Gerrymandering: Politicians Choosing Their Voters
Anew civil war is brewing. Texas is redistricting its electoral map to help a few Republican candidates in 2026. Democrats in California, New York, and Illinois are threatening retaliatory manipulations of their own. How does gerrymandering work? What shall we do about it?
In our Republic, voters are supposed to choose their public servants. With the rise of our two-party system, unscrupulous politicians have found a way to turn this process upside down. Many district lines are drawn in twisted ways that disenfranchise large segments of the population.
As with markets, politics works better if there’s competition. When government interventions grant a business monopolistic privileges, it has little incentive to innovate, keep the customers satisfied with the quality of its products, or cut costs to lower prices. Incentives matter!
The same is true for politicians. When they know their seats are safe thanks to some creative cartography, they lose the incentive to represent the diverse interests of the constituents. Gerrymandering robs the political system of the very competition that keeps it healthy.
Here’s how it works. Imagine a place with 25 voters who must elect five representatives. 15 voters are conservative, and 10 are socialist. What would be the outcome of the elections? Three conservative wins, two socialist? Not so quick. Splitting up or concentrating voters can lead to other outcomes.
If all five electoral districts include three conservative and two socialist voters, 40% of the residents will have no voice. What if we place 10 conservatives into two districts and divide five of them to be minorities in the other three districts? Abracadabra, and 40% of the voters have 60% of the seats.
Gerrymandering creates bad incentives by disconnecting results from rewards. An employee who knows he’ll keep his job regardless of his performance is less likely to go the extra mile. Likewise, a politician in a safe district doesn’t need to care about his constituents’ problems.
This system encourages extremism. The real contest is in the primary, not the general election. Candidates must appeal to their base and are rewarded for moving to the ideological fringe rather than finding common ground. That’s how you kill bipartisanship in Washington.
In any distorted market, bad information produces bad decisions. Gerrymandering prioritizes party loyalty over solving problems. When politicians no longer fear electoral backlash, government services, infrastructure investments, and tax policies become inefficient.
The political process needs a level playing field. Rules must be transparent, consistent, and fair. Gerrymandering allows insiders to rewrite the rules to entrench their advantage. It weakens accountability and produces special-interest legislation at the expense of most constituents.
Politics is a marketplace of ideas, and gerrymandering undermines its operations. We get bad candidates and policies not because the voters are stupid—they’re simply constrained by rigged choices. It’s not a recipe for good governance. That’s how you Balkanize our communities.
Can we fix the problem? Our state, Michigan, tried an independent redistricting commission. The idea was to take the power to redraw districts from the hands of partisan politicians and give it to neutral bodies. The guiding criteria were vague, and the members still had ideological biases.
Other places experiment with ranked-choice voting or multi-member districts. Such tools could make gerrymandering less effective and give voters more diverse choices. The goal is to preserve the benefits of competition while giving more people a voice in policymaking.
When the composition of our legislative bodies doesn’t reflect the will of the people, we suffer political gridlock, social strife, and economic stagnation. Gerrymandering undermines the integrity of the electoral process, making our government unresponsive and inefficient.
Incumbents have played that game for over two centuries. More recently, the media renamed such tactics Perrymandering (for Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry) and Jerrymandering (referring to California Democrat Governor Jerry Brown). It’s time to end this perverse practice.
This piece originally was published by the Independent Institute.