There's been a lot of talk about gerrymandering lately. Perhaps you are wondering just what it is and how it works. Let me explain with some simple examples.
Suppose a certain state has 10 million people. 6 million of these are from party A and 4 million are from party B. (I'll just say A and B instead of real parties to avoid distracting readers from the main points.) The state is entitled to 10 districts. (In the US today, there are not a simple 1 million people per district. As I write this it's actually 761,169. But just to make the example simpler ...)
Suppose for our purposes here that you can divide people into voting districts however you want. In real life there are laws and customs that say each district must be contiguous. That is, you can't take 100,000 people from the western edge of the state and 100,000 from the eastern edge of the state and put them together and call it a district. But in practice, this is only a minor impediment to gerrymandering. Districts are often made with bizarre shapes to group together people who vote a certain way. The word "gerrymander" actually comes from a case in Massachusetts where the Democrats made weird shaped districts to group people the way they wanted. A newspaper reporter said one district looked like a salamander. As the leader of the Democrats was named Elbridge Gerry, he called it a "gerrymander". Anyway ...
You might think that the fair thing to do would be to make 10 districts, each with 1/10 of the voters from party A and 1/10 of the voters from party B. Then each district would have 600,000 A's and 400,000 B's. But that would mean that party A would win in every district, so you'd get 10 representatives from party A and zero from party B.
You might think that party A should get 6 representatives and party B should get 4. So you could make 6 districts each with 1 million people from party A and no one from party B, and 4 districts each with 1 million from party B and no one from party A.
But suppose that party A gets to draw the district map. They could make 10 districts each with 600,000 A's and 400,000 B's like I mentioned a moment ago, so they would win in every district, and they would get all 10 representatives and B would get zero.
Real life is often more complicated than that. They have to bow to geography at least somewhat, and if they are too blatantly unfair it could stir up opposition. So maybe they make 8 districts each with 700,000 A's and 300,000 B's, and 2 districts with the remaining 200,000 A's and 800,000 B's each. So A gets 8 reps and B gets 2. That is, they get 80% of the representatives even though they only have 50% of the votes.
Suppose B controls the map. As they have fewer total voters, they don't want to evenly distribute them. Instead they concentrate A's in a small number of districts. Like maybe put 900,000 A's and 100,000 B's each in 3 districts, and 471,000 A's and 529,000 B's in each of 7 districts. Now A wins 3 districts by a landslide and narrowly loses the other 7. Even though A has 60% of the votes, they get only 30% of the representatives.
The trick is to concentrate all your opponents' voters into a few districts which they win big, while spreading your voters out across many districts that you win narrowly.
But there's a catch. If you go too far and make your margin in "your" districts too narrow, you could lose the district if enough voters switch to the other party, or if people move in and out. Like in my example above, if 30,000 of your B voters actually vote for A in one of your districts, you'll lose. Political winds go back and forth all the time so this is quite possible.
What can be done about it?
Some say the answer is to have strict rules about how district lines are drawn. Like whenI lived in Ohio they passed a law saying that the map must be the proposal with the most nearly rectangular districts. But today both parties have lots of smart people and computers. They can draw maps that meet the rules but still benefit their party.
Another idea is to have the map drawn by an "independent commission" which is not controlled by either party. But how do you do this? How do you choose the members? If they are picked by the governor or the legislature, surely they will pick people who are biased toward their party. You can write on a piece of paper that they must be fair and impartial, but that isn't going to make it happen.
Personally, I think the only way to do it is to be results-oriented. Say that the number of representatives from each party must be proportional to the number of voters. Like if 60% of the voters are rom party A, then party A should get 60% of the representatives. But I'm not totally naive. I'm sure the parties would still find ways to game the system.
© 2026 by Jay Johansen
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