Electoral Boundaries Quotes

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

So [Republicans] packed all the Democrats into districts, very Democratic districts. What that's done is made our party urban, more liberal, and so those people are doing what their constituents want. But that's not what my constituents want.

It's going to be very important that we as women's rights advocates are involved in redistricting of both the states legislatures and of the House of Representatives and that we not lose seats but we gain seats for talented women and our country, but we're lacking behind.

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.

I thought incorporating Columbus and Platte County into the 1st District was a good idea.

California is among several states that already have fought their way out from under partisan gerrymandering by taking line-drawing authority away from the Legislature.

Even in Madison’s day, the practice of gerrymandering for partisan advantage was familiar. In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison’s Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.

Redistricting will determine the future control of Congress.

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

I think its time to get a reapportionment process that frankly takes out the incumbency protection and the raw politics of the process.

It is always tough to win every booth right across the electorate because there are different issues in different parts of the electorate.

No one ever asserts that politics has no role in apportionment or redistricting.

Redistricting is one of the purest actions a legislative body can take.