Gerrymandering: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

democracy undeniably the best Greek export that doesn't have fruit at the bottom there is understandable concern at the moment about the personalities harming our democracy but tonight let's talk about one of the major structural problems and it's something that Democrats in particular love to complain about we have seen Republicans rigged the system with their gerrymandering often illegal gerrymandering there is gerrymandering to a fare-thee-well in states controlled by the Republicans listen political gerrymandering is probably one of the greatest threats to our democracy right now well slow down that is a bit much the greatest threat to our democracy right now is clearly whatever tweet the president has planned for Cinco de Mayo this year we don't know yet what it will be we don't know which Spanish words will be misspelled or we can assume it will be horrifying but gerrymandering is a real problem it's the practice of drawing voting districts in a way that create unfair advantages to whoever happens to be drawing the lines which which does sound mundane but the results can be significant gerrymandering is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives because take a look at what happened in some states where they drew the district lines in Pennsylvania 44% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in 2014 but 13 of the 18 districts more than two-thirds are represented by Republicans in Ohio about 40% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives but 12 out of 16 seats 3/4 of them are represented by Republicans those numbers are way out of proportion to what people should expect you wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice cream that was 75% strawberry how is that okay what perverts voted for this so whoever draws the district's has a lot of power and thanks to technological advances it's possible to use that power in very precise ways in the age of computers you can gerrymander with scientific precision you can run in and out of alleys and up and down streets so carefully include and exclude whichever voters you want in one district and not in another so it's become a very precise science he's right about that gerrymandering has become a very precise science and interestingly it's one of the few remaining types of science in which the Republican Party currently believes now now there are different reasons politician to engage in gerrymandering it's done to disadvantage voters based on race or on political party or to shore up seats for incumbents sometimes even within a party take her team Jefferies in 2000 he run a strong challenge in a Democratic primary for the New York State Assembly and he planned to run again in 2002 but the Democrats had done something interesting to the map the map that was drawn was absolutely fascinating they drew a map that literally carved out the block on which Hakeem Jeffries lived from assembly district 57 I remember shaking my head in disbelief there were a lot of people hoping to vote for me but was surprised to find that they no longer lived in the Assembly District that they have been living in for years if not decades Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough but that move was gangsta yes it was gangsta I remember the threshold for gangsta in Brooklyn is be notorious b.i.g whose debut album begins with songs that are respectively about armed robbery gun violence armed robbery and gun violence and being prepared to die by gun violence while committing armed robbery I think if I know means a new problem even the term gerrymandering goes back centuries it gets its name from a 19th century politician in Elbridge Gerry as governor of Massachusetts he helped shape a congressional district so blatantly one-sided that one critic said it looked like a salamander no another replied a gerrymander now that counted as a joke in 1810 back when your entertainment options were sunsets Washington Irving novels and getting kicked by a horse and quick sidenote you are not wrong to notice that the Jerry in gerrymander refers to a guy whose name was actually pronounced Gary because literally everything about gerrymandering is stupid and wrong and look there is nothing inherently wrong with redrawing a voting district it's actually necessary they need to have around the same number of people in them and populations shift over time as people move or die or emigrate to America because their stand up careers have endured what might be best characterized as a pogrom of indifference that is why every ten years we have a census after which lines are redrawn for both the US House and state legislatures the problem is in most states the lines are drawn by politicians in fact in 37 states the drawing of state legislative districts is primarily controlled by the legislators themselves and they have a pretty clear vested interest there and if you think that seems crazy you're not alone let me fall I speak to five or six members of the British Parliament could come over to shadow members of Congress and one of the things I have to explain to them is here's how you get elected the house I have you know I see the shocked looks on these British faces and one time one stood up and said well that's terrible that's not the voters choosing their representatives that's the representatives choosing their voters first that's racist and second second even I find it difficult hearing advice on map drawing in a British accent that one said I don't see why one scrap of dust is any different from another so I ended the border here because that's where my pen ran out of ink now learn to like it what's the worst that can happen but it is true that if your party holds the redistricting pen it will substantial power and there are multiple techniques at its disposal there are a couple of ways that you can reapportioned people and put them into districts and there's a thing called packing and there's a thing called cracking yes packing and cracking not to be confused with the team drug trend of cracking and packing which is when the teens hollow out a cucumber fill it with crack and put it in their anus to absorb it faster I saw it on the local news which means it's real and every teenager is doing it right now but in this context packing these cramming as many Opposition voters as possible into just a few districts and cracking means spreading them out thinly over a bunch of districts so they can't gain a majority in any one of them either way it dilutes their impact I can't think of it as table assignments at a wedding you can either break up your eight awful relatives and spread them out over different tables or you can pack them all together in one insufferable table of the Damned The Washington Post showed how this can work look at this hypothetical state it's 60% blue voters 40% red and it needs to be carved up into five districts now proportionally you would want three blue and two red districts but if you draw the lines like this you can get three red majorities and two glues and if you draw it like this you can get five blue majorities and no red and if you draw lines like this it looks like a dick which is irrelevant to this discussion it is objectively very funny and if you are thinking shouldn't all of this be illegal well that's complicated because if you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged minorities yes that is illegal under the Voting Rights Act but if you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged voters of an opposing party that has generally been allowed so racial gerrymandering no partisan gerrymandering that's kind of okay and it's led politicians to be pretty brazen in their behavior like in North Carolina last year their congressional map was thrown out in federal courts for racial gerrymandering which is wrong so they had to redraw and while doing it state Rep David Lewis went out of his way to explain that the new map would not illegally over minorities it would just legally buckle the Democrats we want to make clear that we to the extent are going to use political data in drawing this map it is to gain partisan advantage on the map I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood I need you to understand this is not a race thing because it can't be we just want to map the churns out Republicans like if Ann Romney that is all we say that is all we are saying here please let me understand and that map worked in 2016 despite Republicans winning just over half the votes in House races they wound up controlling 77% of the state seats that is a more blatant disregard for what people want then the who gives out Bazooka Joe on Halloween oh great gum from the Roosevelt administration wrapped in a comic from the other Roosevelt administration at least the guy handing out snicker stuff with razor blades actually gives you a Snickers and Republicans elevated this technique to an art form with a plan called read map or the redistricting majority project they poured more than 13 million dollars into state level races ahead of the last redistricting gaining huge numbers of seats and that paid massive dividends when Republicans won the majority of state houses in 2010 it ensured they'd be redrawing the maps in those states and long before it paid off in 2012 nationwide Democrats running for Congress got 1.1 million more votes but Republicans sent 33 more members to the house exactly so the maps they drew put Democrats at a significant disadvantage it's like if instead of Tim Duncan the San Antonio Spurs and had to use Tim Burton it's not technically impossible to win but it's going to be much much harder and look to some extent Republicans got lucky because 2010 was a wave election for their party and I'm not saying Democrats are angels here by no means when they have had control they've gerrymandered the out of districts in states like Maryland and they've been pretty brazen too Illinois in 2001 the Democrats won the right to redistricting issues for reasons too complicated and too stupid to explain a name was pulled out of a replica of Abraham Lincoln stovepipe at but but just watch as one Democratic lawmaker made the least convincing promise ever well will they'll sit down in draw a very fair map an inherently suspicious look on his face that's the exact expects of someone who just urinated in the public pool water's warm today huh enjoy your swim so how do you know if your district has been drawn with nefarious intent well that's tricky because too often people will just lazily point to districts that have a weird shape north carolina's 12th district looks like spilled coffee Pennsylvania's 16th is flexing its muscles and one commentator compared Maryland's third to a broken-winged pterodactyl and then there's this they call it the earmuffs oh yes an earmuffs district not to be confused with the aim of district which is a one block area of Manhattan we're sketchy men sell accessories made from the third endangered species you should go you should visit but while it is tempting to see something suspicious in an odd-shaped district there is a pretty good argument against prioritizing tidy lines above all else dropping a bunch of squares seems fair it seems like if you could just draw a grid like Tron that you could put people into districts and there wouldn't be any sort of manipulation in the process but Americans don't live the exception of Montana and you know a few other square places Americans don't live in squares our communities are irregular and random yes that's true American communities are not square they're like jazz music they're freeform free-flowing and they contain a troubling amount of opioids and there is no one right way to draw a district reasonable people will disagree some might prioritize of districts being politically competitive others might favor compactness others want to keep so-called communities of interest together the problem is it may be physically impossible to do all three of those things in one place in fact take that earmuff district at the thin line connecting the two halves is just a single road and people love to make fun of that in Chicago squeezed between two freeways this narrow strip is needed to connect two halves of a gerrymandered district to keep it contiguous as is required this is the way Congress gets around the contiguous rule because there's obviously nobody living here I mean unless they're homeless people I guess anybody here any congressional voters out there now you might laugh but a few seconds later an entire ghost baseball team from the early nineteen hundred's walk out of the store lost and beaten to death with their ghost bag and he's kind of deserved it but but here is the thing though it is drawn like ear muffs for good reasons because the northern and southern parts are to Latino communities and the district in the middle is predominantly african-american now both are Democratic so it's not about partisan advantage it's about ensuring that both communities have representatives serving their interests and it's criticized a lot but redistricting it experts absolutely love it in fact two of them actually put it on their wedding cake that is a real wedding cake and I'm guessing that the bachelorette party cake was something like one more night of packing and cracking so so to break it down not all weird shake districts are bad and not all normal shake districts are good and there is one more thing gerrymandering is not the sole reason for the mismatch between our popular vote percentages and our representation some of that is due to where Democrats choose to live Democrats live in the wrong places basically they've decided to cram themselves in cities and that just makes it really hard to have a winning coalition when your people do that if you're college-educated if you want to work in the creative economy you move to a city and those places have enough Democrats already Democrats they do play make places like Des Moines or Columbus or Raleigh North Carolina all so that those young people move there but that's kind of outside the typical realm of political strategy wait what do you mean make Des Moines cool I've already got the Des Moines Heritage carousel the most badass balls-to-the-wall carousel in the whole Midwest and yes according to their website it is closed for the season of spring which is not a good time for carousel but when May 28th it's going to be an all-out carousel Stravaganza until 8 p.m. but it is true Democrats are basically packing themselves into districts and that is not likely to change anytime soon but there is a broader non partisan point here and that is the inner democracy the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does now there is actually a Supreme Court case coming up involving a redistricting in Wisconsin there was so partisan a lower court struck their maps down and the Supreme Court may for the first time actually issue a clear ruling putting limits on partisan gerrymandering so all of our hopes are now we need delicious claws of Justice neo-gothic but even without a ruling many experts argue we should simply be taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians and give the task to independent commissions and that's a pretty good idea in fact a handful of states already do some version of that and it's not perfect it is tough to completely remove parties and biases a fact that one state lawmaker brought up to shoot the idea down if I felt there were any way in the world that I could stand before my constituents and say I believe that it's possible to come up with a group of people who have no political bias whatsoever who will simply sit down in a room and magically create districts I'd be behind it I'd be behind it a hundred percent but those people don't exist now if you recognize that guys because you saw him about ten minutes ago reassuring everyone in intensive Roy districts was to gain parties an advantage for Republicans so eventually arguing nobody's unbiased so let's use me the most brazenly biased man in the universe which is pretty much arguing no babysitter is perfect so let's just use Slenderman but while independent Commission's might not be perfect they would definitely be better and the truth is it is hard to come up with a worse system than the one most states currently have and there is something very important at stake here lawmakers should not be allowed to dilute our votes by drawing their own lines and essentially picking their own voters no you know what I will tell you why the foundations of democracy are built on the idea that everybody's vote should count equally everybody that is what America is all about that everyone every one of us to get an equal chance to make a bad decision which things up for everybody else whoever we are however poor our decisions whether you are a Juggalo will stop it or a 47 year olds Quidditch player it's a school or or someone who bought that stupid $6,000 jacket I wore on the sell last week it's horrible our boy recently fully hurt even if we Scientologists or Parrotheads or guys who ride unicycles as their primary mode of transportation in this one context we should all be relevant regardless of our questionable life choices whether you're an easy Ambrose or a guy jamming a knife into a toaster or a Washington Redskins fan or even a guild Stein support he went one how would she of one what process could give you so the point is her voice should count as much as anyone elses as much as a guy in a fedora or a beta of erotic pastries or a SantaCon attendee or everyone's racist grandma don't say anything if at the end of the day that is the point of this country that's what made America great because think about it results should not be the fault of lawmakers crazy lines they could be the result of our only play these decisions [Applause]

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 11,452,581

Keywords: last week tonight gerrymandering, john oliver gerrymandering, gerrymandering, redistricting

Id: A-4dIImaodQ

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The voters don't pick their politicians, the politicians pick their voters.

[u/Alexander_Hamilton_]

A "fun" game for anyone who wants to gerrymander.

[u/ani625]

http://i.imgur.com/3BZIL3u.gifv

[u/wertwert765]

I feel like I have seen that Chicago* stringy "Headphone" district a lot as example of bad gerrymandering, interesting to find out its actually not such a badly drawn district.

[u/BoogsterSU2]

It doesn't matter which political party you're in or what your political views are, GERRYMANDERING SHOULD BE ABOLISHED.

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[u/awesometuck1559]

That little smirk the dude gave to the camera was sickening. What a smug piece of shit.

[u/RemingtonSnatch]

I think the most interesting point made was that while gerrymandering is indeed a crazy problem, perhaps the biggest problem is simple demographics: left-leaning people tend to congregate in urban centers together, while right-leaning people spread out all over the place. Any true solution needs to balance for that.

[u/ani625]

Here's the Washington post article - How to gerrymander your way to a huge election victory.

[u/halcyon_haze]

Mirror for non-US.