Gerrymandering, VRA, Partisanship, and Federalism

01 May, 2026

You may have heard that we are in a very partisan age. You may have also heard that there's a mid-decade gerrymandering race to the bottom. And you may have heard that the Supreme Court has significantly altered the Voting Rights Act this week. Some notes:

1. This is not a great state of affairs. And all of these things are in some way linked.

2. There's nothing wrong per se with strong partisanship---it's more the norm than the exception in republics, across both time and space. But when you combine it with districting and gerrymandering, you tend to inevitable distort---and largely worsen---the representational math. It's stupid that 40% of the voters in Massachusetts prefer the GOP but get none of the 9 House seats. And it's dumb that the GOP has a 10-4 edge in North Carolina, a state that's more or less 50-50 in partisan preference.

3. Further, when there are racial disparities in party preference, it tends to push a party system toward a lot of race-based thinking, both pro and con, which isn't ideal either way. There's absolutely no normative vision of democracy that sees locking a distinctive minority out of House seats via gerrymandering as good, or even reasonable. But it's also not fully satisfying to solve that by creating ascriptive carve-out districts specifically for racial minorities. It's second-best, at best.

4. Ideally, we'd like a system that, even if partisan, tended to offer representation that reflected popular support for the parties in various jurisdictions. And I'd like the 15th amendment enforced in a way that eliminates race as a barrier to voting, minimizes race as a feature of the electoral system, but still allows minority voters to choose ascriptive candidates that can win, if they so wish.

5. Luckily, as Lee Drutman writes today, there's a system that gets us closer to all of this, and can be put in place without even needing constitutional-level change: proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

6. It can get complicated, but the basics of proportional representation are simple: parties produce lists of candidates. You vote for a candidate. All the votes for the party are totaled together. Whatever proportion of the vote the party gets statewide, that's the proportion of seats they get in the House. If the Dems get 65% of the vote in Massachusetts and the GOP 35%, then the Dems get 6 seats and the GOP gets 3. And those seats go to the 6 and 3 most-selected candidates on their lists.

7. Note that this eliminates the line-drawing. Gerrymandering is just gone, because the lines are gone. But it also greatly improves the racial issues. No more lines can be drawn to box out black votes. No more districts are created to make black seats. If black voters want to vote for a black candidate from a party list, they just do so. If enough do---that is, if the Dems get 6 seats, and the black candidate(s) were among the top 6 Dem vote-getters, you end up with a black representative. No racial-content to the process. No equal-protection problems. But in almost all cases, better ascriptive representation of minorities, if they want it.

8. But wait, it gets even better! Since you only need 12% of the vote in Massachusetts to qualify for a seat, all sorts of third-parties can now emerge, and actually get seats. The Greens can likely get at least one, the Libertarians might be able to get one. If black voters saw their interests as different from the Dems, they could start their own party. Without the need to get to 50% in each district, none of the constitutive pieces of the big-tent party coalitions would need to organize before the election. A whole new party system opens up.

9. One of the big failures of American federalism has been the lack of diversity in governing institutions. Save for unicameral Nebraska, all 50 states have bicameral separation of powers systems, with independently-elected executives, drawn from geographic first-past-the-post districts. I would love to see some toying with these systems. If a few states would try proportional representation, it could prove popular, and spread much the way other federalism-based reforms did, like women's voting rights, gay marriage, or abolition.

10. At the congressional level, the single-member district system is required right now, by law. Congress passed the Uniform Congressional District Act in 1967, in part to prevent at-large congressional elections (all candidates selected statewide) in the multi-member states, which tended to be used to undercut partisan and racial minority representation.

11. I would not propose Congress just immediately switch the whole country over to proportional representation. But amending the Uniform District Act to continue the ban on at-large elections in the multi-member states, but allowing for states to use proportional party-list systems might spur some experimentation, which would be excellent.¹

12. There's a fear that proportional representation will cost us some of the virtues of the district system. This is undeniably true. Local representation will suffer, as may constituent service that is currently tied to the district-based form of representation. It's a trade off. But in our partisan age, it's worth it in order to (1) end the gerrymandering wars, (2) improve popular representation, (3) improving the implementation of the 15th amendment for racial minorities, and (4) spur a multi-party system.

13. Proportional representation is not perfect. It has lots of details to work out. But, in general, it's a better system of republican democracy than the old Anglo-American geographic district system. And right now, it's more obvious than ever that it's time may have come.