It’s only mid-2025, but both “major” US political parties are already well into their campaigns to win US House and Senate seats in the 2026 midterm elections. They’re talking up potential candidates, trotting out actual candidates, and, in the case of the House, going all-out to ensure that those pesky voters don’t get in the way of partisan ambitions.
Their current election-rigging schemes revolve around the decennial practice of “redistricting” based on the most recent US census.
Their tool/tactic of choice is called “gerrymandering,” after a Massachusetts newspaper noticed that the boundaries of state senate district created under legislation signed by then-governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812 resembled a salamander.
In Texas and Missouri, Republican-dominated state legislatures are trying to figure out how to maximize the number of House seats held by the GOP, and minimize the number of House seats held by Democrats, after next year’s elections. In California, New York, and Maryland the parties’ positions are reversed.
One perpetual wrench in the machinery of redistricting is race. Historically, black civil rights groups have held that districts must be drawn so as to allow black voters to support “the candidate of their choice,” as if the race of a candidate is or should be the sole factor black voters consider in choosing a member of Congress.
Personal honesty compels me to insert here that I doubt the efficacy and legitimacy of “representative democracy” at all. Not only do I disapprove of giving government any significant power or authority, but I find the idea of a single politician “representing” the interests of BOTH myself AND the other 750,000 or so people in “my district” silly in the extreme.
That said, if we’re going to do this thing, partisan goals and ethnic divisions shouldn’t be part of the calculation. “Redistricting” should be this simple:
First, figure out how many House districts a state is entitled to.
Second, plug the state’s population data into software that chooses a random point within the state and draws the most compact districts possible, from that point, based on population density.
No accounting for partisan voter registration. No accounting for clusters of different ethnicities. One person, one vote, period.
We should no more draw congressional districts based on the proportion of Republicans to Democrats or the proportion of whites to blacks to Latinos, etc., than we should draw them on the proportion of plumbers to sous chefs or the proportion of Led Zeppelin fans to Swifties.
Gerrymandering isn’t about representing the interests of voters, whether as individuals or members of groups. Gerrymandering is about the desires of the country’s two main political parties to maximize their power at the expense of each other’s.
Ending gerrymandering wouldn’t solve the myriad problems with “representative democracy,” nor would it solve our biggest problem: The poverty of expecting political power to actually resolve our conflicts.
It would, however, reduce the “obviously rigged clown show” element in our elections, perhaps freeing up our time and energy so that we can start addressing those larger issues.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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