Quotes About Redistricting

Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.

Redistricting reform is one of the most important issues we can tackle.

Around the nation, lawmakers have drawn up their districts with such perverse precision and aversion to competition, that legislators rarely face competitive challenges.

Legislators redistrict all the time to achieve desired results. They group people together based on how they think they will vote. There is something fundamentally wrong with this tactic; it is unconstitutional, it is manipulative, it is patronizing, and it infringes upon all citizens' right to vote.

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.

A few states have taken redistricting out of the hands of partisans and put them in the hands of fair-minded committees. Every state should do the same.

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

Redistricting and a broken, polarized Congress have made it tough to be a moderate in Congress.

I think the best term limit is to have public financing of campaigns and independent redistricting.

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

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.

Bullies have played a dirty trick to force me out of office by re-drawing my Congressional district to cover a largely rural area of north Florida and include 22 prisons, and convicted felons can't vote.

A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as "the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States." He once told an audience of state legislators, "Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.

California's redistricting process creates a historic opportunity for Valley Latinos to have a strong and unified voice in Congress for the first time. The opportunity to be the Valley's first Latino Congressional representative is humbling, and I'm proud that so many diverse leaders have come together to support this campaign.

We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders).

Gerrymandering isn't just a recent phenomenon, though; the word was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry went to such egregious lengths to redraw the state senate districts in his party's favor that one district took on the shape of a salamander.