دانلود کتاب یک نفر، یک رای – تاریخ شگفت انگیز Gerrymandering در آمریکا

The results of Wisconsin’s 2018 election had to be seen to be believed. The state’s controversial governor, Scott Walker, running for a third term in office after surviving a closely contested and high-profile recall effort in 2012, and securing a narrow reelection in 2014, faced off against the Democratic challenger Tony Evers, the state’s superintendent of public instruction. The election was expected to be a close one. The Cook Political Report rated the race as a toss-up, both candidates were consistently polling within the margin of error, and prediction models, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, had the contest ranked as one of the closest in the nation. At first blush, very little appears strange about the result. The challenger, Evers, eked out a narrow victory by almost 30,000 votes over the somewhat unpopular incumbent, a margin of slightly more than 1 percent of the nearly 2.7 million ballots that were cast. Yet peering beneath the surface reveals some disturbing abnormalities. Despite losing the popular vote overall, Walker somehow carried sixty-three of Wisconsin’s ninety nine state assembly districts, and twenty-one of the thirtythree state senate districts. How could a candidate for governor win almost two-thirds of the districts in a state and still end up on the losing side? The answer to that question lies in what may go down as one of the most egregious instances of gerrymandering in American history. The battle over Wisconsin’s legislative districts would play out in both the statehouse and the media, eventually reaching all the way to Washington, D.C., and a showdown before the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. What exactly is gerrymandering? The term has a certain elasticity to it that makes pinning down a concise and consistent definition of the underlying concept somewhat tricky. Writing in the early twentieth century, Elmer Griffith, a University of Chicago PhD student whose treatise “The Rise and Development of the Gerrymander” may be among the most cited doctoral dissertations in history, defined the gerrymander thus: “Districts would not seem, therefore, to be gerrymandered unless they were established especially for election purposes and were formed intentionally in a particular manner for partisan advantage.” As a working definition for the purposes of this book, Griffith’s formulation is a good start, although perhaps a little more restrictive than I would like. Nevertheless, it serves as a decent jumping-off point for the discussion to come, by laying out the three quintessential elements of the practice.