Gerrymandering Explained
CGP Grey
CGP Grey
4.9 • 820 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2011
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Queen Lion of the Animal Kingdom is giving more democracy to her citizens by adding a legislative branch to the government. |
| 0:06.0 | The citizens each get one vote and are divided into ranges. Each range will elect one representative to send to the newly created jungle council. |
| 0:14.0 | To best understand how the system works, let's take a look at a small colony where there are just two political parties, the Buffalo and Jackalope. |
| 0:20.0 | This colony is divided into four ranges. In, the Buffalo and Jackalope. |
| 0:20.8 | This colony is divided into four ranges. |
| 0:23.1 | In the first election, Jackalope candidates win two of them and Buffalo candidates win the |
| 0:26.6 | rest. |
| 0:27.7 | All is well for several election cycles until the Animal Kingdom Census Taker comes round and |
| 0:31.8 | shows that the population has both moved and grown. |
| 0:34.7 | To better represent the larger population, a new seed is added to the jungle Council, so the Rangers' boundaries must be redrawn. This is where the trouble begins. Redrawing electoral boundaries is a huge political problem. To help them, the representatives of the Jungle Council hire a Weasley consultant to figure out where the new boundaries should go. If Weasel draws rectangular boundaries, everything will be okay because the jungle council |
| 0:55.7 | will, as close as possible, reflect how the citizens vote. |
| 0:59.5 | However, Weasel doesn't do this. |
| 1:01.4 | Instead, he tells the Buffalo Party that, for a price, he can turn their slim majority |
| 1:05.6 | into a landslide victory in the election. |
| 1:08.2 | With a supermajority on the jungle council, the Buffalo wouldn't have |
| 1:11.0 | to listen to those pesky jackalope filibusters anymore, so the Buffalo gladly pay up. |
| 1:15.8 | How can Weasel deliver on his promise? It's depressingly simple. By packing together as many |
| 1:20.4 | jackalope voters into one range as possible and spreading the rest of them out, the Buffalo |
| 1:24.2 | party can win an additional seat without any voters switching allegiance. What Weasel and the Buffalo have done is called gerrymandering, the intentional changing of electoral boundaries for their benefit. |
| 1:33.3 | Several election cycles later, the underrepresented and disgruntled Jackalow Party approaches Weasel and asks |
| 1:38.3 | if he can manipulate the ranges to be in their favor instead of in the buffaloes. |
| 1:42.3 | Why indeed he can? Using the same trick, Weasel packs buffalo voters into a few ranges |
... |
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