Good Gerrymandering Can’t Cure Bad Gerrymandering

Election Day for Virginia voters arrives April 21. The voters of the Old Dominion have received enough glossy mailers to fill several dump trucks, urging them to vote for or against a state constitutional amendment that changes the state’s redistricting process.

That proposed amendment would “allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” In plain English, it would allow the state legislature to scrap the work of Virginia’s independent redistricting commission and draw its own House districts.

Control of the U.S. House may hinge not just on voters this fall, but on a growing redistricting arms race that has now reached Virginia. In a narrowly divided House, even a handful of seats redrawn mid-decade could determine control.

The Virginia amendment is sold as a way to “restore fairness” — a controversial description. That understanding of “fairness” rests on the notion that off-cycle gerrymandering in other states is bad gerrymandering — and so it therefore must be offset by “good” gerrymandering. That is presumably the foundation for another of the proposal’s claims: The amendment will give voters the power “to level the playing field in the midterms this fall.”

The playing field that the amendment’s backers seek to level is the national electoral landscape — in particular, the partisan demographics of congressional districts across the country. Each state in the Union draws its own congressional maps. Typically, they only do so every 10 years, but that norm is collapsing. Six different states created new congressional maps after the 2024 elections, largely due to pressure from President Trump or in reaction to redistricting efforts in other states. Six other states are currently considering changes to their House maps.

How many House seats will change as a result of this partisan arms race? Nobody knows precisely.

It’s clear why Virginia Democratic Party leaders support the amendment. They have identified a sickness in our political system and want to prescribe a cure. But it is far from clear that this amendment is the right cure for the problem.

Just as a diabetic needs insulin, and an appropriate dose can be life-saving, too much is as dangerous as too little. Similarly, a poorly crafted attempt to level the national playing field with state-level gerrymandering threatens to destroy the health of the political process it’s meant to save. Any effort to get to a level playing field necessarily rests on electoral results from a collection of states — somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen — and it will be nearly impossible for the resulting pileup to get the level right with any degree of precision. In part, that is because there is no real agreement on what a level playing field would look like.

And it’s not likely one will result from additional gerrymandering. As more states are drawn into a destructive chain reaction — an immense waste of effort leading to readjustments of congressional districts across the country — the chief effect will be to weaken the voices of voters, not to usher in greater fairness.

Virginia should not join this race to the bottom. Instead, it should try to stop its spread. That’s what Indiana did. Last year, when President Trump ordered Indiana lawmakers to produce a Republican gerrymander, they refused. One Republican legislator, state Sen. Spencer Deery, responded that his opposition to mid-cycle gerrymandering was not in conflict with his principles; instead, he declared, “my opposition is driven by them.”

Everyone knows this measure is unfair to Virginia voters. As Rep. Don Beyer (D‑Va.) recently explained, “even though this seems unfair in Virginia, it’s totally fair for America.”

But good gerrymandering does not solve the problem of bad gerrymandering. Unnecessary, irregular redistricting, regardless of how it is sold, is still gerrymandering. All of it is corrosive to democracy. To paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts,

the way to end gerrymandered districts is to end the gerrymandering of districts.

The voters of Virginia have no real interest in a special redistricting effort that produces lopsided, partisan results. Instead, the interest that Virginia voters all share is their right to vote in an election with politically neutral rules with results that authentically reflect their choices. They would be unwise to adopt voting rules that are biased in favor of a partisan majority, because there is no guarantee that the adopters will be in the majority forever.

They shouldn’t respond to gerrymandering in other states with gerrymandering of their own.