Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Where We Have Been: The History of Gerrymandering in America
- How Gerrymandering Got So Nasty: Means, Motive, and Opportunity
- Redistricting Reform
- Can Commissions Make Districting Fairer?
- 2021–2022 Reapportionment and Commissions
- Alternatives to American-Style Districting
- Areas for Future Research
- Conclusion
- Appendix
Conclusion
Gerrymandering is an obvious problem in American politics. In recent decades, more and more states have developed various approaches to taking districting powers away from state legislatures.
While redistricting commissions, particularly independent commissions, have demonstrated their value in drawing fairer maps than state legislatures, how much fairer is a matter of debate.
According to existing studies, the improvements in partisan fairness are modest, and sometimes debated. The effects on competitive elections are even less certain. Commissions also tend to draw districts that are more compact, and do a better job of keeping communities together and ensuring that minority groups can elect their preferred candidates to achieve fair representation.
To be sure, as partisan and racial gerrymandering grow more aggressive, and the Supreme Court continues to remove legal restraints, it is quite possible that commissions will become more important, and demonstrate greater impacts on fairness compared to partisan state legislatures. Likewise, as more states embrace truly independent models of redistricting commissions that take all power away from politicians, the impacts may become more pronounced.
However, it is also possible that the Supreme Court could embrace a radical view that state legislatures have complete power over districting. If this were to happen, commissions would be rendered unconstitutional unless specifically mandated by Congress under Article I, Section 4.
But as this analysis has hopefully clarified, there are significant limits to achieving fairness given the geographical distributions of Democrats and Republicans and the widespread usage of the single-member district, regardless of who draws the lines and under what authority. As long as the single-member district remains the operational technology, mapmakers will face many difficult tradeoffs that fail to live up to the collective ideals of fair districting, regardless of whether they are independent and nonpartisan, or political and partisan.