I have been on a crusade for the past three years to educate the public about the corrosive practice of gerrymandering. I was warned back in2015 not to place it in my platform while running for the House of Delegates inVirginia. "It is too complicated, the public isn't interested," I was told. The public wasn't interested only because they weren't told about this tool to keep elected officials in power by carving out their own districts. It had grown into the terrible threat to democracy with the use of computer data to draw the lines.
In 2015, the stark tragedy of gerrymandering became apparent when all of the incumbents in the Virginia General Assembly kept their seats.
It is no wonder the Virginia House legislative power in 2017 kept this protective practice and finagled another debacle to representation by adjourning before a vote, even after 10,000 phone calls from constituents asked them to advance the bills to end gerrymandering. The bill never made it out of the House Privileges and Elections Committee in Virginia.
We are faced with a critical moment in preservation of democracy. Can we not look at hyper partisanship as a byproduct of this problem? Are challenged elections doomed?
This year in Virginia, we have a chance to upend the predictable votes that feeds the gerrymonster. We can bring people to the ballot box that don't normally vote in a state election or have given up on voting because they feel ignored. This is asking for the predictions of data to be upended.
Angela Lynn
Candidate for Virginia House of Delegates 25th District
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