August 21, 2025
Gerrymandering.
It’s a word we’re hearing a lot lately – especially because of what’s going on in Texas and California and perhaps several more states too. But it occurred to me that while some of you may know what the word means – some of you may not – and lots of you have never seen it in action. So I want to demonstrate it for you so you can see how these politicians are rigging the system to benefit their own party. And before I get into this – let me be clear…both parties do this. Voters usually hate it. But the United States supreme court ruled gerrymandering congressional maps for purely political reasons is absolutely legal.
So let’s get into it. This is the current district map for the 119th Congress. As you know there are 435 members of the United States House of Representatives and each one of them has a district in their home state. They were voted into office from the voters in that district. It’s hard to see the districts because there are so many of them on this map -but each one of those little shapes represents a district.
Since our system is based on the idea of representation based on population –redistricting usually happens after the census results have been released. So every 10 years when we know how many people are living in each state – those 435 US House seats get redistributed. Some years some states gain seats and maybe in the next decade they lose seats. It just depends on their population. Then once the states know how many US house seats they’re getting the state legislatures and governors are responsible for drawing those district lines. In some states – to do away with the appearance of having politicians picking their voters – the redistricting has been taken out of the hands of the politicians and has been delegated to independent commissions. Every state has a different process.
Now, you’ll hear the word gerrymandering associated with redistricting. Gerrymandering is *not* new. It’s the process of redrawing those electoral district lines for one party’s political gain over another. And as I said the supreme court says it’s legal. So now I’m going to show you how redistricting can turn into gerrymandering real fast.
Let’s take an imaginary state. In our imaginary state we have the imaginary green party and the orange party. And for arguments sake let’s say the people in the orange party generally live in the same areas and the people in the green party generally live in the same areas. Now according to our founding fathers representation should be based on population and should be proportional.
Like this. This would be considered a fair redistricting. You can see proportionately each party is fairly represented based on population. The orange party gets three representatives. Though the green party has fewer members they still get two representatives. But do you want to see how I can gerrymander the crap out of this map?
Boom like this. Now you can see each of the districts if I draw the map horizontally puts the orange party in the full majority every time. They get all the representatives. The green party gets zero. Wanna see how I can do it for green?
Told ya. If I draw the district lines randomly like this I can get green to have more representatives than orange even though orange technically has more people. But you’re probably thinking – this doesn’t happen in real life.
You’re damn right it does. Here is a map from Princeton University’s 2023 gerrymandering project which gave each state a grade based on whether that state had fair redistricting or horrible gerrymandering. All the states in green had good – basically fair redistricting. Yellow had better than average redistricting with some bias. Orange was average redistricting and red means poor redistricting basically totally gerrymandered. Obviously these colors are going to change after all this redistricting is complete.
Now — before you get discouraged I want to point out something important. You –still have a choice. Your vote still matters even with all this map rigging. And that’s because there’s a weak spot in gerrymandering. Instead of doing the hard work to earn the votes of new voters for their party – these politicians are just shuffling around their known existing voters. But when you shuffle existing voters you are moving voters you know are going to vote for your party out of what are called safe districts. A safe district would be one that has an overwhelming number of one party’s voters so any politician of that party who ran in that district would be a lock. But when you pull too many of those voters out of those safe districts – to create new districts for your party– you run the real risk of making those safe districts more vulnerable and competitive. See — these politicians are all counting on you not to show up and vote. They’re banking on you being complicit in their rigging. But if you do show up and you do vote – their gerrymandering plans may not work the way they thought.
119th Congressional district map here.
Princeton Univ. Gerrymandering Project map here.
