Wikimedia Commons: Elkanah Tisdale (1771-1835) (often falsely attributed to Gilbert Stuart), public domain


Picture this: It’s 1812 in Massachusetts, and Governor Elbridge Gerry has just approved a redistricting plan that creates such a bizarrely shaped legislative district that when a local newspaper editor saw it on a map, he thought it looked like a salamander. The editor sketched wings and claws onto the district, and someone quipped that it looked more like a “Gerry-mander” than a salamander. The term stuck, and more than two centuries later, we’re still dealing with the same problem that inspired that joke.
What Gerrymandering Actually Means
At its core, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district boundaries to give one political party or group an unfair advantage over its opponents. It’s a form of political manipulation that allows those in power to essentially choose their voters, rather than letting voters choose their representatives. Think of it as a sophisticated form of gaming the system—perfectly legal in many cases, but profoundly anti-democratic in spirit.
The mechanics are surprisingly straightforward. There are two main techniques: “cracking” and “packing.” Cracking involves splitting up concentrations of opposing voters across multiple districts so they can’t form a majority anywhere. Packing does the opposite—cramming as many opposing voters as possible into a few districts so they waste their votes winning by huge margins in just a couple of places, leaving the rest of the districts safely in your column. These techniques can be deployed together to engineer a decisive partisan advantage.
A History of Creative Mapmaking
The practice didn’t start with Gerry, of course. The Founding Fathers—for all their lofty rhetoric about representative democracy—weren’t above putting their thumbs on the electoral scales. But gerrymandering really came into its own in the 20th century as advances in census data, and statistics combined with the addition of newly available computing power made it possible to draw districts with surgical precision.
The 2010 redistricting cycle marked a watershed moment. Single-party control of the redistricting process gave partisan line drawers free rein to craft some of the most extreme gerrymanders in American history often down to the level of individual city blocks. Republicans, having won control of many state legislatures in the 2010 midterms, used sophisticated computer modeling to create maps that locked in their advantages for a decade. Democrats did the same where they had the power, though Republicans controlled more state legislatures and thus wielded greater gerrymandering capability overall.
The 2024-2025 Gerrymandering Wars
Here’s where things get really interesting—and deeply concerning. The situation has exploded into what some are calling “gerrymandering wars” following the 2020 census and a critical Supreme Court decision in 2019. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering constitutes a non-justiciable “political question” where federal court intervention is unsuitable. Translation: The federal courts won’t stop partisan gerrymandering because they claim there’s no objective standard to measure it.
This opened the floodgates. The Brennan Center estimates that gerrymandering gave Republicans an advantage of around 16 House seats in the 2024 race to control Congress compared to fair maps. But here’s the kicker: we’re not even done with this decade’s redistricting.
In an unprecedented move, President Donald Trump has pushed Republican state lawmakers to further gerrymander their states’ congressional maps, prompting Democratic state lawmakers to respond in kind. In August 2025, during a special session, Texas’s legislature passed a redistricting plan that weakens electoral opportunities for Black and Hispanic voters.  California has threatened to respond with its own gerrymander, creating a tit-for-tat dynamic that could spiral out of control.
North Carolina provides perhaps the most dramatic example. After the state supreme court reversed its position on policing partisan gerrymandering, the Republican-controlled legislature redrew the map, and after the 2024 election, three Democratic districts flipped to Republicans—enough to give control of the U.S. House to the GOP by a slim margin.
The situation has gotten so extreme that both parties are now openly engaging in mid-decade redistricting—something that traditionally only happened after each ten-year census. California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Utah have all adopted new congressional maps in 2025, with new maps also appearing possible in Florida, Maryland and Virginia.
The Racial Dimension
It’s crucial to note that gerrymandering comes in two flavors: partisan and racial. While partisan gerrymandering is currently legal thanks to the Supreme Court, racial gerrymandering—drawing districts specifically to dilute the voting power of racial minorities—violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The line between the two can get blurry, though, since partisan voting patterns often correlate with race.
In May 2025, a federal court ruled that Alabama’s 2023 congressional map not only violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act but was enacted by the Alabama Legislature with racially discriminatory intent. Similar battles are playing out in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states. The legal landscape here is complex, with courts sometimes walking a tightrope between ensuring fair representation for communities of color and avoiding the creation of what could be challenged as racial gerrymanders.
What Can Be Done About It?
The most popular reform proposal is the creation of independent redistricting commissions—bodies of citizens (not politicians) who draw district maps according to neutral criteria.  Currently, several states including Colorado, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia use redistricting commissions to draw congressional and state legislative maps, ranging from political commissions with elected officials to completely independent commissions that bar all elected officials from serving as commissioners.
Do they work? The evidence is mixed but generally positive. According to a Redistricting Report Card published with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, the states that had some form of commission drew “B+” maps on average, while states where partisans controlled the process drew “D+” maps.  California’s independent commission is often held up as the gold standard, though it’s not perfect—even fairly drawn maps can produce lopsided results due to how voters cluster geographically.
Another proposal focuses on clear, enforceable criteria: compactness, contiguity, respect for existing political boundaries, and transparency in the mapping process. Advances in statistical analysis also make it possible to compare proposed maps against thousands of neutral alternatives to detect extreme outliers, a method increasingly discussed in academic and legal circles.
Federal legislation has been proposed repeatedly. The Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 would prohibit states from mid-decade redistricting and would require every state to adopt nonpartisan, independent redistricting commissions. Similar provisions were included in the “For the People Act” that Democrats passed in the House in 2021, but it died in the Senate. Getting such legislation through Congress would require bipartisan cooperation, which seems unlikely given that both parties see gerrymandering as a political weapon and they believe they can’t afford to unilaterally disarm.
Some reformers advocate for more radical solutions. Proportional representation systems, where the share of votes equals the share of seats, would end boundary-drawing battles altogether and make democracy more representative. Under such a system, if Democrats win 60% of the vote in a state, they’d get roughly 60% of that state’s congressional seats. It’s intuitive and fair, but it would require a fundamental restructuring of American electoral systems—something that’s probably not politically feasible in the near term.
State courts have emerged as a potential backstop. At least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, even though federal courts won’t touch them.  This means that state constitutional provisions against gerrymandering could provide meaningful protection—though as North Carolina demonstrated, state court compositions can change, and with them, their willingness to police gerrymandering.
The Bottom Line
Gerrymandering represents a fundamental tension in American democracy: How do we draw districts fairly when the people drawing them have every incentive to rig the game in their favor? The problem has ancient roots but ultra-modern manifestations, powered by big data and sophisticated computer modeling that would make Elbridge Gerry’s head spin.
The current moment feels particularly precarious. With Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House and midterm elections traditionally being unfavorable for the party in power, the Republicans’ action amounts to a preemptive move to retain control of Congress. The Democrats threatened response could trigger an escalating cycle of partisan map manipulation that further entrenches our political divisions and makes elections less responsive to actual voter preferences.
Independent commissions offer a promising path forward, but they’re not a silver bullet. They work better than partisan control, but they can’t eliminate all the inherent challenges of translating votes into seats through geographic districts. More ambitious reforms like proportional representation could solve the problem more completely, but they face enormous political and practical obstacles.
For now, gerrymandering remains what that newspaper editor saw in 1812: a monstrous distortion of democratic principles, hiding in plain sight on our electoral maps. The question is whether we have the political will to slay the beast, or whether we’ll keep feeding it for another two centuries.
 
Sources:
Brennan Center for Justice – Gerrymandering Explained
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained
 
Brennan Center for Justice – How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
 
American Constitution Society – America’s Gerrymandering Crisis
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/americas-gerrymandering-crisis-time-for-a-constructive-redistricting-framework/
 
ACLU – Court Cases on Gerrymandering
https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=gerrymandering
 
Stateline – State Courts and Gerrymandering
https://stateline.org/2025/12/22/as-supreme-court-pulls-back-on-gerrymandering-state-courts-may-decide-fate-of-maps/
 
Campaign Legal Center – Do Independent Redistricting Commissions Work?
https://campaignlegal.org/update/do-independent-redistricting-commissions-really-prevent-gerrymandering-yes-they-do
 
RepresentUs – End Partisan Gerrymandering
https://represent.us/policy-platform/ending-partisan-gerrymandering/
 
Senator Alex Padilla – Redistricting Reform Act of 2025
https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/watch-padilla-lofgren-introduce-legislation-to-establish-independent-redistricting-commissions-end-mid-decade-redistricting-nationwide/
 
Protect Democracy – How to End Gerrymandering
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/how-to-end-gerrymandering/