The brilliance of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” lies in his ability to break down complicated issues into understandable soundbites. On Sunday, Oliver took a stab at an outdated political process with a confusing name that threatens voter equality in the United States. It’s called “gerrymandering.”
Gerrymandering, Oliver told viewers, is “the practice of drawing voting districts that creates advantages for the person who is drawing the line.”
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Essentially, through gerrymandering, politicians and legislators are able to choose the voters that make up their district by redrawing district lines, which means they can try and choose to include voters who will reelect them. Districts must be updated after the federal census, which takes place every 10 years, to account for changing demographics, and politicians in power have used that rule to their advantage.
The implications for racial minorities and disenfranchised populations can be critical, both during and after elections, as Oliver explained.
“It’s known to disadvantage voters based on race, or on political party, or to shore up seats for incumbents,” Oliver said. “If your party holds the redistricting pen, it holds significant power.”
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As PBS has explained, the impact of gerrymandering has ramifications in immigration policy, healthcare, and minimum wage. Undocumented, uninsured, and low-income people tend to naturally cluster in cities and vote in Democratic districts. So, when district lines are redrawn to even further segregate voters by party, issues like minimum-wage are only championed by an even smaller segment of elected officials. For example, minimum wage policies in Michigan have been thwarted due to that state’s conservative leadership, according to the Detroit Metro Times.
The Alliance for a Just Society wrote that: “Gerrymandering not only creates extreme polarization and weakens the votes of moderates and minorities, it also reinforces racial stereotyping and housing segregation.”
Although some of this redistricting is a result of natural demographic trends, politicians in power can make this polarization even worse with the stroke of a pen.
And this leads to further inequality, as policies that benefit the few prevail over policies that benefit the many.
“In a democracy, the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does,” Oliver said in his segment.
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To make his point about gerrymandering clear, Oliver assembled a diverse coalition of individuals, including “scientologists, or parrotheads, or guys who ride unicycles as their primary mode of transportation.”
“Election results should not be the fault of lawmakers drawing crazy lines,” Oliver said, concluding. “They should be the result of our own crazy decisions.”