Will America's Democracy Survive Gerrymandering?
By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 18/11/2025
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When the session of the Continental Congress that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution ended, journalists surrounded Benjamin Franklin asking him what had happened. Franklin replied, "We built a republic. I hope we can keep it."
Two hundred and forty-nine years later, it would seem that America's political class is determined to subject the creation of Franklin and the rest of the Founding Fathers to a stress test that may destroy it. This stress test is known in the United States as gerrymandering. This name was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts Governor Eldridge Gerry created a salamander-shaped electoral district. The district was dubbed the gerrymander by the press
Today, the practice of redrawing electoral district patterns occurs every ten years. This is because, based on census results, it is necessary to enlarge or shrink districts according to their growth or decline. But for approximately 30 years, the political leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties has implemented the mandate of territorial redistricting using partisan criteria. These criteria allow them to fragment voters for opposing groups and/or concentrate voters in a territory to prevent people of other political persuasions from being elected. These practices, known as packing and cracking, constitute an intervention against democracy that can severely weaken the republic
Indeed, packing involves concentrating the voters of an opposing party in a single district so that they win that district by a wide margin, but have reduced influence in surrounding districts. Cracking involves dividing a group of voters across several districts so that they are in the minority in each district, preventing them from electing their preferred candidate. Both tactics make elections less competitive, empower one political party, and limit the voting power of certain communities.
The results of these practices are evident. Elections that do not reflect the general will of the voters, which could lead to biased legislative outcomes, lower voter turnout, and a sense of lost sovereignty. But the worst impact of gerrymandering...
But thanks to this practice, the population begins to shut itself behind the wall of disbelief and the cloak of cynicism. There is a loss of respect among citizens for electoral processes or for the policies emanating from representatives elected under the precepts of this practice. Therefore, they become politically demobilized and withdraw their support for fundamental democratic institutions such as the Legislative Assemblies, Congress, the judges, and the president.
The net impact is elections that do not reflect the general will of the voters, biased legislative results, lower voter turnout, and a feeling of powerlessness. The American collective thus moves away from the founding motto "Et Pluribus Unum," that is, "out of many, one," which is what the Founding Fathers, including Franklin, wanted to create. And this distancing created by gerrymandering is leading the American people down another path that could generate fissures.
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