Electoral Systems 101

The illusion of control

I had a post on the proposed Alternative Voting System, but it was too gargantuan for me to bother fact-checking, so I'm breaking it up into parts.

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the act of changing constituency borders in order to change the result.

Simply illustrated, take the following group of people, geographically distributed with one blob of Conservative voters up north, and a blob of Labour voters down south:


CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL
LLLLL
LLLLL


Now lets see where the constituency boundaries are:


CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
----------- constituency boundary
CCCCC
CCLCC 1 Conservative MP
CLCLC
----------- constituency boundary
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL

1 Labour
2 Conservative

"That's no good", think Labour, who happen to be in power; "lets change the boundaries":


CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL 1 Labour MP
LLCLL
----------- constituency boundary
LLLLL
LLLLL 1 Labour MP


2 Labour
1 Conservative

Or simply:


CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL

1 Labour
1 Conservative

Note that in neither case did the actual votes change, just the boundaries (and, thus, the number of MPs elected for each party).

It was apparently used a lot Northern Ireland, in an attempt to stifle separatist parties, and in the UK we have an allegedly indipendant boundaries commission to set the boundaries, supposedly to prevent gerrymandering.

Nonetheless, if you want people to assume they've got control and live in a democracy whilst still maintaining power yourself, gerrymandering should be in your vocabulary.