User:Juliedo1/Gerrymandering in the United States

I saw that Racial Gerrymandering is a section on the page, but I think that it's also important to include racial discrimination as an effect of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering can also have an impact on how the votes of minorities don't hold as much weight as a white voter because of gerrymandering and first past the post system, which then can harm the democracy.

Racial Discrimination
A study by Durst in 2018 found that the laws overseeing annexation can give rise to gerrymandering and increase racial discrimination due to the underbounding of black neighborhoods. Annexation is more commonly seen with Black and Hispanic communities than white communities, causing these communities to be underbounded in municipal borders, bringing back racial gerrymandering that undermined the voice of Black and Hispanic residents.

While people of color took up a substantive percentage of multiple states, their votes usually don't hold the same weight because of the district maps. More discussions of redrawing maps have been brought up, however, state officials have ignored such problems multiple times, resulting in voters of color' voices being sidelined in dominantly white districts with candidates that support the white population. Though racial discrimination was prohibited by the Supreme Court in the past, recent decisions have limited the protection of drawing discriminatory maps.

Health Impact
Gerrymandering and re-mapping districts usually resulted in "packing" and "cracking", in which "packing" is trying to pack as many people with similar voting preferences together as much as possible to increase the power of their choices, and "cracking" is separating people that has similar preference apart to reduce their power. This has several health implications for citizens, especially in different natural hazardous situations. In 2003, Georgia faced a hail storm, and districts that were cracked faced a harder time receiving recovery resources, which led to many physical and mental health impacts on many citizens.

Reference

 * Forgette, R., & Winkle, J. W. (2006). Partisan Gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act. Social Science Quarterly.
 * This is a peer-reviewed article, so it should be a reliable source. The article talks about the how the Voting Rights Act related to gerrymandering and some consequences that comes from this relation.
 * McCarty, N., Poole, K. T., & Rosenthal, H. (2009). Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization? American Journal of Political Science.
 * This is a peer-reviewed article, so it should be a reliable source. The article focuses about additional effects like polarization that came from gerrymandering.