After reading my fellow classmate Elijah's blog post about gerrymandering, I have to say I couldn't agree more with their points as to why gerrymandering should not exist. Drawing district lines to include or exclude certain groups of people is extremely unfair and malicious. After watching the U.S. Senate election race just this past week, I got to truly see how gerrymandering can affect the way votes are split up and conducted.
Like we’ve seen in class, if redrawing district lines was done using an algorithm rather than doing it by hand, the split up of political parties in each voting district would be far more fair, resulting in the elimination of some of the incumbency advantages seen in elections. Politicians often talk about the necessary change that we need to see in America, but with unfair voting districts, how can we see change if the Republican party is almost always favored (speaking in terms of the state of Texas)? If we were to eliminate gerrymandering and create district boundaries with equal political party representation, we would get to see a true reflection of who turns out at the polls, and that each districts votes should matter the same.
As they mentioned the city of Austin, I agree that the unair split up of voting districts is extremely evident in our city. Austin is indeed majority Democratic, but with the way lines are drawn, Republicans tend to have the majority vote. Once again, if districts were drawn with equal representation of both parties, problems with voter discrepancy would be eliminated almost completely. We need this to happen in order to see the change we want to see in our country.
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