On a clear day, I can see the 9^th Congressional District from our back porch.

Actually, I can see it any time I care to look west, except for days when Shermans Creek is shrouded in fog. The 9^th District may be a couple thousand feet away, on the other side of Route 74, but it’s a different world.

Well, maybe not so different. If you were to drive down Pine Hill Road to Route 74, near Wentzel’s Mill, you wouldn’t know you were about to cross a political fault line. One side of Route 74 looks pretty much like the other.

But there is a difference: the 17^th District is blue; the 9^th is red.

Each district has about 640,000 residents. The 17^th is slightly wealthier on a per capita basis, but only very slightly. It’s more racially diverse than the 9th: white people make up 96% of the 9th, compared with 88% for the 17^th. The 9^th is about two-thirds rural, one third urban. The 17^th, on the other hand, is about two-thirds urban, one third rural, which makes sense when you consider that the 17^th includes Harrisburg.

What doesn’t make much sense is that Perry County — on the whole, a pretty homogenous place, socially and politically — should be cleaved in half, its residents divvied up between two very different congressional districts.

Welcome to the strange world of gerrymandering, a venerable tradition that goes back to the roots of our Republic. The sneaky redrawing of voting districts actually predates the first U.S. Congress. As early as 1788, Patrick Henry schemed with the Virginia House of Delegates to try to keep James Madison out of Congress, but the practice didn’t get its popular name until 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a redistricting bill that favored his own political party. One of the geographically tortured districts was said to look like a salamander, and in a stroke, a brand-new portmanteau word was invented to describe a process as old as the Constitution: “gerrymandering.”

The word has come to stand for slicing and dicing the electorate to guarantee or increase the power of one party over another. Every ten years, in the wake of the national census, districts are massaged, deleted, or completely redrawn.

As recently as twenty years ago, there was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement between the two major parties. Rather than tie up legislatures’ precious time with endless squabbling over redistricting, the squabbling was limited to the year or two immediately following the census.

But that wasn’t good enough for some highly partisan politicians. In the early 90s, Texas decided to redraw its districts several years after the census. The issue was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that gerrymandering, while messy and often ugly, was essentially politics as usual, and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the courts, except in some special cases.

Thus was born a new, hyper-partisan, 24-7 approach to redistricting, which encourages whatever party is in power in state legislatures – currently, and overwhelmingly, Republicans – to come up with ever more clever Franken-districts with two goals in mind: making life as easy as possible for incumbents of one’s own party; and maximizing the number of wasted votes for the opposition.

There are arguments to be made for grouping voters with similar political interests. In the 80s and 90s, many Southern districts were redrawn to give black voters a majority for the first time in history. This had the happy effect of increasing the diversity of the House, which is still, to our shame, a predominantly white male club. But it had the unhappy effect of making several formerly competitive districts walkovers for Republican candidates, since the redrawn districts were now rid of a significant black – and overwhelmingly Democratic — minority.

Gerrymandering reduces the competitiveness of elections and encourages politicians to pander to the more extreme elements in their party, since most Congressional races these days are won or lost in the primary, not in the general election. But redistricting is also a fact of our political life. Right now, in back rooms of state legislatures across the country, gerrymanderers are poring over the results of the 2010 census and cramming all sorts of data into special redistricting software in an effort to give their party an edge in future elections.

This process will surely produce some strange-looking stepchildren. As it is, the 17^th Congressional District looks a lot like the chalk outline of a murdered turkey. The 9^th is like an angry man shouting and shaking his finger at Harrisburg while winding up to slug it with his other hand.

I kind of know how it feels.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 March 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com