The Great American Gerrymander Machine

You may be surprised by the state of our democracy when one party's congressional candidates win 1.1 million more votes than the other but end up being greatly outnumbered in the House of Representatives.knife setsYou may be alarmed when one party's congressional candidates win 83,Fruit knife000 more votes in the state of Pennsylvania but end up with five House seats to the other party's 13.You may be astonished that schemes are afoot in Pennsylvania and other states to change the Electoral College such that, if they had been in effect last year, the presidential candidate who won by nearly 5 million votes would have been declared the loser.But I have expected for more than two decades that we would experience the out-of-control gerrymandering of legislative districts that is now causing such assaults on our political system.
I first realized that our country was headed toward unbridled gerrymandering in the late 1980s when I spent several years of my career as a history professor developing (with much assistance from colleagues who had the necessary technical skills) a computer-based historical atlas called The Great American History Machine.This software application would superimpose county-level census data since 1790 on a map of the United States, as well as similar data of federal elections. So, for example, a student in an American history course could instantly produce a map showing the percentage of Democratic presidential votes in every county in 1880 and compare it with a parallel map of the percentage of people enumerated in the 1880 census who were born in, say, Ireland.
I displayed this software at a number of conferences, and people frequently suggested that contemporary politicians would be delighted to have it to draw legislative districts in favor of their respective parties.The amount of energy that can be stored depends on the amount of energy that the Solar charger can sustain, the bigger the battery the more energy it can store.For a number of reasons The Great Machine itself would not have been the right application for that undertaking. But I gradually began to realize that the developments in computing that were enabling me to produce my harmless educational application eventually would enable others to ravage democracy through gerrymandering.The 2010 census turned out to be the moment when the devastation began.It just so happened that the GOP had the upper hand after the 2010 elections. Republicans controlled redistricting in states with 40 percent of congressional seats vs. the Democrats' 10 percent. Courts, divided governments or commissions drew up the rest. And the Republicans took full advantage of state-of-the-art gerrymandering technology -- as the Democrats would have,Motion sensor light given the chance.LED bulb