America has this thing called Gerrymandering which can only be done if you have a good idea how many registered voters belong to which political party in certain parts of town.
The ways that Gerrymandering occurs is truly a tragedy.
There's also the reality often ignored of where the Senate has MORE power than the House as it concerns favors given from people in the Senate toward those in the House---and the House never represented all people from all various backgrounds and most were not poor in the House anyhow.
There are no "poor" Representatives---be it from the hood or from trailer parks. There's a social status one must have to represent--and even with that, depending on who votes you in and whom you favor, one group will always be heard more so than another....
The Founding Fathers intended House of Representatives to be very responsive to shifts in the public mood. The framers of the Constitution designed the House of Representatives to be the most democratic body of the national government, as responsive as possible to the popular will. Compared to senators, members of the House represent smaller numbers of voters and serve shorter terms. The framers' idea was to make congressmen more accountable to voters, and thus more representative of public opinion at any particular moment in time. The Constitution does not set the size of the House, but it does require that each state's representation be proportionate to its population. The First Congress, elected in 1788, included just 65 members of the House. As the country expanded and new states entered the Union throughout the nineteenth century, the House grew larger and larger. By 1912, the House had grown to nearly seven times its original size, with 435 members representing the 48 states that existed at the time.
However, gerrymandering has created many "safe" seats for congressmen almost certain to win reelection, no matter what. And that is a big problem. Other problems apart from that...in America today, U.S. senators from the twenty-six smallest states, representing a mere 18 percent of the nations population, hold a majority in the United States Senate, and, therefore, under the Constitution, regardless of what the President, the House of Representatives, or even an overwhelming majority of the American people wants, nothing becomes law if those senators object. The result has been what one would expect: The less populous states have extracted benefits from the rest of the nation quite out of proportion to their populations. What happens if the larger states, with a majority of the people, object? Not much apparently since the nine largest states, containing a majority of the American people, are represented by only 18 of the 100 senators in the United States Senate.
The fact that a Senate majority reflects a majority of states rather than a majority of the people originated in what is erroneously called the Great Compromise, which small states extracted from larger states in 1787 at the federal Constitutional Convention. All states, large and small, wanted each states vote in the House of Representatives to be proportioned to the size of its population. Small states wanted an equal vote for every state represented in the Senate, regardless of population. What followed was hardly a compromise. Rather, it was just the unhappy acquiescence of larger states to an undemocratic demand by smaller states, which were otherwise refusing to be part of a new national government.
Gerrymandering was NEVER what the Fathers intended...paticularly as it concerns people not being represented fairly or smaller people have greater representation than others simply because of larger space (As that is why it has been an issue for others lying on territory so as to have greater pull).
When the First Congress convened in 1789, there were 65 members in the U.S.
House, with each one representing roughly 30,000 people. Given the growth of the country, the number of seats in the U.S. House increased over time until reaching 435 in 1913. Reformers realized that if we continued adding new seats every time the population increased, there would soon be 1,000 members serving in the U.S. House. So the size of the U.S. House was set at 435 with the passage of the Reapportionment Act of 1929. Consequently, instead of adding new congressional seats as the population increases, each member of Congress simply represents more people. Today, a member of Congress can expect to represent roughly 700,000 people...and with that comes the responsibility of ensuring that the more people someone's to represent are represented FAIRILY/CONISTENTLY in their stances.
After every decennial census, congressional seats are reapportioned to reflect changes in the population. The process nicknamed "gerrymandering" was named after Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts politician who, in 1812, signed off on a scheme to rearrange legislative districts to favor members of one party. When a newspaper editor commented that the shape of the new districts resembled a salamander, the name stuck: "Gerry-mander." Unfortunately, the power to design legislative districts rests with state legislators who use computer programs and voting data to rig districts to favor their reelection and their political party. Zigzagging through neighborhoods, stretching over long distances, and connecting people with little in common, gerrymandered districts now resemble modern art and offer incumbents safe seats.
For more, one can go
here or here at Founding
Father Elbridge Gerry and Gerrymandering.
Politicians have been drawing district lines for their own advantage since the days of the founding fathers, when
Patrick Henry gerrymandered a Virginia district to try to keep James Madison out of Congress. And the issue goes deep when seeing the history of what has happened throughout the U.S when the
Supreme Court has consistently found certain types of racial gerrymandering to be illegal. Supreme Court ruled in 1986
that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional and could be challenged in court . While the Supreme Court
opened the door to partisan gerrymandering challenges in 1986, it set a high bar: Plaintiffs would have to prove that the shape of a district demonstrated "both intentional discrimination against an identifiable political group and an actual discriminatory effect on that group."
As another explained best in
investigation of special interests and redistricting, the ways that politicians manipulate districts are so well-known that political insiders have a special gerrymandering vocabulary: Politicians can "pack" certain communities into a single district, "bleach" out minorities, "crack" troublesome voting blocks between different districts, "kidnap" a troublesome representative by putting his or her house in a separate district from his or her former constituents, or "hijack" a district by redrawing the lines to pit two incumbents from the same party against each other. (For more details on these tactics, check out our
Devil's Dictionary of Redistricting ). And this plays out at the harm of citizens. In example, one can examine Montogomery, Alabama. Known for its hostilities toward minorities often and at 62 percent African-American, the Alabama 7th Congressional District was already a safe minority district. But when the Republican-controlled state legislature redistricted recently (last year, I believe), they extended the district's tendrils further into Birmingham and Montgomery to carve out African-American neighborhoods and create a 64 percent African-American district. The result: The surrounding districts now have almost no African-American voters. Previously competitive, the districts are now safely Republicans....but there's still talk of fair representation.
There is simply no factual evidence as it concerns the claims that all groups are properly represented in the U.S and have been consistently....or that political corruption as it concerns gerrymandering is what the Founding Fathers had in mind since they were against such and made that clear multiple times. We can't reinvent history
For others who've spoken out against the issue:
