Gerrymandering in the United States
Based on Wikipedia: Gerrymandering in the United States
The Salamander That Ate American Democracy
In 1812, a Boston newspaper published a cartoon that would give a name to one of democracy's oldest tricks. The image showed a grotesque creature with dragon wings, sharp claws, and a serpentine body. It wasn't fantasy—it was a map of a Massachusetts voting district, twisted into such an unnatural shape that it resembled a salamander. The district had been drawn under Governor Elbridge Gerry, and a clever editor mashed the names together: Gerry-mander.
The word stuck. Two centuries later, gerrymandering remains one of the most powerful and controversial tools in American politics.
Here's the basic idea: every ten years, after the census counts the population, states must redraw the boundaries of their voting districts. Each district should contain roughly the same number of people, ensuring that every vote carries equal weight. In theory, this is a neutral administrative task. In practice, it's a blood sport.
The party that controls the mapmaking can essentially choose its own voters. By drawing district lines strategically, politicians can make it nearly impossible for their opponents to win—even when those opponents represent a majority of the population.
How the Game Is Played
Gerrymandering relies on two main techniques, and their names are wonderfully descriptive: packing and cracking.
Packing means cramming as many of your opponents' voters as possible into a small number of districts. Imagine a state with ten districts and a population that's sixty percent Republican, forty percent Democratic. Under fair maps, you might expect Democrats to win about four districts. But if you pack Democratic voters into just two districts—both of which they win by enormous margins—you've "wasted" thousands of Democratic votes. Those landslide victories don't translate into additional seats. Meanwhile, Republicans can spread their voters efficiently across the remaining eight districts, winning each by comfortable but not wasteful margins.
Cracking is the opposite strategy. Instead of concentrating your opponents, you dilute them. Split a Democratic neighborhood across three different districts, and suddenly they're a minority in each one. Their votes still count, technically. But they never add up to a win.
The most effective gerrymanders use both techniques simultaneously, packing some opposition voters while cracking others.
The Frank Mascara Problem
Sometimes gerrymandering gets personal.
Frank Mascara was a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, first elected in 1994. When Republicans redrew the state's maps in 2002, they didn't just reshape his district—they surgically removed him from it. The new boundary lines formed a narrow finger that extended precisely to include Mascara's house but excluded the spot where he parked his car.
This wasn't an accident. It was a technique called "kidnapping" or "hijacking"—redrawing boundaries to force an incumbent into a district where they can't win. Mascara found himself pitted against a fellow Democrat, John Murtha, in a primary he was designed to lose.
He lost.
The Computer Revolution
For most of American history, gerrymandering was an art. Mapmakers needed local knowledge, political instincts, and a lot of colored pencils. They could create unfair maps, but the process was laborious and imprecise.
Then computers changed everything.
Modern gerrymandering is a science. Geographic information systems can process census data, voting histories, and demographic information down to the individual household. Algorithms can generate thousands of possible maps and evaluate each one for partisan advantage. What once took months of negotiation now takes hours of processing.
The result is maps of unprecedented precision. Districts snake through neighborhoods, splitting apartment buildings from the houses across the street. They follow rivers for miles, then suddenly leap to capture a specific precinct. They create shapes that would make Elbridge Gerry's salamander look positively normal.
A study from the University of Delaware documented how these techniques can calculate exactly which voters to move between districts to flip outcomes. The software can identify the minimum number of changes needed to guarantee a desired result—not just for one election, but for a decade of elections, across a range of possible political shifts.
Three Flavors of Manipulation
Not all gerrymandering looks the same. American courts and politicians generally recognize three distinct varieties, each with different legal status and moral implications.
Partisan Gerrymandering
This is the classic form: drawing maps to benefit one political party over another. Republicans do it. Democrats do it. Whoever controls the mapmaking process tends to use that power to entrench their own advantage.
The most systematic recent example was REDMAP—the Redistricting Majority Project. In 2010, the Republican Party recognized that whoever won state legislatures that year would control redistricting after the census. They invested heavily in state races, won big, and then used their new power to draw maps that locked in Republican majorities for the next decade.
The results were stark. In Wisconsin's 2018 elections, Democrats won every statewide office and a majority of the total votes cast for state assembly candidates. They won thirty-six of ninety-nine assembly seats. The maps had been drawn so effectively that even a significant Democratic wave couldn't overcome the structural disadvantage.
Bipartisan Gerrymandering
Sometimes the two parties cooperate—not to compete, but to protect their own incumbents. In a bipartisan gerrymander, mapmakers from both sides agree to create "safe" districts where sitting representatives face no real challenge.
This sounds less sinister than partisan gerrymandering, but it has its own corrosive effects. When general elections are foregone conclusions, the only real competition happens in party primaries. Primaries tend to attract more ideologically extreme voters, pushing candidates toward the fringes. The result is a legislature full of people who never have to appeal to moderate voters or compromise across party lines.
Racial Gerrymandering
This is where gerrymandering intersects with America's long struggle over civil rights.
Racial gerrymandering can work in two directions. Historically, white-dominated legislatures used it to dilute Black voting power—cracking African American communities across multiple districts so they could never elect representatives of their choice. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to combat these practices.
But racial gerrymandering can also be used to concentrate minority voters, creating "majority-minority" districts where communities of color can reliably elect their preferred candidates. This seems beneficial, but it's complicated. Packing minority voters into a few districts can actually reduce their overall influence, leaving surrounding districts whiter and more conservative.
In Ohio, Republican officials were caught on tape discussing how to use race in their redistricting. They removed approximately 13,000 African American voters from one district specifically because Black voters had supported Democratic candidates. The goal was openly partisan, but the method was explicitly racial.
The Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Johnson in 1995 that racial gerrymandering violates the Constitution—but only when race is the "predominant factor" in drawing district lines. If mapmakers can claim they were motivated by partisanship rather than race, the maps may survive legal challenge. This creates a perverse incentive: partisan gerrymandering provides legal cover for racial gerrymandering.
What the Courts Have Said
The Supreme Court has spent decades struggling with gerrymandering, issuing rulings that often seem contradictory.
The story begins in 1962 with Baker v. Carr. For the first time, the Court ruled that federal courts could review state redistricting decisions. Previously, courts had considered redistricting a "political question" beyond their authority. Baker opened the courthouse doors.
Through the 1960s, the Court established the principle of "one person, one vote"—districts must contain roughly equal populations. This ended the practice of leaving district lines unchanged for decades while population shifted to cities, which had given rural areas vastly disproportionate representation.
But population equality is a necessary condition for fair maps, not a sufficient one. Two districts can have identical populations while being gerrymandered beyond recognition. The Court has repeatedly tried—and largely failed—to establish standards for when partisan gerrymandering goes too far.
In 2004, Vieth v. Jubelirer produced a fractured decision. Four justices wanted to declare partisan gerrymandering claims non-justiciable—meaning courts simply couldn't address them. Four justices disagreed. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, agreed that no manageable standard had been proposed but left open the possibility that one might emerge in the future.
Kennedy never found his standard. In 2018, Gill v. Whitford gave the Court another chance to rule on Wisconsin's aggressively gerrymandered maps. The justices punted on procedural grounds, sending the case back to lower courts without deciding the core question.
Then came Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019.
By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering to be a political question after all. Federal courts would no longer review these claims, no matter how extreme the manipulation. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, acknowledged that "excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust." But he concluded that courts couldn't fix it.
The decision effectively gave state legislatures a green light. If you control the mapmaking, you can draw districts as unfairly as you want, and federal courts won't intervene.
The States Push Back
With federal courts out of the picture, the battle has shifted to state courts and state constitutions.
Several state supreme courts have ruled that partisan gerrymandering violates their state constitutions, even if federal courts won't touch it. Pennsylvania's court threw out the state's congressional map in 2018. North Carolina's court did the same in 2019.
Voters have also taken matters into their own hands. Ballot initiatives in several states have created independent redistricting commissions, taking the mapmaking power away from legislators with obvious conflicts of interest. These commissions vary in their structure and effectiveness, but they represent an attempt to depoliticize a fundamentally political process.
The results are mixed. Some commissions have produced fairer maps. Others have been captured by partisan interests despite their nominally independent structure. And in states without these reforms, gerrymandering continues unabated.
The 2020s: A New Era of Manipulation
The redistricting cycle following the 2020 census was the first conducted entirely under the Rucho ruling. Without federal court oversight, some states pushed boundaries further than ever before.
In August 2025, Texas Republicans passed a mid-decade redistricting—a relatively rare move, since states typically only redraw maps after each census. The new maps were designed to give Republicans thirty of the state's thirty-eight congressional seats, gerrymandering Democratic strongholds in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas.
Republicans argued they were engaged in purely partisan gerrymandering, which Rucho permits. Democrats countered that the maps constituted racial gerrymandering, which remains unconstitutional. Texas is a majority-minority state; it's nearly impossible to draw partisan maps there without also affecting racial representation.
The Texas move triggered a response. Democratic-controlled states including California, Illinois, and New York announced they would consider their own mid-decade redistricting to add Democratic seats. What had been an occasional tactic threatened to become standard practice—a perpetual redistricting war where maps change whenever one party gains temporary control of a state government.
As of late 2025, analysts projected that maps likely to be in place for the 2026 elections would create nine additional Republican seats while eliminating four Democratic seats and five competitive districts. The competitive districts are particularly significant: they're the places where elections are actually contests rather than foregone conclusions.
The Deeper Problem
Gerrymandering is both a symptom and a cause of American political dysfunction.
It's a symptom because the practice only matters when politics is polarized enough that knowing someone's party affiliation tells you how they'll vote on most issues. In an era of ticket-splitting and independent voters, carefully drawn maps would constantly be upended by actual elections. Gerrymandering works precisely because American voters have become so predictable.
It's a cause because safe districts eliminate accountability. When a Republican representative in a safely Republican district never faces a competitive general election, they have no incentive to appeal to Democratic voters or even moderate Republicans. Their only political threat comes from their right flank in a primary challenge. The same dynamic pushes Democrats in safe Democratic districts to the left.
The result is a Congress full of members who have every reason to be uncompromising and no reason to seek common ground. Gerrymandering didn't create polarization, but it amplifies and entrenches it.
International Observers Take Notice
When the United States sends election observers to other countries, they look for signs of manipulation: incumbent advantage, lack of genuine competition, voting systems designed to produce predetermined outcomes.
In 2004, international observers came to watch American elections. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—a group the U.S. helped found to monitor elections in formerly communist countries—sent a team to observe and report.
They were not impressed.
The observers criticized the congressional redistricting process and recommended a review of procedures "to ensure genuine competitiveness of congressional election contests." It's not often that organizations designed to certify elections in developing democracies find American practices wanting.
The Search for Solutions
If gerrymandering is the problem, what's the solution?
Independent commissions are the most common reform. By taking redistricting out of legislators' hands and giving it to a nominally neutral body, the hope is to reduce partisan manipulation. The challenge is designing a commission that's actually independent—commissioners have political views too, and the process for selecting them can be gamed.
Algorithmic redistricting is a more radical approach. Instead of human judgment, let computers draw maps based on neutral criteria: compactness, contiguity, preservation of existing political boundaries. The problem is that "neutral" criteria aren't really neutral—choosing to prioritize compactness over keeping communities together is itself a political choice.
Proportional representation would eliminate single-member districts entirely. Instead of electing one representative from each district, a state might elect all its representatives at once, with seats allocated proportionally based on statewide vote totals. This is how most democracies work. It would make gerrymandering impossible, since there would be no district lines to manipulate. It would also require fundamental changes to American election law that seem politically unlikely.
Multi-member districts are a middle ground. Instead of one representative per district, elect three or five, with seats allocated proportionally within each district. This reduces but doesn't eliminate the impact of district boundaries.
None of these solutions is perfect. All of them face political obstacles, since the people with the power to implement reforms are often the same people who benefit from the current system.
The Salamander Endures
More than two hundred years after that Boston newspaper published its famous cartoon, the gerrymander remains alive and well.
The tools have changed—from colored pencils to supercomputers, from local knowledge to algorithmic optimization. The legal landscape has shifted—from federal oversight to state-by-state battles. The stakes have grown—from state legislatures to control of Congress to, arguably, the future of American democracy itself.
But the fundamental dynamic remains unchanged. Whoever draws the maps has enormous power to determine electoral outcomes. That power can be used fairly or unfairly. And in a system where the mapmakers are chosen by elections held under the previous maps, there's a built-in resistance to change.
Governor Elbridge Gerry lost his reelection bid in 1812, partly because of the backlash against his salamander-shaped district. The gerrymander outlived him. It has outlived generations of reformers who tried to kill it. As long as elections are conducted in geographic districts, some version of it probably will.
The question isn't whether gerrymandering will exist. The question is whether American democracy can develop institutions and norms strong enough to keep it from eating the system from within.
The salamander is hungry. It always has been.