I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. We're going to take a little trip back in history today for a really important lesson in gerrymandering. That's the process of drawing district lines to favor a political party. It's a way to increase power simply by making sure voters that support you are packed into a certain district or using lines to divide up supporters of the other side.

Educator Christina Greer explains in an informative lesson from our education arm, Ted Ed.

Most people have heard the word gerrymandering once or twice, probably during a presidential election.

What exactly is gerrymandering? Essentially, it's the process of giving one political party an advantage over another political party by redrawing district lines.

It's like Democrats trying to gain an advantage over Republicans, or Republicans trying to gain an

advantage over Democrats.

You see, each party wants to gain as many districts as possible so they can do things, like

control the state budget or set themselves up to win even more districts in the future.

So, to understand how this process began and how it continues today, we must go back

to 1812 in Massachusetts. Elbridge Jerry, the governor of Massachusetts, supported and signed

a bill to allow redistricting, that is, redrawing the boundaries that separate districts. The catch?

The new lines would favor Jerry's own political

party, the Democratic Republican Party, which no longer exists. You see, Jerry wanted his party to win

as many state senate seats as possible. The more members of your party who vote, the more likely

you are to win an election. The new lines were drawn to include loads of areas that would help

Governor Jerry in the future. They were so strange-looking that someone said the new districts

look like a salamander. The Boston Gazette added Jerry's name to the word salamander, and

voila, gerrymandering, the process of dividing up and redrawing districts to give your political

party an advantage.

So how exactly does someone go about protecting their own political party and actually gerrymandering a district?

There are two successful practices, packing a district and cracking a district.

Packing is the process of drawing district lines and packing in your opponents like cattle

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