What do you think is the most important issue in American politics today? Criminal justice reform? Health care? Global climate change? Immigration? Gay rights? Economic justice? ISIS? Creeping totalitarianism?
All of those things (and more!) are incredibly important, but they may all be secondary to something else: gerrymandering. And earlier this week, the Supreme Court announced that it was going to decide a case that could potentially reform the practice entirely.
For those not familiar with the term, gerrymandering is the process by which state legislators draw voting district boundaries, for both congressional and state legislature districts. That sounds pretty boring, but in essence the power to draw voting district boundaries is, in many situations, akin to the power to determine who wins elections.
This process usually happens every 10 years, and the party in control of the state legislature is, in most states, the one that's in charge. In theory, re-drawing boundaries happens in order to balance the districts with population changes. Every 10 years, the census data is released, so if a district has grown in size, then the boundaries need to change so that each district in the state has roughly the same number of voters.....
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
