All 50 state Leagues and the District of Columbia League have joined the new LWVUS People Powered Maps Campaign to ensure fair representation across the country.
On June 27, 2019, the Supreme Court abdicated its role deciding cases involving partisan gerrymandering with three decisions (including Rucho v. League of Women Voters of North Carolina).
This is not a one-size-fits-all campaign. For New York State this means working with a new redis- tricting process passed by the voters in 2014. Our new Deputy Director, Jennifer Wilson, will lead our state efforts to achieve fair maps during our redistricting process in 2021. Stay tuned for more information as we train and work with LWVUS to develop strategies to ensure that our redistricting process will work for the people and not the politicians of New York state.
The Census, counting all the people, in the right place, once, is the first step toward a good redistricting process. Is there a Community Counts Committee in your community? Check out the resources on the US Census website. Would you like to identify the hard to count populations in your community? Use the Census tool, ROAM (Response Outreach Area Mapper).
The cartoon above is a political cartoon from 1812. It illustrates the electoral districts drawn by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the incumbent Democratic-Republican party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists. It depicts the bizarre shape of a district in Essex County, Massachusetts as a dragon. The painter, Gilbert Stuart, likened it to a salamander, and the editor, Benjamin Russel, advised “Better say a Gerrymander.” The name stuck.
Source: Wikipedia.
