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In the Roanoke area, what initially raised eyebrows was that both sides made proposals that allowed Roanoke and Blacksburg to be absorbed into a Republican-majority district, putting the senator from the State John Edwards, D-Roanoke, unemployed and insuring Del. Sam Rasoul, also Roanoke Democrat, could never succeed him.
However, this is inevitable in a non-partisan process, isn’t it? Both parties would have to give up things they wanted to keep.
This news was quickly overshadowed by the committee’s complete inability to reach compromises for a General Assembly or Congress cards. The committee’s Democratic co-chair, Greta Harris, said on October 20 that “this is not working” and that “we are done”.
The word “gerrymander” immortalizes Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812, for having signed the creation by his political party of a distorted electoral district. The outline of this new neighborhood inspired a newspaper cartoonist to redesign it as a sinister winged salamander with a forked tongue. The cartoonist nicknamed this creature “The Gerry-mander”.
For centuries, government officials adjusting their constituencies have spawned new gerrymanders, designed to help the ruling party stay on top. (Although, of course, the practice has long preceded the name.)
After the Civil War, gerrymandering became a means of depriving black voters of the right to vote, with boundaries drawn to confine the black population of a community to a single district, while analyzing multiple white-majority districts.
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