In the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. Now districts must be equal in size within the state by population and must be contiguous. This gives us some very unique districts. Illinois 4th district was featured by The Economist as one of the most strangely drawn and gerrymandered congressional districts in the country and has been nicknamed "earmuffs" due to its shape. It was created to pack two majority Hispanic parts of Chicago into one district.
Technically districts should be drawn to give equal representation for the given district but this is not so. The districts are cut up in such a manner to give itself a distinctive advantage come election time. That means if one party has the majority of the state legislature they usually want to draw the districts so that they have a better chance of winning. This makes elections of state legislatures very important. There should be laws against gerrymandering and draw lines with more equal representation. The problem is democrats tend to live in the urban areas and therefore would most likely win most of the seats in Congress. My opinion is that gerrymandering complicates the political process and should be done away with.
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