One Person, One Vote Audiobook Libro.fm

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A redistricting crisis is now upon us This surprising compelling book tells the history of how we got to this momentfrom the Founding Fathers to todays hightech manipulation of election districtsand shows us as well how to protect our most sacred hardfought principle of one person one vote Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens politicians journalists activists and voters

Seabrooks lucid account of the origins and evolution of gerrymanderingthe deliberate and partisan doctoring of district borders for electoral advantagemakes a potentially dry wonky subject accessible and engaging for a broad audience The New York Times

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of election districts for partisan and political gain Instead of voters picking the politicians they want politicians pick the voters they need to get the election results theyre after Surprisingly gerrymandering has been around since before our nations founding And with technology those drawing the redistricting lines have now more than ever been able to microtarget their electoral manipulations with unprecedented levels of precision

Nick Seabrook an authority on constitutional and election law and an expert on gerrymandering pronounced with a hard G has written an illuminating urgently needed book on how our elections have been rigged through redistricting beginning with the Founding Fathers Abraham Lincoln the Civil War and Reconstruction and extending to the twentieth centurys gerrymandering battles at the Supreme Court and todays hightech manipulations of election districts

Seabrook writes of Patrick Henry who used redistricting to settle an old score with political foe and fellow Founding Father James Madison almost preventing the Bill of Rights from happening He writes of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry and corrects the mistaken notion of the derivation of the term gerrymander He writes of Abraham Lincoln and how his desire to preserve the Union led him to manipulate the admission of new states in order to maintain his majority in the Senate

And we come to understand the place of the Supreme Court in its fierce battles regarding gerrymandering throughout the twentieth century First was Felix Frankfurter who fought for decades to prevent the judiciary from involving itself in disputes concerning the drawing of districts Then came the Warren Court and its series of civil rights cases culminating in the landmark decision Reynolds v Sims written by Chief Justice Earl Warren which says that state legislatures unlike the United States Congress must have representation in both houses based on districts containing equal populationswith redistricting as needed following each census The result has been everincreasing hardfought wrangling between the two political parties after each census

Seabrook explores the rise of the most partisan gerrymanders in American history put into place by the Republican Party after the 2010 census and how the battle has shifted to the states via REDMAPthe GOPs successful strategy of the last decade to control state governments and rig the results of state legislative and congressional elections