Gerrymandering means that the party in power manipulates the boundaries of electoral districts to maximize the votes of its own supporters and dilute the votes of its opponents in an attempt to stay in office as long as possible. [1] This blended word comes from the combination of Governor Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts and salamander; the original Gerrymander refers to the serpentine shape of one infamous congressional district that the legislature established in the 1810s to preserve a Democratic-Republic voting block and which Gerry signed into law.[2] Ideally, the electoral districts within a province would each contain roughly the same number of people within a narrow variance of the average number of people per MP, and these districts would also be established without regard to political party and would instead follow the general geographic contours of the province. Since single-member districts cannot by definition overlap with one another, the most mathematically “compact”, or perfect, electoral district has only four sides. In contrast, a gerrymandered district sprawls out into the squiggly lines of a pernicious polygon that cobbles together multiple pockets of support for one political party.[3] This pattern held for the first few decades after Confederation in Canada and still holds sway in many American states today.
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