I Went to Vote in My City's Primary. My City Wasn't on the Ballot.
A few things changed around my voting practice within the last few years and at first it wasn't a big deal. First, my polling station changed from Gorton High School to the Nepperhan Community Center last election. A little inconvenient. Instead of walking down the street, now I had to walk a few blocks. That's OK! Democracy is worth it and I can get my steps in. But this year the changes that came with the redistricting of 2023 finally hit home. Since early voting started, I've been a fan. I'd spent weeks reading up on the candidates running for office here in Yonkers, and I was eager to cast my vote for the names I'd been hearing about for months.
Then I got the ballot. One race. State Comptroller. Huh?
None of the candidates I'd been following were on it. Confused, I asked the poll worker what was going on. That's when I found out I'm not in the 90th Assembly District, where most of the Yonkers races I'd been tracking are happening. I'm now in the 89th.
That surprised me, because when I looked on the map, the 89th District also includes Mount Vernon. I live on the Hudson River. Mount Vernon doesn't touch the Hudson. So what exactly do my neighborhood and Mount Vernon have in common, politically speaking?
I pulled up a map of the district lines. The 89th doesn't just border Mount Vernon, it wraps around the southwest edge of Yonkers, hugs the Bronx border, and stretches into Mount Vernon to connect the two.
This is what gerrymandering looks like on the ground.
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing legislative district lines to benefit one party, incumbent, or outcome, often by splitting up or combining communities in ways that dilute their voting power. It's frequently discussed in the abstract, as a national problem or a talking point in a civics class. But here's what it looks like in practice: a district line that takes a section of Southwest Yonkers, mostly home to communities of color, and merges it with a similar section of Mount Vernon, also mostly home to communities of color, rather than keeping it connected to the rest of Yonkers.
On paper, that might not raise red flags. Two cities, two diverse communities, combined into one district.
The harm shows up exactly the way it did for me: on primary day, standing in a booth, realizing the candidates running to represent my city aren't actually running to represent me. My vote for Assembly doesn't go toward shaping who speaks for Yonkers. It goes toward a seat shared with a different city's political conversation entirely.
Multiply that by however many residents along that stretch of Southwest Yonkers found themselves in the same position this primary season, and you start to see the actual cost of how these lines get drawn.