Tom Hofeller Quotes

My tentative plan is to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section and replace them with right-thinking Americans..

Redistricting is the nastiest form of politics that there is.

By using the latest sophisticated software, state legislatures can carve out districts that guarantee electoral victory for one party or the other, often in the service of protecting incumbents.

These districts at the federal and state level that are gerrymandered tend to produce a lot of extremism.

Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders).

…by gerrymandering the State, seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.

Properly done gerrymandering will increase the weight of some votes and nullify the effect of others, in order to ensure with near certainty that elections will yield the outcome desired by the incumbents.

Every individual who participated in the redistricting process knew that incumbency protection was a critical factor in producing the bizarre lines.... Many of the oddest twists and turns of the Texas districts would never have been created if the Legislature had not been so intent on protecting party and incumbents

Political gerrymandering makes the incentive for most members of Congress to play to the extremes of their base rather than to the center.

The Republicans in the House and Senate took the district that I firmly represent, 22 in south Florida, from a D plus one to a D plus five almost a D plus six district, which means you are given a five to six percent registration advantage to Democrats. They drew in more Democrats into the district I represent.

We cannot always count on a severely gerrymandered legislature itself to find and implement a remedy [to gerrymandering.]

If legislators are allowed to continuously redistrict throughout the decade, you are going to have no way of using elections to remove unpopular officeholders because the lines will be redrawn to ensure their reelection.

It has become a cliché that voters no longer choose their legislators. The legislators choose their voters.

First they gerrymander us into one-party fiefs. Then they tell us they only care about the swing districts. Then they complain about voter apathy

Gerrymandering is not hard. The core technique is to jam voters likely to favor your opponents into a few throwaway districts where the other side will win lopsided victories, a strategy known as “packing.” Arrange other boundaries to win close victories, “cracking” opposition groups into many districts.

… because … gerrymandering makes the districts less competitive, candidates are freed to pander to their bases while ignoring moderate and independent voters. More ever, politicians who do not pander face primary challenges from ideologically purer candidates.

Equal constituencies' sound fair. So why is Labour so against the constituencies bill and why do we call it gerrymandering? Because, like so much Tory rhetoric, it sounds good, but if we look beyond the soundbites it becomes clear that it covers policies that promote narrow sectional interests.

American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.

Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can't draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That's really critical.

If you ask the people who are professional political analysts, they would say that the way redistricting has worked, that the Republicans have something of a lock on the House until a redistricting occurs after 2010, particularly as a result of what DeLay did in Texas.

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.

Washington is politics! Somehow if people have political objectives, then those objectives are automatically disqualified? If that's the case, the Democrats have no business being legitimized about anything because everything they do is political.

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.

When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.

... political pornography.