Every decade, after the census, American democracy undergoes a ritual that determines more outcomes than any campaign ad or debate performance: the redrawing of legislative district boundaries. This process, called redistricting, is constitutionally required. Gerrymandering—the manipulation of those boundaries for partisan advantage—is not. Yet the two have become so intertwined that the distinction barely matters anymore.
The term itself dates to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a district so contorted it resembled a salamander. But the modern practice bears little resemblance to that crude cartography. Today's gerrymanders are precision instruments, engineered with voter-file data, demographic projections, and algorithms that can test millions of possible maps in hours.
The two techniques
Gerrymandering relies on two complementary strategies: packing and cracking. Packing concentrates opposition voters into as few districts as possible, ensuring they win those seats by overwhelming margins while wasting their numerical strength elsewhere. Cracking disperses the remaining opposition voters across multiple districts, diluting their influence so they fall just short of a majority everywhere.
Consider a hypothetical state with ten districts and a population split 60-40 between two parties. A neutral map might produce six seats for the majority and four for the minority. A skilled gerrymander can flip that to eight-two or even nine-one, depending on how efficiently voters are distributed. The majority party doesn't need more votes; it needs better cartography.
The sophistication of modern gerrymandering makes detection surprisingly difficult. Courts have struggled to define a standard for when partisan line-drawing becomes unconstitutional. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts have no jurisdiction over partisan gerrymandering claims, calling them "political questions" beyond judicial competence. The decision effectively outsourced the problem to state courts and legislatures—the very bodies most likely to benefit from the practice.
Why reform keeps failing
Independent redistricting commissions have emerged as the reformers' preferred solution. States like California, Arizona, and Colorado have adopted them with varying degrees of success. But commissions are only as independent as their appointment processes, and partisan actors have proven adept at gaming supposedly neutral selection mechanisms.
The deeper problem is structural. Whichever party controls a state legislature during a redistricting year controls the maps for the next decade. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: gerrymandered maps produce lopsided legislatures, which then draw even more aggressive maps after the next census. Breaking the cycle requires the party in power to voluntarily surrender an advantage it spent years acquiring.
Some mathematicians and political scientists have proposed algorithmic redistricting, using computer programs to draw compact, contiguous districts without partisan input. But algorithms require objective functions, and every choice about what to optimize—compactness, competitiveness, community preservation—embeds a political judgment. There is no view from nowhere.
Our take
Gerrymandering persists because it works, and it works because the people empowered to stop it are the same people it benefits. The Supreme Court's abdication in Rucho was intellectually coherent but practically disastrous, leaving American democracy's most fundamental process—who gets to choose their representatives—to the tender mercies of those representatives themselves. Until voters in enough states demand independent commissions through ballot initiatives, bypassing legislatures entirely, the geometry of power will continue to be drawn by those who already hold it.
