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by mannykannot 3110 days ago
The framers of the US constitution were remarkably prescient about a number of things, but my guess is that they did not anticipate gerrymandering, or at least its effectiveness. I would be very interested to hear otherwise.
5 comments
NelsonMinar 3110 days ago
Gerrymandering is a very old idea. The term itself was coined in 1810, and was in practice well before then. The 1788 election in Virginia was gerrymandered, the same year the Constitution was ratified. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-lea...

There's a significant difference in the modern era in that gerrymandering can be much more precise. The 2010 districts the Republicans drew in several states are very sophisticated works of statistics, GIS, and political science. I fear what machine learning techniques are going to do in 2020.

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sdeer 3110 days ago
Actually one of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry was partially responsible for the first Gerrymandered voting districts and the concept is named for him (and the fact that one of the districts was depicted shaped like a Salamander in a cartoon.)
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Amorymeltzer 3110 days ago
More likely, they did not anticipate that the country would be almost completely dominated by a (hyper)partisan, two-party system. Not only were established parties not in existence at the drafting, but the presidential election system immediately broke down under a two-party system.
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int_19h 3110 days ago
They did not anticipate parties. Or rather they did, but they really didn't like them, and assumed that they would be able to prevent the political system from being dominated by them. And it takes parties to gerrymander.

Also, I think it's partly because at the country's founding, most hot political issues had a clear large-scale geographic distribution, and so geographic districts were considered an adequate way to capture the overall mood.

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delecti 3110 days ago
And if you're right (which I also suspect), I'd be curious what they would have tried to do to prevent it. Not because it's necessarily useful to solve today's problem, but because it'd be interesting to see.
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