Last summer, President Trump told the Republican-controlled Texas legislature that the GOP was "entitled to five more seats" in the Lone Star State. That rhetoric touched off an "arms race" of redistricting efforts in "red" states like Texas and "blue" states like California. The battle was notable both for the very public way officials on both sides of the aisle talked about arguably rigging the 2026 general election and for the fact that redistricting normally happens every 10 years, after the federal census in years that end in zero.
"It’s like a lot of things," Williams College political science professor Jim Mahon said recently. "There are norms people observe, and, if everyone observes them, they persist. If everyone decides we’ll have no restraints on our behavior and take advantage of every possible loophole and push everything, that becomes the new rules of the game.
"Clearly, there should be districts that respect the boundaries of municipalities and counties where possible so that people who have, say, the same mayor, can have the same representative. People who have the same city council can have the same representative."
Federal law constrains Congressional districts by saying they must be contiguous and must contain roughly the same number of people based on a state’s overall population.
Beyond that, the process is mostly up to the states, even more so after the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and ended the practice of using the landmark Civil Rights law to encourage "majority-minority districts" that protect the voices of Black Americans.
Mahon points to the redistricting in Tennessee, which was passed a week after the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, as an example of how the rules of the game have changed.
"Greater Nashville is divided into five districts, and Memphis got divided into at least two [districts]," Mahon said. "It doesn’t make any sense.
"The idea of compact districts and districts that respect the jurisdictional boundaries of what’s on the ground, that’s the way it should be done. That’s the way it is done by commissions, when commissions are appointed and empowered. … When you say compactness, you don’t want [districts] hanging out, stretching really long ways like some of the districts have been done – including portions that are only 100 feet on either side"
The website Congress.gov lists fewer than 10 states where redistricting is done by commissions, including New York, where the commission’s map is subject to legislative approval. Vermont is one of four single-district states where no districting is necessary for federal elections. Massachusetts is part of an overwhelming majority of states where the legislature is responsible for drawing congressional maps.
Given the Democratic Party’s dominance on Beacon Hill and the fact that all nine members of the Bay State’s House delegation are Democrats, Massachusetts frequently is cited by Republican sympathizers as an example of the kind of gerrymandering Trump wanted states like Texas to counter.
"Republicans will say the Republican party will pull 35 percent of the Massachusetts vote for Congress, but it’s all Democrats," Mahon said. "Democrats could say the same thing about Alabama or Mississippi. But [those Republican pundits] are comparing it to something like a proportional representation system."
Mahon said that would require the U.S. converting to something like a European parliamentary system, where each party ran a slate of candidates in a given state, and, based on the percentages voting for each slate, the parties would be awarded some number of representatives to Congress.
He does not see that solution gaining traction.
"Some years ago, when Lani Guinier was nominated to a seat on the Supreme Court, something she had written about one way to facilitate the representation of minorities in states where there was a substantial minority population was proportional representation," Mahon said. "It was a law school article. But she was pilloried and called a ‘quota queen.’
"She was saying that if Alabama had seven [U.S. representatives] and if the Democratic party put up minority candidates in its slate and it won 40 percent of the vote, it would get two or three minority representatives. That would be a cleaner way of doing it than all the redistricting and messaging around with lines."
A more realistic path to address the issue of partisan gerrymandering was something like H.R. 1, the first bill introduced in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in 2021, Mahon said. In part, the measure would have required independent redistricting commissions for federal elections in every state.
Mahon, who has served as chair of Williamstown’s Democratic Town Committee, said that the party came close to passing the "For the People Act," but it could not survive the filibuster in the U.S. Senate.
"With commissions, you try to make it bipartisan, and you’re going to have disputes," Mahon said. "But if the commission’s work can be supervised by someone else who says, ‘If you’re not adhering to compactness and respect to traditional jurisdictional boundaries, you’ve messed up.
"I think the national law is the [remedy] that is closest to being enacted – the idea that everyone should have a commission and observe the principle of compactness and respect for jurisdictional boundaries. That was almost enacted."
Mahon said nothing like that proposal is likely until at least 2029, and only then if Democrats take control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Action any earlier would be possible only if his party won veto-proof majorities on Capitol Hill this November, something that even the most pie-in-the-sky Democratic sympathizer would deem impossible.
In the meantime? "The new rules of the game are taking advantage of rules that have been broken and, I think, have been broken for good," Mahon said.
As for Elbridge Gerry, the namesake of the broken system, Mahon agreed that the so-called Founding Father probably gets a bad rap from history.
"Obviously, he’s not the only one to do it," Mahon said. "He’s the one with the picturesque political caricature that became the image associated in everyone’s mind. The maneuver he did helped keep the Massachusetts Senate in Democratic-Republican hands even though the Federalists swept the election of 1812. Then he goes on to become Vice President, so obviously his reputation wasn’t ruined [at the time].
"I don’t think it’s fair to him. Politicians screwing around with the boundaries of districts, that’s something lots of people have been doing. And his name was associated with it because of a particular political engraving.
"I’ve never seen a salamander with wings."
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