Gerrymandering, the oldest cheat in the book

By AIDEN PRICE

The Mirror reporter

Democracy, something that the US has been using since its beginning. It is showing that everyone votes and the one with the most votes wins… or at least that was the plan. With gerrymandering, this isn’t how it’s done politically.

Gerrymandering is where district voting lines are drawn to support one side better than the other. The original idea began a long time ago when people used this to make the upper-class votes count more than the ones from the lower class. Now both parties (Democrats and Republicans) use this to their advantage. Drawing the lines in places to benefit them.

This is a problem! Sometimes our vote doesn’t matter because one of the sides cheat their way to winning. If someone has the majority of votes then they should be the ones that win, but then the other wins due to gerrymandering.

There are many ways to fix this problem though. The easiest option is to just get rid of it entirely. Democracy is about voting fairly and letting the majority vote win, so we can get rid of gerrymandering (and the Electoral College) so it’s a fair vote.

The other good option for us is to use the ranking method where people would vote for their top three people. The person in last place is eliminated. Then everyone who chose that candidate as their first vote would use their second vote instead. This keeps going until one of the people we are voting for gets over 50% of the votes.

The other options are harder and could just make it worse, so the one that we should focus on is getting rid of it.

Is gerrymandering fully horrible? No, there are upsides to having it. Sometimes this can help in ties and also split places that are having a hard time having a choice. This is what was originally planned

No matter many times we try to make gerrymandering look good it is used to cheat the system and get one side to win. We should just use the popular vote and not gerrymandering.