There is an astounding revelation in a recent New Yorker feature about Barack Obama. While the magazine’s cover image, featuring Obama and his wife as Osama Bin Laden and a terrorist accomplice, generated incredible controversy when it appeared this summer, the article’s damning revelation about how American electoral politics works received no comment. Perhaps because in the U.S. the corrupt nature of the political process is not considered news.

As an Illinois state senator from the majority party, Obama got to draw-up his own constituency boundaries, only subject to approval by the ruling Illinois state Democrats. In contravention of every idea about how to build representative democracy in fair and even-handed fashion, many U.S. states permit this partisan re-districting which allows the governing party a freehand to design the electoral map.

In Obama’s case the lack of independent electoral boundary commissions meant he, and his party were free to fill up his share of the map with his South Side Chicago supporters. But, since he had national ambitions, his team added some of the north side with its museums, concert halls and other prestigious organizations to his electoral area, so that the state senator could meet and get to know wealthy board members of Chicago arts organizations, who, eventually, would help him move up to become a U.S. senator.

In the U.S. “getting out the vote” means first putting your voters in your district, then dispersing your opponents vote widely, or concentrating it, so opposition voters are piled up in one place.

Armed with this understanding of how voters get distributed into U.S. electoral districts, the prestige and importance American political scientists attach to finding out which way Americans vote, and why, becomes clear. Governing parties want to know as precisely as possible which voters, in what polls, on which street, vote for them, since knowing who makes up your electorate, facilitates the task of adding, or keeping them in your district, when it becomes time to change the electoral map. When you can do something with the knowledge, knowing who votes for your opponents helps just as much in shaping an electoral map to maximum advantage. Obviously, political scientists who can furnish this information accurately are most in demand in those American states where governments draw electoral maps.

Americans are the not the only citizens of the world to be manipulated through partisan electoral engineering. However it was named “gerrymandering” after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry. In 1812 he re-shaped the electoral map to favour his party, and in the process created a district that one opponent said had the shape of a salamander, then another said, no it is a gerrymander.

As activists for Canadian electoral reform know all too well, governments here operate under the theory that when you are winning, you do not change the rules.

In Canada, without full control over the electoral map, but having the first-past-post electoral system, the easiest way to get out the vote is the Jean Chrétien strategy. Chrétien could count on having more partisan voters than his opponents, and worked to keep the opposition divided, even keeping the Bloc alive so as to divide the anti-Liberal vote in Quebec. But the Chrétien specialty was to lull into apathy anyone this was not politically engaged. Rather than worry about getting out the vote, he knew people could not vote for someone else if they stayed home. With about 25 per cent of eligible voters voting Liberal each time he led the party into an election, Chrétien won three straight majorities in the House of Commons.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have more money, and more party members than the opposition parties. The opposition is divided. But the Conservatives have generated significant voter antagonism, and not enough apathy.

A lack of popular support suggests the prime minister is blowing smoke at Liberal leader Stéphane Dion when he talks about an election this fall.

But the looming recession could change Conservative political calculations. The Liberals expect their political prospects to go up, as economic fortunes go down. Conversely, the Conservatives do not want to give the economy enough time to turn down badly before they face the voters, or they risk handing a minority to the Liberals.

When bad times hit neighbourhoods and communities across the country, not even the power to redraw the electoral map can save a government.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...