On February 11, 1812, Elbridge Gerry — governor of Massachusetts, former delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and future vice president of the United States — signed a redistricting bill passed by the Democratic-Republican majority in the Massachusetts legislature. The bill redrew the state senate districts in ways that conspicuously favored the party. One district in particular, covering parts of Essex County, had been drawn into a contorted shape stretching from the coast inland through a series of sharp bends and elongations. The Boston Gazette ran a cartoon depicting the district with a dragon's head, claws, and wings, and labeled it the "Gerrymander" — combining Gerry's name with the salamander the shape resembled. Gerry had not drawn the map himself and reportedly found the whole affair embarrassing. His name became synonymous with the practice anyway.
Two hundred and twelve years later, the practice Gerry reluctantly signed into law has been transformed by computational technology into something almost unrecognizable to its 19th-century practitioners. Software that can model the voting behavior of every census block, optimize district boundaries to fractions of a street, and run millions of simulated electoral outcomes has turned a crude art into a precise science. The REDMAP project — a Republican State Leadership Committee initiative that targeted state legislative races in 2010 to control post-Census redistricting — demonstrated what was possible: by flipping control of key state legislatures in a single election, a party could lock in structural advantages in congressional representation for an entire decade. Democrats received roughly 1.4 million more votes than Republicans in 2012 House elections nationally; Republicans won 33 more seats.
The Supreme Court acknowledged in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is "unjust" and "incompatible with democratic principles." In the same opinion, the Court concluded it was powerless to do anything about it. Justice Elena Kagan's dissent called the majority's reasoning a betrayal of voters trapped in a "rigged election" system. The tension between those two positions — that something is both unjust and beyond remedy — defines where the issue stands today.
"Voters are not meant to choose their representatives. With modern gerrymandering, representatives choose their voters — and they make that choice once a decade, with effects that compound over elections, careers, and legislative majorities." — Nate Persily, Solutions to Political Polarization in America (2015)
Key Definitions
Gerrymandering — The manipulation of electoral district boundaries to produce a partisan, racial, or other advantage for one group over another. Named for Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.
Redistricting — The process of redrawing electoral district boundaries, required after each decennial US Census to account for population shifts and maintain the constitutional requirement of roughly equal population per district.
Single-member plurality (SMP) — An electoral system in which each district elects one representative, and the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they received a majority. The United States House of Representatives uses this system. SMP systems are particularly susceptible to gerrymandering because the winner-take-all structure means that the arrangement of voters across districts directly determines the translation of votes into seats.
Packing — Drawing districts that concentrate the opposing party's voters into as few districts as possible, causing them to win those districts by enormous margins but reducing the number of districts they can win.
Cracking — Dividing the opposing party's voters across multiple districts in numbers insufficient to win any of them, wasting their votes as consistent minorities.
Efficiency gap — A mathematical measure of partisan gerrymandering developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, calculated as the difference in wasted votes between two parties divided by total votes cast. Wasted votes are all votes cast for the losing candidate plus all votes above the winning threshold cast for the winner.
REDMAP — The Republican State Leadership Committee's "Redistricting Majority Project," a multi-cycle initiative targeting state legislative elections in 2010 to control post-Census redistricting in key states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Independent redistricting commission (IRC) — A body established outside the state legislature to draw electoral maps, typically with requirements for partisan balance among members and criteria prioritizing neutral principles over partisan outcomes.
Voting Rights Act (VRA) — Federal legislation originally passed in 1965 that prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits drawing district maps that dilute the voting power of racial minority groups.
Political question doctrine — A constitutional principle under which federal courts decline to adjudicate certain disputes because they involve questions the Constitution commits to the political branches to resolve. The Supreme Court applied this doctrine to partisan gerrymandering claims in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).
How Redistricting Works
The US Constitution requires that seats in the House of Representatives be apportioned among states based on population, counted by the decennial Census. After each Census, states must redraw their congressional district boundaries to reflect population changes and maintain roughly equal district populations. States also redraw their own state legislative districts, which affect state elections but follow similar principles.
In most states, the state legislature draws both congressional and state legislative maps, subject to the governor's signature. This means the party controlling both chambers of the legislature — and ideally the governor's office — after a Census year controls the maps for the next decade. The asymmetric importance of "Census year" elections — those ending in zero — is well understood by both parties. REDMAP explicitly targeted 2010 state legislative races for this reason.
Some states have reformed this process. Several use independent or bipartisan commissions for congressional redistricting (California, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia) or advisory commissions whose recommendations the legislature must explicitly override. A smaller number of states use commissions for state legislative redistricting. Iowa uses a nonpartisan legislative staff agency that draws maps using population data without partisan information.
Any redistricting plan must comply with several legal requirements. Districts must be roughly equal in population (the principle of "one person, one vote," derived from Reynolds v. Sims (1964)). Districts must comply with the Voting Rights Act — they cannot be drawn to dilute minority voting power, and in some circumstances they must be drawn to give minority communities an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Districts must not unconstitutionally use race as the predominant factor in drawing boundaries, even with remedial intent (Shaw v. Reno, 1993).
Within these constraints, state law may require contiguity (districts must be geographically connected), compactness, and preservation of political subdivisions such as counties and municipalities. These requirements create real constraints but leave substantial room for manipulation, particularly in large, populous states.
Partisan Gerrymandering: Packing, Cracking, and the Math of Wasted Votes
The geometry of partisan gerrymandering has a simple logic, though its execution involves considerable complexity.
Suppose a state has ten congressional districts and that 45 percent of its voters reliably vote Democratic, 55 percent reliably Republican. Under a neutral proportional system, the state might elect roughly five Democrats and five Republicans. Under a gerrymandered map, the same vote distribution can be arranged to produce eight Republican seats and two Democratic seats — or more.
The mechanism: Republican mapmakers pack Democratic voters into two districts where Democrats win 80-15 percent. The remaining eight districts have Democratic voters cracked and dispersed so they constitute roughly 35 percent of each district's voters — enough to be competitive, but not enough to win. Republicans win each of those eight districts by comfortable margins. Two districts worth of Democratic voters, concentrated by packing, produce two Democratic seats. Eight districts worth of dispersed Democratic voters produce zero Democratic seats.
The Wisconsin Case
The 2011 redistricting in Wisconsin, conducted by a Republican legislature under Republican Governor Scott Walker, produced one of the most studied partisan gerrymanders in American history. Republican operatives worked with consultants and lawyers in a rented private office — to maintain attorney-client privilege — to draw maps using detailed voter data. Internal documents, obtained through litigation, showed drafts labeled "Aggressive" and communications discussing how to maximize Republican advantage across a range of electoral conditions.
The resulting maps were remarkably durable: in 2012, Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide assembly vote but only 39 of 99 assembly seats. In 2018, Democrats won 54 percent of the statewide assembly vote and 36 seats. The structural advantage held regardless of how voters actually voted.
The Wisconsin case produced the major federal partisan gerrymandering challenge of the era: Gill v. Whitford (2018). The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the plaintiffs' claims on standing grounds — the plaintiffs had only shown harm at the statewide level, not at the district level — without reaching the merits. Two years later, Rucho v. Common Cause ended federal court jurisdiction over partisan gerrymandering entirely.
Racial Gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act
Racial gerrymandering — drawing district lines to dilute the voting power of racial minorities — has a long history in the United States and remains subject to federal court challenge, unlike partisan gerrymandering.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited practices that discriminated on the basis of race in voting. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits any voting practice that results in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race. Under Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), courts apply a three-part test: the minority group must be large enough and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a single-member district; it must be politically cohesive; and the white majority must vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority's preferred candidates. If all three conditions are met, the failure to draw a majority-minority district may violate the VRA.
The court's jurisprudence on racial gerrymandering has been complex and sometimes contradictory. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Supreme Court held that districts drawn predominantly by race to be "bizarre" in shape could be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause — meaning that drawing majority-minority districts too aggressively could also be unconstitutional. The result is a narrow corridor within which mapmakers must operate: they may not dilute minority voting power (VRA Section 2), but they also may not make race the predominant factor in drawing district lines without satisfying strict scrutiny (Shaw v. Reno and its progeny).
In practice, racial and partisan gerrymandering are often intertwined. In the American South, Black voters vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so packing Black voters into a few districts (racial gerrymandering) and cracking them across others serves partisan purposes simultaneously. Courts have sometimes struggled to determine which motivation dominated in a given map.
The Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder struck down the coverage formula for the VRA's preclearance provision — which had required states with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws — significantly weakening the tool that had been most effective in blocking discriminatory redistricting in the South.
Measuring the Harm: Mathematical Tools
The core challenge of gerrymandering litigation is demonstrating that a map's partisan effects exceed what geography and neutral criteria would produce. Several mathematical tools have been developed for this purpose.
The Efficiency Gap
Developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos of Harvard Law School and political scientist Eric McGhee, the efficiency gap measures the difference in wasted votes between parties divided by total votes cast. A wasted vote is any vote that did not contribute to electing a representative: all votes for losing candidates, and all votes above 50 percent plus one for winning candidates. If one party wastes far more votes than the other across all districts, the map has been arranged to be systematically inefficient for that party.
Stephanopoulos and McGhee argued that an efficiency gap above 7 percent in congressional maps was historically associated with durable partisan advantages. Critics noted that geographic clustering of Democratic voters in cities produces some efficiency gap even without intentional gerrymandering, and that the efficiency gap can be influenced by factors outside mapmakers' control.
Simulation-Based Analysis
The most robust approach to detecting gerrymandering uses Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to generate large numbers of alternative district maps that satisfy neutral legal criteria — equal population, compactness, Voting Rights Act compliance, preservation of municipal boundaries — without using partisan data. The enacted map is then compared to this distribution of simulated neutral alternatives. If the enacted map produces partisan results that are more extreme than 99.9 percent of neutrally drawn alternatives, this provides strong statistical evidence that the map was deliberately designed to achieve partisan advantage beyond what neutral criteria would produce.
This approach was used effectively in Pennsylvania litigation. Expert analysis showed that the Republican-drawn 2011 congressional map produced Republican outcomes more extreme than any of 1,000 neutrally drawn simulated maps. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the map under the state constitution in 2018.
The Supreme Court's Retreat: Rucho v. Common Cause
In June 2019, the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, consolidating challenges to congressional maps in North Carolina (drawn by Republicans) and Maryland (drawn by Democrats). Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, acknowledged that "excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust." He concluded nonetheless that "federal courts are not equipped to apportion political power as a matter of fairness."
The majority held that partisan gerrymandering claims present a "political question" — a category of disputes the Constitution commits to the political branches rather than the courts. Because there is no "judicially manageable standard" for determining how much partisan advantage is too much, federal courts cannot resolve such claims.
Justice Kagan's dissent was pointed. She argued that the majority was leaving "millions of Americans with no legal recourse" and that the mathematical tools developed by plaintiffs — efficiency gaps, simulation analyses, mean-median differences — did provide manageable standards. She analogized the majority's position to "a judge abdicating the judicial role" and suggested that the Court would not apply the same reasoning to other constitutional violations merely because measuring them required quantitative analysis.
After Rucho, partisan gerrymandering challenges must proceed through state courts applying state constitutional provisions. Several state constitutions have provisions about free and fair elections, equality of voting rights, or the separation of powers that state courts have interpreted to prohibit partisan gerrymandering. This avenue is available but inconsistent: its success depends on state court composition, which is itself affected by elections conducted under gerrymandered maps.
Reform: Commissions, Algorithms, and Electoral Systems
Independent Redistricting Commissions
The most widely adopted reform approach is the independent redistricting commission. Arizona's commission, established by Proposition 106 in 2000, consists of two Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent chosen by the other four members from a list screened by the state's Appellate Court Commission on Appointments. Members cannot be elected officials, political appointees, or lobbyists, and must not have held partisan office within three years of appointment.
California's Citizens Redistricting Commission, created by Proposition 11 in 2008 and extended to congressional districts by Proposition 20 in 2010, has 14 members — five Democrats, five Republicans, and four others. Michigan's Voters Not Politicians commission, established by Proposal 2 in 2018 after a campaign led by political novice Katie Fahey, uses a random selection process from a pool of screened applicants.
The evidence on commission-drawn maps is generally positive. Studies comparing commission-drawn and legislature-drawn maps find that commissions produce more competitive districts, less extreme partisan bias, and maps that better reflect statewide vote shares in seat outcomes. Commissions are not immune to partisan dynamics — their members are not robots, and criteria can be interpreted in partisan ways — but they represent a substantial improvement over direct legislative control.
International Comparisons
The American approach to redistricting is unusual among democracies. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all use independent boundary commissions that draw maps based on neutral criteria without partisan input from legislators. These systems substantially eliminate strategic mapmaking, though they still produce winner-take-all district systems that can translate votes into seats non-proportionally.
Germany's mixed-member proportional system provides an alternative framework: voters cast two votes, one for a local constituency representative and one for a party list. The party list votes are used to make total seat allocation proportional to overall vote share, with constituency winners counted toward each party's total. This system makes gerrymandering much less consequential, because the proportional component corrects for any distortions in constituency outcomes.
Algorithmic Redistricting
Some reformers have proposed using computer algorithms to draw district maps automatically based on neutral criteria — population equality, compactness, contiguity, and Voting Rights Act compliance — without human judgment. In principle this approach would eliminate conscious manipulation. In practice, the choice of criteria and their weights involves normative judgments that algorithmic automation does not eliminate. What "compactness" means, how to weight municipal boundary preservation against compactness, and how aggressively to draw majority-minority districts all involve choices that embed values. Algorithmic redistricting is a useful tool for generating alternative maps and establishing benchmarks, but it does not remove human judgment from the process — it relocates it to the design of the algorithm.
For a broader treatment of how democratic institutions function and fail, see how democracy works and why democracies fail. For historical context on the racial dimensions of voting rights, see what caused the civil rights movement.
Consequences for Representation and Policy
The effects of gerrymandering extend beyond the immediate question of which party controls the legislature.
Polarization: Safe seats insulate incumbents from general election competition. A representative whose district has been packed with co-partisans faces no meaningful threat from the other party. Their only competitive election is the primary, which tends to be decided by smaller, more ideologically motivated electorates. This creates incentives to appeal to the party base rather than the center, contributing to the ideological sorting and polarization that political scientists have documented in congressional voting behavior since the 1990s. Research by political scientists including Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein documents the relationship between partisan mapmaking and extreme voting records among members of Congress.
Responsiveness: Representatives in gerrymandered safe seats are less dependent on the full range of their constituents' views. If 65 percent of a district's voters will vote for the incumbent regardless of what they do, the representative's behavior is less constrained by electoral accountability. Studies have found that representatives in more competitive districts are more responsive to district-level opinion shifts than those in heavily gerrymandered seats.
Entrenchment: A party controlling a legislative majority has power over the next redistricting, which shapes the electoral map for the next decade, which influences which party controls the legislature after the next election, which shapes the redistricting after that. This self-reinforcing cycle means that breaking a gerrymander often requires winning elections under maps drawn to make winning very difficult — an asymmetric challenge that can perpetuate minority-party control of a majority of seats across multiple election cycles.
References
- Chen, J., & Rodden, J. (2013). Unintentional gerrymandering: Political geography and electoral bias in legislatures. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 8(3), 239-269. https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00012033
- Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ___ (2018).
- Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019).
- Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993).
- Stephanopoulos, N. O., & McGhee, E. M. (2015). Partisan gerrymandering and the efficiency gap. University of Chicago Law Review, 82(2), 831-900.
- Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986).
- Wang, S. S.-H. (2016). Three tests for practical evaluation of partisan gerrymandering. Stanford Law Review, 68(6), 1263-1321.
- McGhee, E. (2020). Partisan gerrymandering and political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 171-185. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-060118-045346
Frequently Asked Questions
What is gerrymandering and how does it work?
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district boundaries in ways that systematically advantage one political party or group at the expense of others. The term combines 'Gerry' — after Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor who signed a notably shaped redistricting plan in 1812 — with 'salamander,' the animal that political cartoonists thought the resulting district resembled.In a winner-take-all (single-member plurality) electoral system like the United States House of Representatives, how you draw district lines has an enormous effect on outcomes. Because each district elects one representative by plurality, you need only win a majority of votes within each district — not a majority of all votes. This creates an opportunity for the party controlling the mapmaking process to arrange voters into districts in ways that systematically produce more seats than their statewide vote share would otherwise predict.Redistricting — the process of redrawing district lines — occurs after each decennial Census, when population shifts require districts to be redrawn to maintain roughly equal population. In most US states, the state legislature draws district maps for both state legislative seats and congressional seats. The legislature typically passes maps along party-line votes, meaning whichever party controls the legislature after a Census year controls the map for the next decade. This is why control of state legislatures in the year ending in zero (2010, 2020) is considered extraordinarily consequential — it determines who draws the maps that govern elections for the following decade.The effects can be substantial. In the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Democrats won 51 percent of the statewide congressional vote but only 5 of 18 congressional seats, because Republican mapmakers had drawn districts that packed Democratic voters into a few safe seats while cracking Democratic-leaning communities across many districts the Republicans won narrowly.
What is packing and cracking?
Packing and cracking are the two fundamental techniques of partisan gerrymandering, and understanding them reveals the core logic of how maps can translate votes into seats asymmetrically.Packing means concentrating as many of the opposing party's voters as possible into a small number of districts. This produces districts where the opposing party wins by enormous margins — 80 or 90 percent — 'wasting' all their votes above 50 percent plus one. If the opposing party's voters are packed into two districts, they win those two seats by enormous margins, but their votes above the threshold are effectively irrelevant to the outcome.Cracking means splitting the opposing party's voters across multiple districts in numbers too small to win any of them. A community that is 45 percent opposition-leaning is split into three different districts, each of which has the opposition at about 30 percent — never enough to win. Those votes are 'wasted' in the sense that they consistently produce losing results.The combination — packing some opposition voters into a few lopsided districts and cracking the rest across many losing districts — minimizes the number of seats the opposition wins. It produces a situation where the gerrymanding party wins many districts by comfortable but not enormous margins (say, 55-45), while the opposition wins a few by enormous margins (80-20) or loses many narrowly (45-55).The efficiency gap, developed by law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Eric McGhee in 2015, formalizes this intuition: it measures the difference in wasted votes between the two parties as a fraction of total votes cast. A large efficiency gap favoring one party is evidence that the map has been drawn to waste the other party's votes systematically. Critics note that the efficiency gap can be influenced by factors other than intentional gerrymandering, including the geographic clustering of partisan voters.
How do you measure gerrymandering?
Measuring gerrymandering is harder than it might appear, because partisan advantage in maps can arise from intentional manipulation or from the natural geographic distribution of voters. Democratic voters tend to cluster in cities; Republicans are more evenly distributed across suburbs and rural areas. This geographic pattern produces some Democratic disadvantage in winner-take-all district systems even without intentional gerrymandering.Researchers have developed multiple metrics to distinguish intentional manipulation from geographic sorting. The efficiency gap, described above, measures asymmetry in wasted votes. The mean-median difference compares the average district vote share to the median district vote share: in a symmetric distribution, these should be equal; a large gap suggests the map has been drawn to give one party an advantage that persists across a wide range of electoral outcomes.The partisan bias metric measures how many more seats a party would win than its opponent if they each got 50 percent of the statewide vote — a hypothetical that isolates the map's structural tilt from election-to-election vote fluctuations.Geometric measures of compactness — including the Polsby-Popper score (the ratio of the district's area to the area of a circle with the same perimeter) and the convex hull score — attempt to detect oddly shaped districts that might reflect manipulation. However, oddly shaped districts are not necessarily gerrymandered (they may follow natural or municipal boundaries), and compact districts can still be severely gerrymandered if voters are carefully sorted into them.The most powerful approach uses computational simulation: generating thousands or millions of alternative maps subject to neutral criteria (equal population, compactness, compliance with the Voting Rights Act, respect for municipal boundaries), and then asking whether the enacted map produces partisan outcomes that are extreme relative to this distribution of plausible alternatives. If the enacted map produces more Republican seats than 99.9 percent of simulated neutral alternatives, that is strong evidence of intentional manipulation. Courts have begun to accept simulation-based evidence in redistricting cases.
Why don't courts stop partisan gerrymandering?
For decades, federal courts heard claims that severely partisan gerrymanders violated the Constitution, with varying results. In 2019, the Supreme Court ended this era of federal oversight with its 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that federal courts have no authority to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims — that such claims present a 'political question' that federal courts cannot resolve because there is no 'judicially manageable standard' for determining when partisanship in mapmaking crosses a constitutional line.Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering is 'unjust' and produces maps that are 'incompatible with democratic principles.' The majority nonetheless concluded that federal courts lack the tools to remedy the problem, because any intervention would require federal judges to define an acceptable level of partisanship in redistricting — a task the Court deemed inherently political.Justice Kagan's dissent argued forcefully that the majority was abandoning voters to a system of 'rigged elections' and that the efficiency gap and other mathematical tools did provide manageable standards. She argued that the Court was in the paradoxical position of refusing to enforce democratic norms on the grounds that doing so would be too political.The Rucho decision left partisan gerrymandering claims to state courts applying state constitutional provisions. Several state supreme courts have struck down gerrymanders under state constitutional grounds — North Carolina's supreme court, for instance, initially struck down its map as violating the state constitution, though a change in the court's partisan composition later led to reversal of that decision. Pennsylvania's supreme court struck down the state's congressional map in 2018. The state court avenue remains available but varies enormously by state.Racial gerrymandering — drawing districts to dilute the voting power of racial minorities — remains subject to federal court challenge under the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. But racial and partisan gerrymandering have become intertwined in ways that courts have struggled to disentangle, since racial and partisan identity are correlated in many parts of the country.
What are independent redistricting commissions?
Independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) are bodies that draw electoral maps outside of the partisan legislative process. The rationale is simple: elected officials who benefit from rigged maps should not draw those maps. Commissions with criteria-based mandates and insulation from legislative control can draw maps that more fairly represent voters.Designs vary considerably. Arizona established an independent redistricting commission by ballot initiative in 2000, with five members (two Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent chosen by the other four from a pool screened for conflicts of interest). Arizona's commission drew maps for its state legislative and congressional districts for the 2002-2010 and 2012-2020 cycles. The Supreme Court upheld the commission's authority to draw congressional maps in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), ruling 5-4 that ballot initiative processes constitute valid exercises of the state's authority to regulate elections.California established a Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008 for state legislative districts (extended to congressional districts by a 2010 ballot initiative). The commission consists of 14 members — five Democrats, five Republicans, and four from neither major party — screened to exclude politicians, lobbyists, and political consultants.Michigan's experience illustrates the citizen-led reform path. After Republican mapmakers drew maps in 2011 that a federal judge later said were drawn 'with the intent to subordinate the interests of Democratic voters,' Michigan voters approved Proposal 2 in 2018 — the Voters Not Politicians initiative — establishing an independent citizens commission by a 61-39 percent margin. The commission drew the maps used in the 2022 elections, which produced a congressional delegation more proportional to statewide party vote shares.Commissions are not a perfect solution — they face pressure, their members are not immune to partisan motivation, and their maps must still comply with legal requirements that can themselves be contested. But the evidence suggests they produce significantly more competitive and proportional maps than legislatively drawn districts.
How does gerrymandering affect democracy?
Gerrymandering has several well-documented effects on democratic representation and governance, beyond the immediate outcome of giving one party more seats than its vote share would produce.The most direct effect is on representational fairness. When a party wins a significant majority of legislative seats on a minority of votes — a situation that can persist for an entire decade regardless of how voters' preferences shift — the basic relationship between electoral outcomes and representation is severed. Legislators feel less accountable to the full range of constituents in their state because their districts are drawn to be safe.Safe seats contribute to political polarization. A representative in a heavily gerrymandered safe district faces no meaningful threat from the other party. Their primary election — often won by a small number of the most ideologically motivated voters — becomes the only real competitive election they face. This creates incentives to appeal to the party base rather than to moderate or cross-partisan voters, contributing to the drift of both parties toward their extremes that political scientists have documented in congressional voting records over recent decades.Gerrymandering also affects policy responsiveness. Research by political scientists suggests that legislators in competitive districts are more responsive to median voter preferences than those in safe districts. If most districts are uncompetitive by design, policy outcomes may diverge more from the preferences of the median voter — a measure of democratic responsiveness.Finally, gerrymandering can entrench itself: a party that controls the map controls which politicians are elected, who in turn control the map after the next Census. Breaking this cycle requires either a wave election large enough to overcome the structural disadvantage — which some political scientists estimate would require a double-digit national margin to flip control — or reform through ballot initiative in states where that option exists.