Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The efficiency gap was first devised by University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Eric McGhee in 2014. [3] The metric has notably been used to quantitatively assess the effect of gerrymandering, the assigning of voters to electoral districts in such a way as to increase the number of districts won by one political party at the expense of another.
In the 2012 election for the state legislature, that gap in wasted votes meant that one party had 48.6% of the two-party votes but won 61% of the 99 districts. [28] The wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, but gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable.
Under the previous decade's apportionment and primary system a win by less than 55% was rare. In the 2012 elections, there were eleven such contest victories. The 2014 elections will be informative as to the durability of these conditions, as many first-term representatives will then be running as incumbents, usually an advantage.
That was evident in the just-completed once-a-decade redrawing of California congressional and legislative districts. But the latest gerrymandering wasn’t about crafting weirdly shaped districts ...
Republicans dominated the 2010 elections and were then able to “aggressively gerrymander as much as they wanted in many states” but in more recent elections “Democrats won governorships in a ...
Around 2014, Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee developed the "efficiency gap", a means to measure the number of wasted votes (votes either far in excess of what was necessary to secure a win for a party, or votes for a party that had little chase to win) within each district. The larger the gap of wasted votes between the two parties ...
Ninth Judicial District Judge Fred Van Soelen listens to arguments during the second day of a trial in which New Mexico Democrats were accused of illegal gerrymandering, Sept. 28, 2023 in Lea ...
A bipartisan gerrymandering effort was done, and districts were configured in such a way that they were dominated by one or the other party, with few districts that could be considered competitive. In some cases this resulted in extremely convoluted boundary lines. In the 2004 elections, a win by less than 55 percent of the vote was quite rare.