When Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry drew the state’s Congressional districts in a way that would benefit the Democratic-Republican Party in the year 1812, he couldn’t have anticipated that his last name would go down in history through the use of the term gerrymandering. Gerrymandering, according to a 2019 study led by researcher Alex Keena, is “a form of voting manipulation whereby electoral district boundaries are drawn to produce a partisan or political bias in elections.” Essentially, while all Congressional districts are required to have roughly equal populations, these districts can be drawn up in such a way to benefit one political party or another.
It is important to understand the impacts that these congressional district boundaries can have on elections in order to see if voters respond to these manipulated maps. My research question was: to what extent does gerrymandering and the redistricting process of each state relate to voter turnout? My hypothesis was that higher rates of gerrymandering would lead to lower rates of voter turnout, because if voters feel that elections are rigged for or against their party of choice, as a result they may feel that their voices would not make a difference and their time is better spent elsewhere.
Methods
In order to answer this research question, I examined the relationship between my independent variable – gerrymandering – and my dependent variable – voter turnout. While experts cannot agree on how to mathematically measure gerrymandering, one common method is by using the Polsby-Popper score, which is a measure of a district’s compactness. Polsby-Popper scores range from zero to one; the higher the score, the more a district has been gerrymandered. My academic advisor, Dr. David Good of the O’Neill School, ran software which used a similar equation to assign each state a numeric value based on the compactness. I will refer to this value as the state gerrymandering score. In order to measure voter turnout, I collected data from a website called The Election Project, which in turn collected its data from the American Community Survey, which is administered by the US Census.
Results
When using the equation noted above, the top five most gerrymandered states are Alaska (a note on that later), Maryland, Louisiana, Hawaii, and West Virginia. The least five gerrymandered states are Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, and Montana. The correlation between state gerrymandering score and voter turnout was very weak for the four election years of interest: 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022. Presidential election years were excluded due to the federal nature of those elections. The correlation between these two variables can be examined in the following graphs. The far outlier to the right is the state of Maryland, which is considered to be one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.
Limitations and Discussion
The equation used to assign each state a numeric gerrymandering score is flawed due to the nature of the United States. Some states, such as Alaska, are more oddly shaped (less compact) while other states, such as Wyoming, are more compact. Despite the fact that both Alaska and Wyoming have only one Congressional district, and as a result should each have a gerrymandering score of zero, these two states had radically different gerrymandering scores when using the equation described in the methods section. Alaska was calculated to be the most gerrymandered state in the country with a score of 13.8, while Wyoming was calculated to be the least gerrymandered state in the country with a score of 4.0. The compactness of each Congressional district may be impacted by external factors such as natural boundaries (rivers, mountain ranges) or the shape of individual states. Gerrymandering often causes a lack of compactness, but simply because a district is not compact does not mean it has been intentionally gerrymandered. None of the results collected are statistically significant given the low number of datapoints. Further research should examine voter turnout at the district level rather than at the state level, and the analysis of presidential election years could yield additional results.
Noah Johnson is a senior at Indiana University Bloomington majoring in law and public policy with minors in business and psychology. Noah is originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana and hopes to pursue a career in… he’s not sure yet.
Leave a Reply