Time was, voting rights activists worried about old-fashioned gerrymandering, the practice of a political party that’s in power drawing up election districts to gain an edge in upcoming elections.
Now, though, activists are starting to worry about “entrenchment gerrymandering.” That’s when a political party manages to draw up voting districts so lopsidedly favorable to itself that even if the opposition scores a landslide victory in the popular vote on Election Day, the opposition still can’t win a majority of seats in a legislative body. Nor can the opposition get a chance to draw its own maps after the next Census.
That’s a serious problem for our democracy, which is supposed to respond to the concerns of the majority of voters, not the self-interest of politicians. But no one is stepping in as lawmakers across the country finagle ways to give themselves an edge, not even the U.S. Supreme Court. That has to change.
Gerrymandering has beset the voting process since then-Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 allowed redistricting to favor his party. But the increasingly scientific use of computers has made it much easier to draw a map that favors a particular party and undermines a representative vote.
Maps can make a big difference in how elections turn out. In 2022, for example, North Carolina Democrats and Republicans each won seven congressional seats in the 2022 midterms in a state that is roughly split between the parties. But after Republicans gained control of the state’s Supreme Court, they drew a new map that in 2024 could elect as many as 11 Republicans — and just three Democrats. In the future, even if Democrats win the most votes statewide in races for Congress, they are unlikely to win more than four of the 14 seats.
In Wisconsin, where the number of Democrat and Republican voters is roughly even, Republicans hold a 64-35 majority in the state’s Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate. That is expected to change after Democrats won a majority of seats on the state’s Supreme Court, which in December ordered new maps.
On a national level, gerrymandering by one party for congressional seats can offset gerrymandering by the other, as a 2023 Associated Press analysis found regarding the 2022 elections.
Even so, the damage done by gerrymandering is vast.
- As the Sun-Times’ Tina Sfondeles reported recently, remaps in Illinois keep the powerful in power; in this case, the Democrats, rather than Republicans, who have most often used gerrymandering to their advantage in other states.
- If voters belong to one party, they have little say in who represents them when the districts in which they live are dominated by the other party.
- Sometimes, districts are drawn up to be so one-sided that the party that didn’t draw the map doesn’t even field a candidate. Politicians, in effect, pick their voters, instead of voters picking their representatives.
- Gerrymandering favors politicians on the extreme left or right because they need only worry about the primary election, not the general election, where they will face only token opposition at most. That may contribute to the electorate becoming more polarized, said Shawn J. Donahue, an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo and an expert on gerrymandering.
- Voters in oddly shaped, elongated districts might find their priorities are not shared by other voters who live far from them.
If entrenchment gerrymandering takes over a state, “You are just locked potentially in a permanent or a long-term cycle until someone who is going to be kind of a referee says we are not going to allow this,” Donahue said.
That referee should be the U.S. Supreme Court, but in 2019 the court handed down a ruling that federal courts should not step in and rule on disputes over partisan gerrymandering. The court ought to revise that ruling in light of new mathematical systems that can independently show whether proposed maps are gerrymandered.
There is precedent: In 1964, the court stepped in to end an imbalance in which some districts had many times the number of voters as other districts. The reform is known as “one person, one vote.” And, although the court won’t referee disputes over political gerrymandering, it still will act on racial gerrymandering, as it did in Alabama in June.
Another option would be for all states to come together and agree to have legislative and congressional maps drawn by an independent commission, as eight states do now.
Politicians in most states are unlikely to walk away from gerrymandering unilaterally, fearing it could hand the opposition control over Congress.
But gerrymandering eats at the foundations of America’s democracy. It’s time to consign it to history, along with Elbridge Gerry.
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