Who Gets to Gerrymander?
One of the fundamental underpinnings of democracy is the notion that “the people” get to select their political leaders. Of course, many battles had to be fought and won in the United States to ensure that “the people” actually included all people. Even after laws were changed so that it became legal for Black men and all women to vote, other restrictions, such as poll taxes and literacy tests persisted for many more years. Those exclusionary mechanisms are no longer legal, though difficulty of access to voter-registration still allows for the perpetuation of the historic inequities in the realities of who gets to vote. The recent Motor-Voter law seeks to put voter-registration sites in DMV and welfare offices. This law has been strongly resisted by those politicians who do not want a more democratic electorate, most vociferously by Governor Pete Wilson (R-California). There remains another, more obscured method which politicians have used to perpetuate their power, and mold election o
