Editing Gerrymandering (section)

===Using fixed districts===
Another way to avoid gerrymandering is simply to stop redistricting altogether and use existing political boundaries such as state, county, or provincial lines. While this prevents future gerrymandering, any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained. The [[United States Senate]], for instance, has more competitive elections than the House of Representatives due to the use of existing state borders rather than gerrymandered districts—Senators are elected by their entire state, while Representatives are elected in legislatively drawn districts.

The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however, in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in population. Individual voters can come to have very different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This [[malapportionment]] can greatly affect representation after long periods of time or large population movements. In the [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|United Kingdom]] during the [[Industrial Revolution]], several constituencies that had been fixed since they gained representation in the [[Parliament of England]] became so small that they could be won with only a handful of voters (''[[rotten borough]]s''). Similarly, in the U.S. the [[Alabama Legislature]] refused to redistrict for more than 60 years, despite major changes in population patterns. By 1960 less than a quarter of the state's population controlled the majority of seats in the legislature.<ref>Dr. Michael McDonald, U.S. Elections Project: Alabama Redistricting Summary [http://elections.gmu.edu/Redistricting/AL.htm Dept. of Public and International Affairs George Mason University]. Retrieved 6 April 2008. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080624024455/http://elections.gmu.edu/Redistricting/AL.htm|date=24 June 2008}}</ref> This practice of using fixed districts for state legislatures was effectively banned in the United States after the ''[[Reynolds v. Sims]]'' Supreme Court decision in 1964, establishing a rule of [[one man, one vote]].