By Ande Jacobson

Gerrymandering is a practice that has a long history in the U.S., and no matter who’s doing it, it’s cheating by taking away the voices of the electorate and predetermining an outcome based on partisanship. In practice, it’s done by drawing electoral district boundaries to serve the party doing the drawing by silencing the voices of any opposition through packing or cracking any voting blocks in the party’s favor. Packing entails grouping large blocks of opposition voters together even if they wouldn’t normally be in single district to limit how many districts they can control. Cracking entails breaking up opposition party blocks across districts and separating them further to dilute their votes. In short, gerrymandering is a method of voter suppression and election fraud that’s unfortunately legal but completely unethical. While electoral districts should be effectively a grid based on population density, instead, gerrymandered districts tend to resemble abstract art. Both major parties have engaged in various levels of the practice over the years, and it stems from serious corruption and an inability to compete fairly in an election.

Currently, in response to a “request” from the president, the Texas legislature is attempting to more severely gerrymander their already heavily gerrymandered state to give the House five more Republican seats in time for the 2026 midterms by redistricting out of cycle in a much sharper partisan fashion. The Texas Democratic legislators left the state to break quorum to prevent the vote on the out of cycle redistricting setting off a legal battle with the governor. It’s unclear where that will end, but if Texas follows through on its threat to fully gerrymander their state so that Democratic voices are completely silenced, several Democratic states have said that they’ll follow suit and gerrymander their states bright blue to counter the red state assault and even the playing field. If taken to the absurd extreme, then every state could potentially be rigged to become monolithic, and the federal representation would end up being a display of who could cheat more effectively. That is not democracy. That’s tyranny. The problem of course is that after achieving a nation where cheating the best is the norm, democracy would be lost. Voters wouldn’t be represented by the majority as democracy demands. Granted, Congress currently doesn’t reflect the true majority view. It’s skewed right based on previous gerrymanders.

Normal redistricting occurs every ten years after the census to reflect the changes in population density although a few states allow redistricting more often should the need arise. In other states, a special election is required for voters to determine whether such an effort can occur out of cycle. In other words, in those states where a special election is needed to begin the process of redistricting out of cycle for the purposes of gerrymandering, the voters get to choose whether or not to allow the state to cheat which is rather ironic. In an effort to prevent outright gerrymandering, some states, mostly those controlled by today’s Democratic Party, have also enacted legislation to give non-partisan or bipartisan panels control of redistricting rather than relying on the legislature. In those states (California is one of them) the special election would not only have to ask voters to allow redistricting out of cycle, they’d have to sidestep the non-partisan committee to allow partisanship to take over.

Texas’ actions have called standard practice into question nationwide as we face an election integrity crisis. Voter fraud is effectively non-existent, but election fraud through various voter suppression efforts to silence opposition voices is rampant. And make no mistake, gerrymandering is one of those voter suppression tactics in addition to actions like voter roll purges and polling place closures.

Several clarion calls have been made to Democrats to “fight fire with fire” and gerrymander their states to counter the onslaught by Republicans. Even historian Heather Cox Richardson agrees that while repugnant, such an effort is necessary at this time to give Democrats any voice. She and others insist that if Democrats can gain a majority in Congress, they could then enact legislation to prevent gerrymandering and out-of-cycle redistricting in the future as would occur if the John Lewis Voting Rights Act were passed. Without such a majority, Richardson and others insist that our democracy will be lost because the Republicans have abandoned any semblance of fair play.

Interestingly, a piece of legislation is close to being proposed by a Republican House member, Kevin Kiley (R-CA), to prevent mid-decade redistricting. While his bill is a result of trying to stop his own state of California from doing this (which would cause him to lose his seat), the effect would also stop Texas and other states from going forward. Beyond that though, Congress needs to enact legislation to require redistricting be done by a non-partisan committee in all states. Unless that’s done, there will still be nothing stopping a party in power from gerrymandering their own state every ten years.

As Teri Kanefield has said numerous times, the way you protect democracy is with more democracy. If enough people want democracy to survive, it will. If the electorate abandons democracy though, no amount of cheating will get it back. And the problem with cheating even for so-called noble reasons is that once you justify cheating and normalize it, that corruption remains. After all, what party willingly cedes its electoral advantage?

Addendum: Perhaps rather than trying to out-cheat the Republicans by gerrymandering more severely, the Democrats could instead try to flip red districts blue by doing more of what they are already doing – i.e., going to all districts to lay out the truth of why people are hurting. When people are made aware of what the Republican policies actually mean for them personally, they are not popular. Republican legislators are largely afraid of facing their constituents. On those rare occasions when they have met with them, it hasn’t gone well, and their constituents hit them with hard questions about the legislation they’ve supported that is by all rights completely unsupportable even to their supporters. The Democrats have been meeting with voters across the nation in blue and red districts, and they’ve been very well-received. The Democrats need to make sure that legislators’ voting records are front and center in these discussions, and that people really understand how all of this affects them personally. People are angry about what’s happening, and when they find out that they’ve been lied to, and that they have been seriously hurt by the actions their Republican legislators have taken, they are looking for other options, including voting for Democrats. People need to be given the truth about what their legislators stand for, and they need to make informed decisions. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

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References:

https://www.history.com/articles/gerrymandering-origins-voting
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-2-2025
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/04/schwarzenegger-newsom-redistricting-00493418
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-political-gerrymandering-illegal-6-things-to-know-as-texas-dispute-carries-on
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5435251-newsom-california-redistricting-push/
https://terikanefield.com/musing-about-books-law-and-politics-blog/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CKb4lFhol8

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