Customer Reviews

Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections

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Creating electoral districts to aid the party controlling the state legislature is a practice that goes back in U. S. history at least to the early 19th century. Monmonier gives a simple, easy- to-follow example of how it can be done, using simple diagrams.

Item received as described. Excellent for an introduction to one of the problems which exists in our present government's political system which needs to be fixed. Somewhat technical in some respects but provides a basic grounding in the process of how the census plays an important role in this process.

This is a decent book touching on Gerrymandering of congressional and other districts in order to select the population within each district to guarantee politicians of certain parties getting elected, however, the author's partisanship (leftist) shows through: he coins a word ("Bushmander") to pin Gerrymandering on Republicans, when in fact this behavior has been historically concentrated on the left, both because of Democractic Machine politics, and because of affirmative action racial preferences applied to electoral mechanics. The author thus blames Bush I even though the vast majority of the racial gerrmandering was invited by the Voting Rights Act, a Democratic initiative, and was done by social activists with in the Justice Department in an attempt to create more African American (i.e. "Democratic") districts...but the unintended consequence of this was to simultaneously create more monolithic Republican districts at the same time. In fact, as even the author is forced to admit, the Republicans argued against racial gerrymandering...but this does not stop the Republican administrations under which much of the gerrymandering took place from getting blame, both in the book and in the book's title, for the very policies they fought.