Picking Your Voters

It's Tuesday, May twelfth. In 1812, a newspaper cartoonist in Boston looked at a newly redrawn voting district in Massachusetts and thought it looked like a salamander. He added claws, wings, and a dragon's head, and the Boston Gazette published it with a caption combining the governor's name, Elbridge Gerry, with the word salamander. The Gerry-mander. The cartoon went viral, by 1812 standards, reprinted in newspapers across the country. The word has been in the American vocabulary for over two hundred years, and the practice it describes, drawing voting district lines to predetermine who wins an election, is older than the word itself. James Madison was nearly gerrymandered out of his seat in the first Congress. It was used after the Civil War to suppress Black voting power. Both parties do it today. And in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that there's nothing the federal courts can do about it. The shape of a line on a map can matter more than how you vote. This is how. Every ten years, after the census, states redraw the boundaries of their congressional and legislative districts to reflect population changes. On paper, this is a straightforward administrative exercise: make sure each district has roughly the same number of people so that everyone's vote carries equal weight. In practice, it's one of the most powerful political tools in the country, because in most states, the lines are drawn by the state legislature, which means the party in power gets to decide where the boundaries go. There are two techniques, and they're both simple. Packing is when you concentrate the opposing party's voters into as few districts as possible. They win those districts by overwhelming margins, seventy or eighty percent, but they waste all those extra votes that weren't needed for a majority. Meanwhile, the rest of the map is drawn to give your party narrow but reliable advantages in every other district. Cracking is the opposite. You take a concentration of opposing voters and split them across multiple districts, diluting their influence so they never reach a majority in any single district. A neighborhood that would form a natural political community gets divided between three or four districts, each of which is dominated by the other party. The math is devastating. Imagine a state with ten districts and a population that's roughly sixty percent blue voters and forty percent red voters. Under a fair map, you might expect six blue districts and four red ones. With aggressive packing and cracking, the red party can draw a map that produces seven red districts and three blue ones, winning a supermajority of seats despite being a minority of the population. The blue voters aren't disenfranchised in the traditional sense. They can still vote. Their votes just don't translate into representation because of where the lines were drawn. Wayne Dawkins, a professor at Morgan State University, described it simply: "Politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians." That's the whole thing in one sentence. In a functioning democracy, voters choose their representatives. In a gerrymandered system, representatives choose their voters. One thing worth getting out of the way early: this is not a one-party problem. Both Democrats and Republicans do it, and both do it aggressively when they have the power. After the Civil War, southern states drew districts specifically to dilute Black voting power. South Carolina created a "boa constrictor" district in 1882 that packed Black voters, who made up the majority of the state's population, into a single winding district so that every other district would have a white majority. This was racial gerrymandering, and it was used as a tool of oppression alongside poll taxes, literacy tests, and the threat of violence. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited states from discriminating by race during redistricting, and the landmark Supreme Court cases of the 1960s established the principle of "one person, one vote," requiring districts to have roughly equal populations. Fast forward to the modern version. Republicans executed one of the most effective gerrymandering campaigns in history through a project called REDMAP in 2010. By winning state legislatures in key states during a census year, they positioned themselves to control redistricting in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. The maps they drew locked in Republican advantages for the entire decade. In Wisconsin in 2018, Democratic candidates for the state assembly won fifty three percent of the total statewide vote but only thirty six of ninety nine seats. The maps were so effective that the majority of voters preferred the other party and it didn't matter. Democrats have done the same thing where they hold power. In Maryland, Democrats redrew the 6th Congressional District after the 2010 census, converting a reliably Republican seat into a Democratic one by cracking Republican voters across multiple districts. The Supreme Court heard the case in Benisek v. Lamone and eventually ruled it was a partisan gerrymander. In Illinois, Democrats drew maps in 2021 that eliminated multiple Republican-held seats. In 2025, California voters temporarily suspended their independent redistricting commission to allow the Democratic legislature to add five Democratic House seats. The tool is bipartisan. The criticism tends to focus on whoever used it most recently. Modern technology has made gerrymandering vastly more precise than anything Elbridge Gerry could have imagined. With voter data, consumer data, and sophisticated mapping software, mapmakers can draw districts block by block, predicting outcomes with near-certainty. A skilled operator with the right data can draw a map where every district is predetermined, where the general election is a formality, and where the only competitive race is the primary. In districts like these, voter turnout barely matters. The outcome was decided when the map was drawn. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts cannot hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, acknowledged that excessive partisan gerrymandering is "incompatible with democratic principles" but concluded that the courts had no manageable standard for determining when partisan influence in redistricting crosses the line from acceptable politics to unconstitutional manipulation. He wrote that the issue should be resolved by state courts, state constitutions, and voter-driven reforms like independent redistricting commissions. Justice Elena Kagan's dissent was blunt. She wrote that the majority was condemning voters "to partisan manipulation and politicians to their incumbent's advantage." She called partisan gerrymandering "a practice that strikes at the heart of a representational democracy" and argued that the Court was abandoning the field at the worst possible moment, just as technology was making the manipulation more precise and more durable than ever. The Rucho decision left the fight over gerrymandering to the states, and the results have been mixed. Seven states now use independent redistricting commissions for congressional maps. Some state courts have struck down maps under their own constitutions. But in the majority of states, the legislature still controls the lines, and the party in power still draws them to its advantage. The contrarian question is whether gerrymandering is actually undemocratic or just democracy working as designed. The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to draw districts. Legislatures are elected by voters. If voters elect a party that then draws favorable maps, isn't that the system functioning? The counterargument is that the mapmakers are choosing their voters rather than the other way around, which inverts the premise of representative government. Both arguments have merit. The tension between them is built into the structure of the system. The framers gave legislatures the redistricting power because they trusted elected officials to use it fairly. Whether that trust was justified is a question that every redistricting cycle answers differently. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing voting district lines to predetermine who wins, and it's been part of American politics since before the word was coined in 1812. Two techniques, packing and cracking, allow the party drawing the map to win a supermajority of seats with a minority of votes. Both parties do it. Republicans used REDMAP in 2010 to lock in decade-long advantages across multiple states. Democrats gerrymandered Maryland, Illinois, and California when they held power. Modern technology makes the process precise enough to predetermine the outcome of every district on the map. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts can't police partisan gerrymandering, leaving the issue to the states. The result is a system where, in much of the country, elections are decided not by voters but by the people who drew the lines. The shape of a district can matter more than the will of the people inside it. That was true in 1812. It's worse now. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.