What Is Gerrymandering? How Politicians Pick Their Voters Before You Pick Them
Quick Answer
What is gerrymandering? Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district boundaries to give one political party an advantage over another. It works by either concentrating opposition voters into a single district to waste their votes, or splitting them across multiple districts so they can never form a majority. The term comes from Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 signed a district map so distorted it resembled a salamander. Modern computer-aided gerrymandering has made the practice significantly more precise and harder to detect or challenge.
In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on a state senate district so contorted that a political cartoonist drew wings and claws on it and called it a salamander. Someone combined Gerry's name with the animal and the word "gerrymandering" entered the language. Two hundred years later, the basic concept is the same and the technology is considerably more sophisticated.
How It Works
Electoral districts have to contain roughly equal populations, but the shape of those districts is largely up to whoever draws the maps. In most states, that means the state legislature, which means whichever party controls the legislature after each census draws the maps for the next decade.
There are two primary techniques. "Packing" means drawing a district that concentrates as many opposition voters as possible into one place. Those voters win their packed district by enormous margins, which means most of their votes are surplus and wasted. "Cracking" means doing the opposite: splitting concentrations of opposition voters across multiple districts so they're a minority everywhere and can't win anywhere. A skilled mapmaker can use both techniques on the same map, packing some opposition strongholds while cracking others, to produce a statewide result that bears almost no relationship to how people actually voted.
The Modern Version Is Much Worse
The 1812 salamander was crude by necessity. Mapmakers were working with paper and aggregate census data. Modern gerrymandering uses commercial voter databases with household-level data, sophisticated mapping software, and statistical models that can predict how individual precincts will vote with high accuracy. A party with access to these tools can draw maps that lock in supermajorities for a decade regardless of how voters' preferences shift.
In 2010, Republicans ran a coordinated national strategy called REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project. The explicit goal was to win state legislative races in a census year so they could control redistricting. They spent approximately $30 million targeting state legislative races most national Democrats weren't watching. It worked. Republicans flipped 20 state legislative chambers in 2010 and used that control to draw congressional and state legislative maps across the country for the 2012 through 2020 elections.
What the Numbers Looked Like
The 2012 elections produced some of the clearest illustrations of what precision gerrymandering can accomplish. In North Carolina, Democratic congressional candidates received 51 percent of the statewide vote. Republicans won 9 of 13 congressional seats. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates received 83,000 more total votes than Republican candidates statewide. Republicans won 13 of 18 congressional seats. In Wisconsin, Democrats received more total votes in state assembly races but Republicans won a 60-seat supermajority.
These outcomes were not accidents or the result of voters being geographically distributed unfavorably. They were the intended result of maps drawn to produce exactly those outcomes. The mapmakers said so in documents that later became public through litigation.
Why Courts Won't Fix It
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts cannot review claims of partisan gerrymandering. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that partisan gerrymandering presents a "political question" that is beyond the reach of federal courts. Voters who believe their districts have been drawn to dilute their political power have no federal judicial remedy.
Racial gerrymandering is still subject to challenge under the Voting Rights Act, and several maps have been struck down on those grounds in recent years. Partisan gerrymandering, the explicit drawing of maps to benefit one party, is legal at the federal level. Some state courts have ruled against partisan gerrymanders under state constitutional provisions, with mixed results depending on who sits on those courts and how they interpret their state constitutions.
This connects directly to why political scientists who study authoritarianism list electoral manipulation as one of the earliest and most reliable warning signs of democratic backsliding. The mechanism does not require violence or a coup. It requires control of a state legislature in a census year.
What Actually Works
Independent redistricting commissions, bodies composed of citizens rather than legislators, have produced measurably more competitive districts in states that use them. California, Arizona, Michigan, and Colorado have all adopted versions of independent commissions. Academic research on the maps they produce consistently finds fewer wasted votes and more competitive races than maps drawn by legislatures. The primary obstacle to expanding this model is that it requires the people currently benefiting from gerrymandering to vote to give up the mechanism that benefits them.
The other meaningful lever is state courts. Several state supreme courts have struck down gerrymanders under state constitutional provisions that the federal courts don't have access to. That makes the composition of state supreme courts consequential in ways that most voters don't fully account for.
Paying attention to state-level races is not exciting. It is, based on the evidence of the last fifteen years, extremely consequential. The No Kings T-shirt exists for the same reason the phrase has existed for eight hundred years: power over democratic processes should not belong to whoever happened to win the last election. If your response to all of this is that the phrase "trust your government" requires some heavy irony to use correctly right now, our Trust Your Government T-shirt is available in the Activism collection.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is gerrymandering in simple terms?
Gerrymandering is when politicians draw electoral district boundaries to make sure their party wins more seats than their share of votes would otherwise produce. It works by concentrating opposition voters into a few districts where their votes are wasted, and splitting them up in other districts where they can't form a majority. The result is that election outcomes are largely predetermined by whoever draws the maps, not by how the public actually votes.
Where does the word gerrymandering come from?
The word comes from Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 signed a bill creating a state senate district so contorted in shape that a political cartoonist compared it to a salamander. A Boston newspaper combined Gerry's name with "salamander" to create "gerrymander," and the term stuck. The original district was drawn to benefit Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. Gerry himself later became Vice President of the United States under James Madison.
Is gerrymandering legal?
Partisan gerrymandering, drawing districts to benefit one political party, is legal at the federal level. The Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims. Racial gerrymandering, drawing districts specifically to dilute the votes of a racial group, remains subject to challenge under the Voting Rights Act. Some state courts have struck down partisan gerrymanders under state constitutional provisions, but the federal legal protections against it are effectively nonexistent.
What is the difference between packing and cracking?
Packing and cracking are the two main techniques used in gerrymandering. Packing means drawing a district that concentrates as many opposition voters as possible into one place, so they win that district by large margins but their surplus votes don't count anywhere else. Cracking means splitting a concentration of opposition voters across multiple districts so they're a minority in each one and can't win anywhere. A sophisticated gerrymander typically uses both techniques simultaneously on different parts of the map.
What is REDMAP?
REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, was a Republican political strategy executed in 2010 with the explicit goal of winning state legislative races in a census year in order to control the redistricting process. Republicans spent approximately $30 million on targeted state legislative races and flipped 20 state chambers. They used that control to draw congressional and state legislative maps that remained in effect for the 2012 through 2020 election cycles. Democrats ran a similar effort called REDMAP-mirror ahead of the 2020 census with more mixed results.
How do independent redistricting commissions work?
Independent redistricting commissions draw electoral maps using panels of citizens rather than state legislators. The specific structure varies by state, but most use some combination of random selection and application processes to assemble a commission that includes members from both parties and unaffiliated voters. Research comparing maps drawn by independent commissions to those drawn by partisan legislatures consistently finds that commission-drawn maps produce more competitive districts and fewer wasted votes. California, Arizona, Michigan, and Colorado currently use independent commissions for congressional redistricting.
