Do people have a voice in the new political system? Our elected officials represent their community, but with gerrymandering, the officials being elected might not serve the people. Instead, they represent a desire to control power.
With the midterm election only a few weeks away, we can have our voices heard at the poll again. But what happens if your community has been lost behind the invisible line of gerrymandering?
We live in the era where the invisible line of power spills over into our everyday lives. We're supposed to have a democratic system where the people vote for their elected officials, but along the way, politicians have found ways to manipulate the vote in their favor. You might have missed several articles bringing gerrymandering to light and how it affects our vote.
If you're wondering what gerrymandering is, let me explain how it affects you:
- Gerrymandering makes it possible to manipulate boundaries so that one party or class has a higher favor in winning. Instead of representing for the people, they want to control the vote.
- Gerrymandering is illegal. The Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that gerrymandering is illegal because districts should be drawn to represent the population. So, why in 2018 people are still dealing with politicians getting away with conducting this process without being prosecuted for breaking the law? Are certain people above the law? Does the law even matter if their elected officials are silencing our voice?
- The only way to stop gerrymandering from continuing is to be involved in your community. Look at district processing and find a way to get them redistricted to be fair. It’s time we fight the politicians in the courtroom. It's easy to complain about the unlawful justification of our system, but we need to do more than tweet or post our frustration. We need to get our complaints to the courtrooms to keep our politicians accountable, because they're not going to listen to our voice or complaints. They have found ways to silence us in our democracy by holding our vote in darkness.
We have a voice and if we don’t use it, we will lose our chance at having a government that reflects the people. If you're not happy with how the government is representing the people, we need to find ways to eliminate gerrymandering in our society. We want our vote to count and make change, instead of being silenced by our politicians who practice gerrymandering for their own personal gains.
