“Gerrymandering is like a game of chess where the pieces are all the same color.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to favor a specific political party or group. This practice can distort the representation in legislative bodies by creating districts that either concentrate or dilute the voting power of certain demographics.
Eleanor Stratton of the USConstitution blog, described gerrymandering as – “what happens when the people who draw election districts choose their voters before voters choose them. It is the deliberate shaping of district boundaries to tilt election outcomes. Sometimes the goal is political party advantage. Sometimes it is to weaken the voting power of a minority group.”
The term gerrymandering is derived from the name of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration enacted a law in 1812 defining new state senatorial districts. The law consolidated the Federalist Party vote in a few districts and gave disproportionate representation to Democratic-Republicans. The outline of one of these districts was thought to resemble a salamander. A satirical cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale that appeared in the Boston Gazette graphically transformed the districts into an animal, “The Gerry-Mander,” fixing the term in the popular imagination.
The techniques of Gerrymandering have become more sophisticated over time, but the essence of the problem remains – those drawing the lines can effectively choose their voters instead of the voters choosing their representatives. Gerrymandering is the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries to give one party or demographic group an unfair advantage.
How Gerrymandering Works
Two mechanical techniques drive most gerrymandering schemes – Packing and Cracking.
Packing – concentrates as many opposing voters as possible into a single district, guaranteeing the opposition wins that seat by a huge margin while wasting every vote beyond what they needed for a simple majority.
Cracking – does the opposite, splitting opposition voters across several districts so they fall short of a winning threshold in each one.
Both tactics produce the same result – the party drawing the map wins more seats than its overall vote share would justify.
Federal Rules for Drawing Districts
Federal law prohibits drawing maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities, while partisan gerrymandering occupies a legal gray zone where federal courts have largely stepped aside and left enforcement to state courts.
Every redistricting plan must satisfy the constitutional principle of one person, one vote. For congressional districts, the Supreme Court held in Wesberry vs Sanders that Article 1, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, requiring substantially equal populations while allowing somewhat more flexibility than the congressional standard. In practice, state legislative maps with a total population deviation exceeding roughly ten percent between the largest and smallest districts invite constitutional challenge, though that threshold is not an absolute safe harbor.
Federal law also requires that states with more than one House seat elect their representatives from single-member districts, rather than at large. Beyond these requirements, mapmakers are expected to follow traditional redistricting principles – keeping districts contiguous, reasonably compact, respectful of existing political boundaries like counties and cities, and protective of communities of interest – meaning groups that share economic, social, or cultural ties and benefit from unified representation.
The Census and Redistricting Cycle
Redistricting is triggered every ten years by the decennial census.
Federal law requires the Census Bureau to deliver population data for redistricting to each state within one year of Census Day, which falls on April 1st. Separately, the President must transmit a reapportionment statement to Congress showing how many House seats each state receives based on the new population counts. States then have a compressed window to draw new maps before the next election cycle. Federal law does not prohibit mid-decade redistricting, and the Supreme Court suggested in League of United Latin American Citizens versus Perry (2006) that redrawing maps between censuses is permissible though some state constitutions restrict it.
Racial Gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act
The primary federal protection against racially discriminatory maps is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting practice that results in members of a racial group having less opportunity than other voters to participate in the political process and elect their preferred candidates.
Section 2 claims most commonly involve vote dilution – drawing boundaries that prevent a minority group from electing candidates of their choice.
Section 2 sometimes requires the creation of majority-minority districts to remedy vote dilution. Mapmakers cannot use race as the predominant factor in drawing district boundaries unless doing so survives strict scrutiny, meaning the state must show a compelling government interest and a plan narrowly tailored to serve it.
Partisan Gerrymandering in the Courts
Federal courts can hear racial gerrymandering claims because the Constitution directly prohibits racial discrimination. Partisan gerrymandering occupies different legal territories. The Supreme Court concluded that federal judges have “no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties” and no manageable legal standard to determine when partisanship crosses the constitutional line.
State Courts Fill the Gap
When federal courts out of the partisan gerrymandering business, state courts have become the primary venue for these challenges. Many state constitutions contain provisions with no direct federal equivalent – guarantees of free and equal elections, prohibitions on favoring political parties in map-drawing, or explicit partisan fairness grounds, finding that the maps were drawn to entrench partisan advantage. The legal theories vary by state, but the common thread is that state constitutions often provide hooks for claims that the federal Constitution does not.
Who Draws the Maps
In most states, the state legislature draws congressional and legislative district maps through the ordinary legislative process. The problem with this process is that elected officials are drawing the boundaries that determine their own future elections. To avoid this conflict of interest, some states have shifted redistricting authorities to commissions.
When a court determines that a redistricting plan violates the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, the court typically gives the legislature a chance to draw a new map within a set deadline. If the legislature fails to act, or produces a replacement that still violates the law, the court can step in and draw the map itself, often appointing a special master to draft remedial plans. The court’s replacement map must fix the legal violation but follow the state’s own redistricting policies and preferences as closely as possible.
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On May 15, 2026, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency request by Virginia officials to reinstate a congressional map that would have benefited Democrats in this year’s midterm election – a widely expected decision that represented the court’s latest response to a nationwide redistricting war. The decision blocked Democratic plans to use the new map to pick up as many as four additional seats in the House of Representatives this year.
The Virginia ruling did not just affect one state – it reshuffled the entire battlefield – power now shifts toward Texas, Florida, and the South. Democrats are heavily dependent on California and a few blue states. Control of the House of Representatives hinges on a small cluster of high-impact states, not a broad national map.
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Gerrymandering survives because it exploits a gap between what democracy feels like it should guarantee and what the Constitution explicitly provides.
The federal Constitution demands equal population in congressional districts, and it forbids certain kinds of discrimination through the Reconstruction Amendments and equal protection doctrine. It does not promise competitive elections or proportional outcomes.
If you do not want politicians or political parties choosing their voters some positive alternative approaches might be considered. Solutions designed to make electoral maps fairer, more competitive, and more representative of actual voters rather than political insiders could be accomplished through independent commissions, neutral map drawing, clear legal standards for fairness, public transparency and participation, and using existing county and city boundaries.
A positive alternative to gerrymandering is any system where – voters choose representatives, where rules are clear and enforceable, and the process is visible and accountable.
James Peifer
