Gerrymander

Gerrymander (pronounced jer-ee-man-duhr or gary-ee-man-duhr)

(1) The dividing of a state, county etc into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.

(2) To subject (a state, county etc) to a gerrymander.

(3) A generalized descriptor (though sometimes technically not gerrymanders in the technical sense) of distorted electoral systems (often non-US use).

1812: A portmanteau word and an Americanism, named after politician and diplomat Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1744–1814) who (as a Democratic-Republican), served as fifth vice-president of the United States.  Gerry was governor of Massachusetts at the time the electoral re-districting resulted in the map of Essex County gaining a salamander-like outline.  Gerrymander was coined by the editors of the Boston Gazette and published in the edition of 26 March 1812, the text likely written by Nathan Hale and Benjamin & John Russell, the accompanying a cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale (1768-1835).  Elbridge Gerry's surname was pronounced with a hard “G” (Gary) but gerrymander is almost always (and universally outside the US) pronounced with a soft “g” (jerry).  One (rare) derived noun form is the difficult to pronounce gerrymanderer; the more common adjective is gerrymandered.

The construct was gerry + (sala)mander.  The surname Gerry is a patronymic of Geary, of medieval English origin, from a Germanic personal name.  The personal name is derived from "geri, gari", meaning spear, and is a short form of the various compound names with this first element.  The first recorded spelling of the family name is that of Richard Geri, listed in 1195, during the reign of King Richard I (The Lionheart, 1189-1199) although the name was doubtless in use prior to this entry, surnames becoming necessary only after governments introduced personal taxation (known in England as the Poll Tax).  Over the centuries, surnames in many countries have seen many variations of the original spelling evolve.  Salamander is from the Middle English salamandre, from the Anglo-Norman salamandre, from the Classical Latin salamandra, from the Ancient Greek σαλαμάνδρα (salamándra), of uncertain origin but thought probably pre-Greek and from the Persian سمندر‎ (samandar).

The explanatory diagrams published by the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812.  To the left is what was described by journalists Nathan Hale and Benjamin & John Russell as "The Gerry-mander".  A new species of Monster which appeared in Essex South District in January", the cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale.  The centre map is the original gerrymander, a Massachusetts State Senate district submission drawn in 1812.  To the right is the second Massachusetts congressional district for the thirteenth congress.

The essence of the gerrymander is to draw the divisions on electoral maps such that votes surplus to requirements (often called "wasted votes") in "safe districts" are moved to marginal or opposition-held districts to maximize the possibility of winning.  In some cases, such malapportionments are constitutionally entrenched such as the arrangements often seen for the election of upper houses (including the US and Australian Senates (US political scientists insist the US Senate isn't an upper house but the basis of its electoral principle is a malapportionment).     

Gerrymander is used almost always as a derogatory term, suggesting some form of political corruption, even if usually, technically, lawful.  Strictly speaking, it refers only to bizarrely shaped boundaries drawn on maps of electoral districts to favor one political candidate over another but has come to be used also as a general descriptor of electoral malapportionment.  Malapportionment is the creation of electoral districts with divergent ratios of voters to representatives.  This was how most electoral trickery was done in Australia, the practice not eradicated federally until the 1970s (although constitutionally entrenched malapportionments (lower and upper houses) remain).  It was most famously (though not uniquely) practiced until the 1990s in Queensland where it was known as the Bjelkemander or Johmander (named after Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen (1911–2005; premier of Queensland 1968-1987) because of the way in which some rural electorates in the state parliament contained sometimes as few as half the number of voters as urban seats.  The malapportionment in Queensland, although usually associated with Bjelke-Petersen’s Country Party administration was actually a tweak of a zonal system introduced by the Labor party in 1949 and wasn’t even the worst in the country, the most extreme being in South Australia where, at one point, the largest city electorate contained as many voters as seven rural electorates.

Salamander scene in The Parent Trap (1998).