Elections: Gerrymandering

Elections are the only mechanism by which citizens can hope to maintain effective control over their government.  It is obviously crucial that elections work well.  Equally obviously, elections have not been working at all well.  It is both critical and urgent that airtight integrity of elections be achieved and maintained.  Citizens must always be able to implicitly trust election results.  There are indeed serious integrity risks that need to be addressed, but that is a whole separate topic that is outside the scope of this course.  However, there also are several things which need to be fixed that would significantly improve how elections themselves function.  By far, the most serious single problem is continued use of the Plurality voting method (see the separate Voting Methods course).  The second most serious problem is known as gerrymandering, and that is our topic here.  In this course, you will learn what gerrymandering is, why such a widely-known, ridiculed and reviled practice has not been fixed, and how it could easily be dispatched in a straightforward and permanent way.