How to end the redistricting wars for good

As mid-cycle redistricting escalates, one reform would keep the maps from mattering

In the 2024 elections, only about four percent of U.S. House seats changed hands from one party to another. Four percent. It doesn’t seem possible to make our political system even more rigid. But the two major parties are trying anyway.

In advance of the 2026 midterms, state legislators are racing to redraw congressional maps to make seats safer for one party or the other. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that for decades allowed voters of color to challenge maps drawn to dilute their voting power.

Most Americans live in districts where the outcome was decided long before Election Day by politicians drawing lines to protect their seats. This November, millions of voters will cast ballots that are powerless to affect those outcomes. With this latest wave of mid-cycle redistricting, we’re entering a new phase of a problem that’s plagued American democracy from nearly the beginning.

It’s also a problem that most other democracies have managed to solve.

Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it

In 1968, the political scientist Robert Dixon quipped that “all districting is gerrymandering.” Dixon was making an observation about a fundamental feature — and flaw — of the U.S. electoral system itself: our use of single-member districts.

Single-member districts are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. Gerrymandering works by exploiting a common feature of them known as “wasted votes.” When a candidate wins with 60% of the vote, the 40% cast for other candidates doesn’t help to elect anyone; those votes are considered “wasted.” So, too, are the 10% the prevailing candidate earned beyond what was needed to win. Gerrymanderers are essentially engineers of this waste, designing districts to maximize the opposition’s wasted votes and minimize their own.

Read more — How to end gerrymandering

Take Austin, Texas, as an example. In 2011, mapmakers sliced up the city by drawing parts of it into several surrounding districts. This dispersed the city’s largely Democratic voters across multiple districts. Republicans were able to win in race after race by small but comfortable margins (minimizing waste) while Democrats were spread thinly across the map (maximizing waste). The result: the next year, Republicans in Texas won roughly 58% of the statewide vote but secured 67% of the state’s House seats. Of course, this cuts both ways. In 2024, Democrats in heavily gerrymandered Illinois won about 53% of the vote but ended up with 82% of the state’s seats.

That each of our congressional districts elects only one representative seems natural enough — by and large, that’s the way it’s always been. But globally, this is unusual. The reason we so rarely hear about gerrymandering elsewhere is that most democracies use a system where gerrymandering simply doesn’t work.

Proportional representation inhibits gerrymandering at the source

Today, Protect Democracy released a new report, “When Maps Don’t Matter,” that unpacks how adopting a single reform for the U.S. House would end the redistricting wars for good.

Read more — When Maps Don’t Matter

Most democracies now use multi-member districts where winners are allocated proportionally to votes: a system we’ve long supported called proportional representation. In a five-seat district, a party that wins 40% of the vote receives two seats, and another that wins 60% receives three. As districts grow in size — from one to three members, or from three to five — the ability to manipulate outcomes through line-drawing rapidly diminishes.

Proportional systems aim to align seats with votes: winning about half the vote gets you about half the seats — not 82%. Try as they might, would-be gerrymanderers can’t do much about it, because proportional systems deprive them of their one key tool: wasted votes. Recall that a party that wins 40% of the vote in a single-member district wins nothing (lots of waste). But in a five-seat district, that same party wins two seats: instead of being wasted, nearly all of the votes contribute to representation.

Consider what happens when mapmakers try to gerrymander under proportional representation. Certainly, one could move voters across a district line. But doing so just means those voters bring their representation with them. If 40% of voters are shut out of representation in one district, they simply elect their proportionate share somewhere else. Shuffling the map just shuffles where their seats come from, but ultimately leaves them with the same amount of representation.

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Proportional systems make gerrymandering prohibitively difficult for another reason: It tends to generate multiparty competition. In a two-party system, mapmakers can often make educated guesses about how voters will split between the two sides and draw districts accordingly. But when three or five or more parties are competing, those calculations become much less predictable. A smaller party might surge unexpectedly, drawing support from several different parties and reshuffling the political landscape. Multipartyism increases uncertainty — and uncertainty is the enemy of gerrymandering. When it’s harder to predict outcomes, it’s harder to manipulate the maps in advance.

Over 500 scholars call on Congress to end the redistricting wars through proportional representation

Ridding our politics of gerrymandering will ultimately require reforming the system that enables it.

So say (and we agree) more than 500 scholars — including the nation’s leading democracy, voting rights, and redistricting experts — who also today released an open letter calling on Congress to adopt proportional representation as an end to the redistricting wars.

“These developments are serious,” wrote the scholars, referring to recent developments like the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais and the escalation of mid-cycle redistricting. “But they should not obscure the underlying diagnosis: gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it. We write to urge Congress to do what most democracies have already done: adopt proportional representation.”

Reforms that preserve single-member districts are not enough

It’s possible (sometimes) to get rid of intentional gerrymandering while leaving single-member districts intact. But here’s the catch: Lopsided results tend to persist anyway.

In the 2024 election, California used maps drawn by an independent redistricting commission. Under these maps, Democrats won roughly 60% of the statewide vote but still earned about 83% of the state’s U.S. House seats. This gold-standard commission had all but eliminated gerrymandering, but Democrats still won far more seats than their vote share would suggest. What happened?

In California, Republicans tend to be dispersed geographically, spread out across regions dominated by Democrats. Despite the commission’s best efforts, this prevented mapmakers from drawing districts that would group Republicans together and allow them to win seats commensurate with their actual numbers. This problem is known as geographic sorting. Even in states where gerrymandering isn’t much of an issue, single-member districts are still uniquely sensitive to voter geography — producing distorted results similar to those generated by gerrymandering.

To be sure, reforms like independent commissions or proposed bans on gerrymandering are an improvement over the status quo. California’s results would almost certainly be even more lopsided otherwise (as they will likely be again, now that the state has voted to pause the commission). But as the more than 500 scholars explain, the use of single-member districts “makes the drawing of district lines consequential in the first place. As long as that system remains intact, distorted election outcomes will persist.”

It’s time to eliminate the problem at its source

Americans have never been fond of gerrymandering.

The term itself was coined to mock a salamander-shaped district drawn to protect the party of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812. Over 200 years later, Americans continue to deride the practice. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, roughly seven in 10 said states should not be allowed to draw districts to favor one party.

And over 200 years later, the problem is still with us — for the simple reason that our system makes it possible. It’s time for a new system that eliminates the problem at its source.