Packing and Cracking
The two goals of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes, and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes.
One strategy, packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases, this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest (such as to create a majority-minority district), rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness (and, when minority groups are involved, to avoid possible racial discrimination).
A second strategy, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. An example would be to split the voters in an urban area among several districts where the majority of voters are suburban, on the assumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the majority of suburban voters would elect their candidates of choice.
The strategies are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure more seats for greater representation for voters of another type.
Read more about this topic: Gerrymandering
Famous quotes containing the words packing and/or cracking:
“He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)