How Gerrymandering Invalidates Democracy

The documentary we watched the other day, “Voting Rights and Wrongs,” talked about how gerrymandering can impact voting outcomes and voting attitudes. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of district boundaries such that they favor a certain political party. This has obvious implications for voters, three of which are wasted vote(dividing voters of one party among multiple districts such that they are the minority party in all districts), excess vote(consolidating voters of one party into one or a few districts so that the majority of the districts will remain in favor of the other party), and stacked vote(drawing district boundaries in odd shapes to clump together certain voter groups and ensure the majority of districts go towards a particular party). Any one of these implications means that voters do not have equal influence in their districts and states. Despite this, some 2018 Supreme Court decisions held that gerrymandering is not strictly unconstitutional. The decisions did say that gerrymandering based on racial divides was unconstitutional, as it would violate the 14th Amendment, however, partisan gerrymandering was not necessarily unconstitutional. This decision surprised me, so I looked more into similar cases and the reasonings behind the rulings. I found a Politico article that shed light on two cases – Wisconsin and Maryland. In the Maryland case, the justices upheld the district court's decision “not to grant a preliminary injunction blocking the state’s 2011 congressional map”, reasoning that the legal case was uncertain enough to refuse granting the injunction. In the Wisconsin case, the justices came to a unanimous decision that the Democrats challenging the state maps had “failed to prove” the impact of the district lines on their voting rights. With these two cases, it seems as if the Supreme Court’s difficulty ruling on gerrymandering is largely due to uncertainty regarding either the presence of gerrymandering or its significant negative effects. The documentary also mentioned that the court won’t completely ban gerrymandering because both parties(in turn) have equal opportunity to gerrymander, and, while it does shift support slightly, it doesn’t ensure or deny a party’s success. However, even if this is true, the presence or knowledge that gerrymandering exits discourages voters in and of itself. This means that even if gerrymandering doesn’t ensure the win for one party, the very presence of it makes voters feel as if their votes don’t matter or are being manipulated, thereby discouraging them from voting. Given the fragility of voter motivation, even the simple knowledge that gerrymandering is practiced might be enough to discourage voter turnout, which is a key aspect of democracy that ensures representative leadership and policies. This means that gerrymandering poses multiple threats to democracy: disproportionate voting and discouraging voters of particular groups. All this considered, it would be extremely difficult to stop any and all gerrymandering, especially if it is done subtly. Since there is a large range of severity when it comes to gerrymandering, how can we implement ways to identify harmful gerrymandering and prevent it from seriously impacting elections and voter turnout?