Today I went to vote.
Carmen Pinyero is taking on Earlene Hooper, and if the words "Garbage to gold" mean anything to you, you know why that's an important election. If not, here's why: Hooper once tried to sell Freeport on building an incinerator. Why, yes, there is a picture of Hooper and former Mayor Andrew Hardwick in a promotional video for this Simpsons-seque scheme floating around. I just re-enabled that article on this site!
Anyhow, we're here to discuss something I found out when I went to my polling place - Freeport as a community is split between the 18th New York State Assembly district and the 21st. What's this mean? It means that if you live south of an imaginary line, you're in a different district - with a different representative. And guess what? You can't vote in the other election.
Hooper's 18th district looks something like this, image courtesy of New York State libraries.
How is Freeport Gerrymandered?
I've written about Gerrymandering before for The Hill, in particular criticizing Florida. I know I say "guess what" a lot, but guess what? The 18th district is severely gerrymandered, as you can no doubt tell by the fact that the district looks more like a horse-shoe than it does a sensible geographic region.
Gerrymandering, for those of you who don't know, is (in a nutshell) when the lines of a particular representative district are drawn in such a way that the representatives get to choose their electorate, and not the other way around. Oh, it might not be a deliberate case of a particular representative choosing a particular thing, but political parties (both Republican and Democrat) are notorious for creating "safe seats." Given that people at one polling place informed me that they'd had to turn away over a dozen people who wanted to vote, but weren't eligible to vote down the block from their house because they were in a different district, well...
Let's just say that there's something very un-just happening in our town. In this case, it's the fact that northern Freeport is in one district, southern Freeport is in another, and therefore the village as a whole does not get to have one representative. Instead, our northern representative also represents Roosevelt, Lynbrook, parts of Hempstead and other communities that, while lovely, might not have our best interests at heart. South Freeport is connected to Merrick as well as other south-shore communities; also totally fine places to live, but not necessarily putting Freeport first.
If you need a hint: When Earlene Hooper was proposing the incinerator, she wasn't planning on building it in her district.
That's all; make of it what you will.
For more information about gerrymandering, watch CGPGrey's awesome videos about "Voting in the Animal Kingdom."
No comments:
Post a Comment