Gerrymandering Is a Disease. We Already Have a Cure.

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The gerrymandering apocalypse is upon us. President Donald Trump, determined to hold on to Republicans’ thin House majority, kicked it off in June, when he demanded that Texas Republicans redraw the state’s congressional maps. Texas boasts 38 U.S. House seats—second only to California’s 52. Now state Republicans have redrawn its district lines in hopes of squeezing an additional five-seat margin from its current 25–12 GOP majority. (Texas has one House vacancy.) Texas Republicans took the offer, approving the new maps last week over Democrats’ vehement objections. In direct response, California’s Democratic-controlled Legislature has begun the process of redrawing its own maps to counter the Texas GOP, hoping to pad its party’s lead in the nation’s largest state. Other states have indicated they too may join the gerrymandering wars—and Trump continues to demand that Republicans do so.

Although it remains to be seen which political party will ultimately win, there is one clear loser: democracy. Partisan gerrymandering—the strategy of drawing congressional district lines so as to maximize a party’s legislative representation—has no basis in democratic principles. It is, nakedly, an attempt by political parties to shore up their power in future elections. Google “Illinois District 13” (a Democratic-drawn district) or “Texas District 35” (a Republican-drawn district), and you’ll quickly see that these areas are not intended to encapsulate particular geographies, cultures, or economies. Rather, the party in power draws these lines to do one of two things to the opposition: dilute its voters across many districts, ensuring that they will be in the minority in those districts (a tactic known as “cracking”), or jam them into as few districts as possible, so that the opposing party controls a minority of the total districts (a technique known as “packing”).

Put bluntly, Texas, California, and whichever states join them are now engaged in an antidemocratic race to the bottom.

While a layperson might assume such election rigging to be unconstitutional, given the democratic goals of the House of Representatives—the only branch of government constitutionally mandated to proportionally represent the American population—the Supreme Court proclaimed in 2019 that it would not wade into the political waters of partisan gerrymandering. Rather, the justices left that matter to the states and Congress, which is how we find ourselves in the present moment.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way to avoid line drawing altogether, and to do it constitutionally. Yes, the Constitution requires that the number of House seats be apportioned among the states according to their respective populations, but it says nothing of congressional districts—and nothing about line drawing.

Imagine, then, that rather than drawing Texas into 38 gerrymandered districts, with each holding an election for one representative, Texas instead held one election—statewide—wherein all of its voters chose all of its 38 representatives. That model, known as multimember districting, would make line drawing a thing of the past and end the gerrymandering wars overnight.

But although that would eliminate gerrymandering, without more, it would create a new problem by enabling statewide-majority parties to elect its entire slate of House representatives. For example, Texas is roughly 56 percent Republican, meaning that if Texans voted statewide to elect all 38 representatives, they would likely end up with 38 Republican representatives, despite the 42 percent of Texans who are Democrats. So any pro-democracy reform would still require the proportional allocation of seats to roughly reflect the partisan breakdown of a state.

Fortunately, there’s a readily available solution to address this: Congress could also enact what’s known as cumulative voting. Under a cumulative voting scheme, rather than having Texans merely fill in ovals next to their 38 favorite candidates (i.e., giving each candidate one vote apiece), voters would have 38 votes to assign however they see fit. If there is only one candidate a voter supports, that voter could give the candidate all 38 votes, improving the odds that they get elected, but leaving the remaining seats up to other voters. Or imagine that a non-major party, like the Libertarian Party, endorsed a slate of 10 candidates; then, pro–Libertarian Party voters could allocate three or four votes apiece across those 10. This reform would protect party minorities, like Democrats in Texas, because it would allow Democratic voters to distribute their votes across a smaller but mightier group of candidates.

Cumulative voting could also help protect minority communities. Some voters hope to achieve certain partisan outcomes with their votes, but others care equally about ensuring that candidates sharing their personal characteristics—be it race, ethnicity, religion, or otherwise—are elected to Congress. These communities, like partisan communities, can use cumulative voting to concentrate their support on such candidates.

And although it may sound grandiose, Congress can enact just such a multimember-district, cumulative voting model: The Constitution grants that the body “may at any time” enact voting regulations, something it has done occasionally, most prominently with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Indeed, multimember districts have already been introduced in Congress by Virginia Democrat Donald Beyer via a bill that, while not eliminating line drawing altogether, would mitigate its worst effects. And cumulative voting already exists at the county level. Together, they provide a comprehensive, pro-democracy reform for electing members of the House—without drawing a single line.

As this summer has demonstrated, congressional line drawing enables state legislatures to usurp power from the hands of voters and place it in the hands of political parties. But by putting an end to line drawing altogether, Congress can end the race to the bottom and move us toward true democracy.

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