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Imagine playing a board game where someone redraws the map before the game begins, and that person is on the other team. That's the basic idea behind gerrymandering: district lines can be drawn so that some votes matter much more than others.

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Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district boundaries to give one political party, group, or incumbent an unfair advantage. It usually happens during redistricting, when states update their district maps after the census. The most common tactics are packing voters into a few districts or cracking them across many, which weakens their voting power overall.

Key terms to know:

• Redistricting: The process of redrawing district lines, usually every ten years after the census.
• Packing: Concentrating one group's voters into as few districts as possible.
• Cracking: Splitting a group's voters across multiple districts so they can't form a majority in any of them.
• Wasted votes: Votes that don't affect the outcome, either because they went far beyond what was needed to win or because they were spread across districts that lost.

Most people picture gerrymandering as weirdly-shaped districts on a map — and those shapes are often a clue. But the real issue isn't aesthetics. It's about how voters are grouped and how those groupings affect election results.

The word "gerrymandering" dates back to 1812, when Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a redistricting plan that carved out a state senate district so contorted it looked like a salamander on the map. The Boston Gazette ran a cartoon of it, added wings and claws, and called it a "Gerrymander." The name stuck — and so did the practice.

Every ten years, after the US Census counts the population, states are required to redraw their congressional districts and state legislative districts. This process is called the redistricting process, and it's a normal, necessary part of how representation works. Population shifts. People move.

Congressional seats need to reflect those changes through a process called apportionment — and when seats are reassigned between states based on population changes, that's called reapportionment.

The problem is that in most states, the state legislature controls who draws the new map. When one political party controls that process, the temptation to draw a redistricting plan that benefits themselves — and punishes the other party — can be hard to resist. That's where redistricting and gerrymandering overlap.

Picture 30 students divided into five groups of six. Team Blue has 18 students. Team Red has 12. If you group them fairly, Team Blue wins most groups. But if Team Red gets to decide the groupings, they could put 10 Blue students in one group (where Blue "wastes" votes and wins by a huge margin), then split the remaining 8 Blue students across four groups — where Red wins each by a small margin.

Same 30 students. Same votes. Completely different result. That's packing and cracking in action.

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Gerrymandering doesn't require dramatic shapes or obvious manipulation. The two core tactics — packing and cracking — can be subtle enough to fly under the radar until someone crunches the numbers.

The idea here is straightforward. Draw district boundaries so that voters from the opposing party are heavily concentrated in a small number of districts. Those districts will still win by landslides. But because so many of their votes are "wasted" in lopsided victories, the packed party has fewer votes to spread across the rest of the map.

Example: Put 80% of Democratic voters in one congressional district. They win that seat easily — but by 40 points. All those extra votes don't help in neighboring districts.

Cracking is the opposite move. Instead of concentrating a group, you divide them. Draw the lines so that a city — which might lean heavily toward one party — gets split across four or five different districts. In each of those districts, that group becomes a minority. They lose everywhere, narrowly.

Example: North Carolina's congressional maps were repeatedly challenged in court for splitting Black voters across multiple districts, diluting their influence across the state.

When you add up packing and cracking, you get a systematic way to manufacture wasted votes. Votes are "wasted" in two ways: when they pile up far beyond what's needed to win a seat, or when they're spread thin across districts where the group loses. The party doing the gerrymandering tries to minimize its own wasted votes while maximizing the other party's.

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You don't need to be a political scientist to notice when something looks off. There are a few signals worth paying attention to.

Oddly shaped districts are often the first thing people point to. Some congressional maps have produced districts that snake along highways, wrap around cities, or look like nothing you'd draw if you were trying to be fair. Compactness — whether a district's shape is reasonably tight — is one standard courts and commissions sometimes apply.

But weird shapes alone aren't proof of gerrymandering. Some irregular shapes reflect genuine geographic or community factors. The better question is always: what do the voting results look like?

One of the clearest signals of gerrymandering is a large gap between the share of votes a party wins statewide and the share of seats it ends up with. If a party wins 50% of the total vote in a state but walks away with 70% of the congressional seats, that's worth a closer look.

Wisconsin became a well-known example of this pattern after its 2010 redistricting, when Republicans drew maps that let them maintain large legislative majorities even in years when Democrats won more total votes statewide.

Gerrymandering tends to produce districts where incumbents are almost impossible to beat. When a state's congressional maps result in nearly every seat being a blowout — with very few competitive districts — that's often a sign the map was drawn to protect specific elected officials rather than to reflect balanced representation.

In most states, lawmakers draw their own district maps. That's a built-in conflict of interest. Some states — including California, Michigan, and Colorado — have moved to independent commissions or redistricting commissions to reduce partisan control. Others still leave the process entirely in the hands of the state legislature or governor.

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This is where a lot of people get surprised. The answer isn't a simple yes or no.

In 2019, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark supreme court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause — a case involving North Carolina's congressional maps — ruling that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering claims. The majority held that partisan gerrymandering presents a political question beyond the reach of federal courts.

That ruling didn't make partisan gerrymandering legal in any absolute sense — it just said the Supreme Court and other federal courts aren't the right place to challenge it on partisan grounds alone.

State courts and state constitutions are a different story. Several states have successfully challenged partisan maps under their own state constitutions.

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court struck down the state's congressional maps in 2018 on state constitutional grounds, ordering a new map before that year's midterm elections.

Utah has faced ongoing disputes over whether its congressional districts were drawn to dilute the voting power of more urban, Democratic-leaning communities — a debate that continued well into the 2020s.

Racial gerrymandering — drawing district lines to dilute or manipulate the voting power of a racial group — is treated as a federal legal issue. The Voting Rights Act prohibits district maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities.

Courts have repeatedly struck down maps in states like North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, where Black voters were packed into as few districts as possible in ways that reduced their overall representation.

The legal line can get complicated. Sometimes drawing districts to protect minority voting rights (required by the Voting Rights Act) can look similar to racial gerrymandering. Courts have had to weigh these tensions on a case-by-case basis.

A growing number of states have moved away from giving their state legislature full control over redistricting.

• California uses an independent citizens' redistricting commission.
• Michigan voters approved a similar model in 2018.
• Missouri passed a redistricting reform measure in 2018 that introduced a nonpartisan state demographer to draw maps — though the legislature later moved to roll back parts of that reform.

These bipartisan or nonpartisan commissions don't eliminate disputes entirely, but they do change who has the final say over new district maps.

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The effects of gerrymandering don't stop at which party wins which seats. They ripple outward, shaping how politicians behave, how competitive elections are, and how policies are made.

When district maps are drawn to produce safe seats, elected officials face less pressure from the political center. If a representative's district is packed with their own party's voters, their main threat comes from a primary challenge — not a general election.

That dynamic can reward candidates who appeal to the most committed voters in their party rather than the broader population of constituents. Safe districts can quietly reduce accountability.

One of the most common questions people ask about gerrymandering is: "Should I even bother voting if the map is already rigged?" The answer is yes — and here's why.

Gerrymandering affects the weight and efficiency of votes across a state, but it doesn't make individual votes meaningless. Close elections still happen. Maps get redrawn. Court challenges succeed. Voting in every election, including state and local races, affects who controls the redistricting process in the first place.

State-level redistricting decisions directly affect the balance of power in the US House of Representatives. After the 2010 census, a coordinated Republican effort to win state legislative races before redistricting — called REDMAP — helped reshape congressional maps across key states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Democrats ran a parallel effort in states they controlled, including Illinois and Maryland, where new congressional maps were drawn to maximize Democratic seats. The result was a structural advantage in the House of Representatives that lasted for most of the following decade.

Texas drew national attention in 2003 when a Republican-controlled legislature pushed through a rare mid-decade redistricting — outside the normal post-census cycle — under pressure from then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The new congressional maps flipped several seats and contributed to a larger Republican majority in Congress.

New York has faced its own redistricting battles from the other direction, with Democratic-drawn maps repeatedly challenged in court and struck down by the state's own courts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.

Redistricting fights have also intersected with presidential election politics. Maps drawn after the 2020 census were debated during the Trump administration's final weeks in office and shaped early discussions about which party would control the US House heading into the 2022 midterm elections.

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Try these quick questions to check what you've picked up.

Question 1: A city mostly votes for Party A. Mapmakers split the city across four districts, where Party A loses each one by a small margin. What tactic is this?

Answer: Cracking.

Question 2: A state has 50% of voters supporting Party B, but Party B wins only 30% of seats. What might explain this?

Answer: Packing and cracking by the party that controls redistricting.

Question 3: Party A is split into two districts; they win by 60 points in each. Party B wins six other districts by 5 points each. Who likely drew the map?

Answer: Party B — or whoever controls the state legislature drawing the map.

Question 4: A district's shape stretches across three counties to connect two small towns while bypassing a large city. What might this suggest?

Answer: The map may have been drawn to include or exclude specific voter groups — worth investigating, though shape alone isn't proof.

Question 5: A redistricting commission with equal representation from both parties and several independent members is drawing a new map. What is this called?

Answer: A bipartisan or independent redistricting commission.

Gerrymandering debates are debates about political power, voting access, and fair representation.

Gerrymandering isn't difficult due to your political ineptitude. It's hard because it mixes geography, law, and math all at once — and none of those are topics most of us revisit after school. You can understand the concept of gerrymandering by reading one article on the topic. 

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