Once every 10 years, state legislatures across the country play a game known as reapportionment. After the federal census is completed, your elected state legislators will decide what each legislative district will look like in the years to come. A district map will be drawn, which will show you what federal and state election district you will vote in for the next 10 years.
If you’ve never seen a map of the current districts, you’d find it fascinating. They take the shape of alligators, inkblots, clouds and even, in one case in central New York, President Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner. For each odd shape, there is a political explanation as to how it got there. Districts are almost always crafted to protect some incumbent or to make it more likely that a newly anointed candidate will win.
In the late 1960s, I served in the State Assembly in a district that included the Village of Island Park. It’s a cute little town, and the residents were very welcoming during my short tenure in Albany. But the mapmakers wanted to create a district for the then future, and now former, assemblyman, Armand D’Amato, so between one election and the next, Island Park was removed from my district.
That was a minor change compared with what the mapmakers did after that. When the final map was unveiled, my Assembly district, which had encompassed communities including Merrick, Freeport and Baldwin, had disappeared, and the new district included my hometown of Long Beach and the entire Five Towns. Having a new area with many Democrats was very gratifying, except that there was already an incumbent in that district, the late Eli Wager. That meant that he and I were forced to compete in a bitter party primary in the new district, which I was fortunate enough to win.
The process by which my district disappeared overnight is what we have come to know as gerrymandering. The practice of slicing and dicing legislative districts dates back to 1812, when Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a Boston district that looked like a salamander. From that point on, districts began resembling all manner of species, and the shape of those districts was determined by racial, religious, political and ethnic factors.