Gerrymandering

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/15/2022
  

  American Democracy Wasn't Built to be Democratic

  by Louis Menand

  In a review essay of several books diagnosing the maladies of American democracy, Louis Menand concludes that the system itself is working as designed: to thwart popular rule. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  9/7/2021
  

  Too Often, Politicians Pick Their Voters

  by Warren E. Milteer Jr.

  Political factions and then organized parties have fought over the size, composition and geographical ordering of the electorate since the founding. This legacy today undermines the legitimacy of government and the political will to protect the right to vote. 

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  4/11/2020
  

  Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression

  by David W. Blight

  The president is the latest in a long line of conservative politicians to see minority voters as a threat.

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• 11/3/19
  

  Elbridge Gerry’s Monster Salamander that Swallows Votes

  by Harlow Giles Unger

  As Americans prepare to vote in local and state elections on Election Day, tens of thousands--even millions--will find their votes chewed, swallowed, and discarded by a monstrous “salamander”—the two-hundred-year-old creation of Founding Father Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.

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• SOURCE: Politico Magazine
  8/18/19
  

  How a Gerrymander Nearly Cost Us the Bill of Rights

  by Richard Labunski

  Gerrymandering very nearly cost us the Bill of Rights and could have plunged the country into chaos from which it would not have recovered.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/14/19
  

  What the French Revolution teaches us about the dangers of gerrymandering

  by Rebecca L. Spang

  Our institutions must remain representative and responsive.

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• 7/3/19
  

  Gerrymandering presented a ‘political question doctrine’ deemed outside Supreme Court jurisdiction

  by Lackland H. Bloom, Jr.

  “After five decades of searching for a standard, Chief Justice Roberts was finally able to assemble a majority that concluded ‘enough is enough.’ There is no judicially manageable standard here. This is a non-justiciable political question.”

• 
• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  10-1-17
  

  15 historians file an amicus brief in the case against gerrymandering

  by Cliff Sloan and Michael Waldman

  This is their argument: History frowns on partisan gerrymandering.

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• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  8-7-17
  

  The U.S. could be free of gerrymandering

  Here’s how other countries do redistricting.