Our United States’ democracy is imperiled…something spoken of frequently in the media today. There has been corrosion of our democracy from the beginning, far longer than the current presidential commotion. Gerrymandering, for example, is old-school voter disenfranchisement, as old as the country itself.

Major institutions which evaluate the status of democracy across the world cite gerrymandering as a contributing factor to the erosion of U.S. democracy. The Economist Magazine publishes an annual report on the status of world democracies, which rates the U.S. merely 29th in the world and calls us, by name, a “flawed democracy”.  Historically, the report cites our Electoral College and gerrymandering as primary structural reasons for the low ranking. Incidentally, Canada is the sole “full democracy” in North America, as the US continues to languish as a “flawed democracy”, the classification to which it was relegated in 2016, according to the report.