The most important elections in American politics are often the ones nobody watches. Every ten years, following the census, state legislatures across the country sit down with maps, demographic data, and increasingly sophisticated software to redraw the boundaries of congressional and legislative districts. The process is called redistricting. When it is done to entrench partisan advantage, it is called gerrymandering — and it has become perhaps the single most effective tool for predetermining electoral outcomes in the world's oldest continuous democracy.
The practice is named for Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts governor whose 1812 state senate map included a district so contorted it resembled a salamander. But the modern version would be unrecognizable to Gerry. Today's mapmakers have access to voter files, consumer data, and algorithms capable of testing millions of possible configurations to find the one that maximizes partisan advantage while maintaining the appearance of geographic coherence.
The mechanics of manipulation
Gerrymandering works through two complementary techniques. "Packing" concentrates opposition voters into a small number of districts, allowing them to win those seats by overwhelming margins while wasting their votes. "Cracking" disperses the remaining opposition voters across multiple districts, diluting their influence so they fall just short of a majority everywhere else. The result is a map where one party can win a substantial majority of seats while receiving a minority of total votes.
The effects are not subtle. In several states, legislative maps have produced outcomes where the party receiving fewer votes statewide nonetheless controls the chamber. Courts have occasionally intervened, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering, leaving the practice largely unchecked at the national level.
Why reform remains elusive
The fundamental obstacle to gerrymandering reform is that the people with the power to change the system are precisely those who benefit from it. Legislators who owe their seats to favorable maps have little incentive to create independent redistricting commissions or adopt neutral criteria. Some states have implemented reforms through ballot initiatives, bypassing the legislature entirely, but this option is not available everywhere.
There is also genuine disagreement about what fair maps would even look like. Should districts be compact? Should they preserve communities of interest? Should they ensure proportional representation? These criteria often conflict, and reasonable people disagree about which should take priority. Gerrymandering's defenders argue that some degree of political consideration is inevitable and that the alternative — unelected commissions making inherently political decisions — is no more democratic.
Our take
Gerrymandering is not a bug in American democracy; it is a feature that the system has never successfully eliminated. The practice predates the Constitution and has survived every reform movement aimed at it. This persistence suggests that the problem is structural rather than incidental — when you give partisan actors control over the rules of competition, they will use that control to entrench themselves. The question is not whether gerrymandering can be abolished but whether American democracy can function tolerably well despite it. The answer, so far, is a qualified yes, but the qualification grows more strained with each redistricting cycle.
