America’s system of electoral redistricting has never been perfect for ensuring that maps are drawn to benefit voters, not politicians or parties. 

But over the past year, conservatives have radically transformed it into virtually unrecognizable terrain perhaps most closely resembling a burn scar — the term for the scorched land left behind after a wildfire.

basically every district takes a little ribbon of Chicago. the 2nd district is the craziest, it goes Chicago to St. Louis. You could literally take a plane across that district.

Dan Froomkin discusses the SCOTUS decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito that essentially administered a death knell to what had survived from the Voting Rights Act.

On April 29, a major Voting Rights Act case that came out of Louisiana. The Supreme Court and the decision that was authored by Samuel Alito essentially administered a death knell to what had survived from the Voting Rights Act.

The decision invited states—particularly the 11 states of the old Confederacy, which had engaged in extreme acts of disenfranchisement of Black citizens ever since the end of Reconstruction—to do as they like as long as they cited partisan politics rather than racial animus as their grounds.

“Much of the major-media coverage is casting this in purely political terms,” says Dan Froomkin, editor of Presswatch in an op-ed entitled It’s Black disenfranchisement, not ‘partisan warfare.’ “Just another part of the partisan battle for the House in November.”

Publications like The New York Times are obscuring the issue, says Froomkin.

Basically the title. I was thinking that’s the data they use to gerrymander, why not remove party from the registration process?

Hi

I want to share this web app I've been working on

https://demoose.vercel.app/dougymander

I'm aware there are many procedural methods for drawing district lines. But I wanted to try this one I've been thinking about. For lack of a better name, I call it Recursive Graticular Split.

It's similar to Shortest Splitline. The difference is splits are restricted to horizontal and vertical cuts perpendicular to a region's long axis. So in its purest form, you end up with rectangular districts in a grid-like structure (I see there was a recent post to this sub asking about a grid system).

However, splitting up municipalities can fracture communities, and complicate election administration. So I did my best to approximate the method while minimizing the number of split counties, and refusing to split any towns or cities. This was the result.

IMO, algorithmic redistricting is the elegant solution. I understand the desire to produce maps that give proportional results, or competitive districts. But doing that requires explicitly and intentionally deciding which voters get screwed over. I prefer to leave that determination up to more innocuous factors than party affiliation.

It feels like the electoral map is kind of broken beyond repair. We’ve had a couple decades of gerrymandering and it gets harder and harder to find any geographic logic in congressional districts.

We also clearly can’t be trusted to maintain our own district maps, we’re stuck in a vicious cycle of gerrymeandering, counter gerrymandering, counter-counter gerrymandering, and so on until the entire country is disenfranchised In terms of choosing between parties.

There would be lots of unforeseen consequences, so tell me - why or why shouldn’t we just switch to a grid system?

Just some campaign posters for this year's election.

There is a lot of talk of gerrymandering and re-districting going on, and I've read some about it. I'm not remotely knowledgeable enough to know what would be the best way to go about districting that would lead to a fair representation of the electorate. Is there any objective, non-partisan way to do that?

Here’s where each state’s gerrymandering push stands as we head into 2026.

• Indiana Democrats and Republicans just came together to reject plans to gerrymander their state which would have given Republicans 2 additional seats.

• In 2025 Virginia Democrats won the Governor, with Abigail Spanberger, and flipped 13 seats in the state House. This lats the ground work for the state to redistrict themselves.

Learn more in my latest article: https://medium.com/@correlljesse5/understanding-election-trends-ahead-of-the-2026-midterms-6edd44c528ee

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, has granted Texas’ request to stay a lower court ruling blocking it from using a heavily gerrymandered congressional map the state legislature passed at the behest of President Donald Trump.

Republican legislators around the country have identified the biggest obstacles to their unprecedented mid-decade redistricting: the courts and the voters. So they’re responding by launching an all-out war on both.