Gerrymandering is the manipulation of district boundaries by the officials responsible for drawing them, in order to produce a preferred political outcome Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022). Nick Seabrook, described as the author of One Person, One Vote and a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida, defines the practice as one in which the people who draw the districts in which candidates run manipulate those boundaries to achieve their preferred result — often their own re-election and that of their allies, and often to guarantee that the party in power keeps its majority regardless of how voters cast ballots in later elections.
Bob Zadek frames the underlying problem in the show’s introduction to that episode: the essence of democracy is that voters pick their leaders, but in America today leaders get to pick their voters. He raises the question of whether gerrymandering defies any solution. The same topic returns in an earlier-aired episode, where Ned Foley calls gerrymandering the first structural problem to address in the House of Representatives and describes it as self-interested politicians manipulating boundaries to protect themselves from voters who change their minds Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022).
The purpose of districts
Seabrook explains that a representative democracy can be structured in two broad ways. In a proportional representation system, voters vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, and however many seats a party wins, the first names on a list prepared before the election become members of the legislature. In such a system there is no fundamental connection between a voter and their community and the identity of the person representing their interests.
Districts, used in the United States as well, exist to forge a greater link between politicians and their voters: the jurisdiction is divided into discrete geographic units of voters with a shared identity and a consensus of interest, and the elected representative is expected to serve those constituents and vote accordingly. Seabrook says many of the anti-democratic effects of gerrymandering stem from disrupting or severing that link. Zadek offers the same starting point in his own words — that the theoretical purpose of districts is so a representative knows whom he or she represents, and so that smaller units of society have their specific wishes represented — and Seabrook calls it a good way to think about the matter.
Historical roots
Seabrook traces gerrymandering’s origins back before the United States, into English political history and the creation of the Parliament of England after the Magna Carta, which he describes as a negotiated settlement between the monarchy and groups that had attempted to overthrow it. What resulted, in his account, was a veneer of democracy grafted onto a system that still let the aristocracy and elites dictate policy, in part by configuring districts to keep control of the levers of power.
The earliest manifestation resembling modern gerrymandering is the British tradition of the “rotten borough”: a district configured to include a very small number of inhabitants — in some cases fewer than a dozen voters — so that landowners and aristocrats could use bribery and patronage to secure the election of candidates of their choice. Seabrook’s conclusion is that as long as districts have existed, those in power have manipulated them to keep power.
Zadek asks whether the founders, who studied British history closely and must have known of the rotten borough system, tried to draft away those evils in the Constitution, in statutes, or in behavior, or simply assumed they came with democracy. Seabrook answers that the framers took steps to address problems they had identified in the British system, but that gerrymandering is a many-headed monster: cut off one head and politicians, being strategic, produce another technique. Among the framers’ steps Seabrook names was allocating seats in the House of Representatives among states on the basis of population, and early legislation requiring members of Congress to be elected from districts with roughly equal numbers of inhabitants.
That, Seabrook says, opened the door to a different kind of gerrymandering — one that operates even when district populations are approximately equal. The example from which the practice took its name involves Elbridge Gerry, the Governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 drew the boundaries of the state Senate districts in Essex County to maximize the number of Democratic-Republican candidates elected, worried that Federalists in the state Senate were thwarting his legislative agenda. Gerry did not manipulate district populations; he manipulated who lived in particular districts. By packing as many Federalists as possible into a single Essex County district where they were an overwhelming majority, his party could win all the other districts in the area. Seabrook identifies “packing” as one of the most common techniques in gerrymandering: cramming opponents together into as few districts as possible where they form massive supermajorities, which allows a party to win the remaining seats by smaller majorities.
Competitive districts and the case for self-districting
In the other episode, Foley argues that the danger of gerrymandering today lies in how uncompetitive it makes congressional races. Measuring by competitiveness, he says political scientists find that competitive districts have been lost acutely from decade to decade, with a particularly acute loss in the most recent round of redistricting. The House of Representatives, supposed to be the part of government most responsive to voters’ changing views, has become the least responsive because of that loss. Zadek puts the figure at 96% of seats uncompetitive through gerrymandering, calls the result fake democracy, and notes that the House was at the founding the only part of government that was directly elected. He also observes that the issue surfaces every ten years with a new census — governors control legislatures and legislatures control districting — and is then forgotten for another decade.
Foley’s proposed remedy is a system he calls self-districting, closer to what other parliamentary systems use for proportional representation but adapted in a way he thinks might appeal to Americans: give voters themselves the power to identify which district they want to be in, rather than letting politicians choose their district and manipulate the boundaries. Zadek says he had presented an almost identical cure on his own show, and that no one has adopted it yet.
Seabrook notes a related historical fact: the requirement to have districts is not in the Constitution but an act of Congress, first adopted, he believes, in 1842. Before Congress took that away, some states chose at-large, statewide elections for their House seats; in New Jersey in the 1830s, he says, the state might have had six or seven representatives all elected statewide, with no gerrymandering problem. Congress got rid of that, and undoing it is one proposal now advocated. Foley also considers the Wyoming single-seat case and California’s 55 seats, and raises a question about what a legislature should contain: whether it should hold a demographic diversity of voices — farmers, workers, people who live in the north, people who live in the south, older people, young — or whether every representative should mirror the majority of the electorate as a whole. He suggests legislative debate is better with a diversity of voices.
Bob Zadek’s introduction to the Seabrook episode also credits the guest with discussing potential reforms such as independent citizen commissions, and the episode description mentions the modern technological shift that makes maps nearly impossible to flip. Bob’s exchange with Foley likewise touches on whether the cure lies in more thoughtful voters or more virtuous leaders, both of which he dismisses as cop-outs.
Across episodes: the same diagnosis, two cures
The two episodes approach gerrymandering from different directions but reach the same diagnosis — that boundary-drawing by self-interested officials breaks the link between voter and representative — and both place the cure in structural change rather than in better behavior by voters or leaders. Ned Foley, in the earlier episode, advances self-districting and points to the loss of competitive districts as the acute modern harm, with Bob Zadek noting his own near-identical proposal. Nick Seabrook, in the later episode, supplies the historical depth, from rotten boroughs through Elbridge Gerry’s 1812 Essex County map to packing, and attributes the push for remedies such as independent citizen commissions to the episode’s framing. The later treatment does not revise the earlier one; it widens the frame from a specific institutional fix to the long history of the practice and the range of reforms proposed against it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state which state Essex County or the city of Jacksonville are in, nor the full name or holding of any court case on redistricting, nor which constitutional amendment or provision any case turned on. They do not give the exact date of the 1842 act beyond Seabrook’s stated belief, the precise text of any bill, or the ending of the sections where the transcript breaks off. No speaker’s remarks continue past the point at which the excerpts stop.