It looks as if the composition of the 2024-26 House of Representatives will be determined not by the electorate, but by politicians with their blue pencils determined to cling to power at the expense of democracy and the individual voters.
By Tom Arms | London
The right to vote is at the very heart of every democratic government. Running alongside that is the right to make that vote count; to provide at least the hope that people can change their political representation through the ballot box.
Without that hope the voters will lose faith in their political system and—ultimately—the government loses credibility and democratic values and the country as a whole faces serious decline.
Gerrymandering is a political tool that denies representation to certain sections of the electorate. It has been a part of the American political scene almost since the country’s foundation. It is practiced by both political parties. Neither of those facts make it anything less than what it is—political corruption.
Politicians have been devising methods of manipulating the vote almost since the votes were cast. The Romans devised a system whereby votes were weighted in accordance with the voters’ wealth. In the nominally republican city states of Renaissance Italy, citizens seeking public office were pre-vetted by the wealthy oligarchs before the people voted on them.
Then, of course, there were the pocket—or “rotten”—boroughs of Britain where centuries-old constituency boundaries meant that a handful of voters could elect one MP while a bustling city of tens of thousands went unrepresented.
The drawing of constituency—or electoral—boundaries was at the heart of Britain’s rotten boroughs. And the way in which those boundaries are drawn which became the biggest political bone of contention. Up until 1885 they continued to be organized in such a way to give more MPs to rural areas.
After the 1885 Redistribution of Seats Act, urban areas were given more seats but political parties were given a bigger say in boundary redistribution. The two biggest parties—the Liberals and Conservatives—insured their hold on power by splitting up working class areas to dilute support for the nascent Labor Party. They gerrymandered.
It was not until 1948-50 that Britain established an independent boundary commission that took control of constituency boundaries out of party political control. Gradually over the post-war years, other countries followed suit. In 2025, the United States is the only major outlier, standing alongside countries such as Zimbabwe.
The United States is a federal system and each state determines the electoral boundaries for every elected office from congressman to dog catcher. In a handful of states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan and Washington—an independent electoral commission draws the lines. New York also has a nominally independent commission, but the state legislature has reserved the right to override its decisions. In all the other 44 states the electoral boundaries are drawn by politicians in the state legislatures. In the US, drawing electoral boundaries is called “redistricting.”
The result has been truly astonishing efforts at gerrymandering. In Louisiana, for instance, a third of the population is African-American but only one of the state’s six congressmen is Black.
Louisiana is a deeply conservative Republican state. But the Democrats are just as guilty of the sin of gerrymandering. In the 2016 congressional elections in Maryland, the Democrats managed to win seven out of eight seats with just 62 percent of the vote. In 2020 In Illinois Democrats won 14 out 17 congressional seats with 60 percent of the vote.
You would think that Supreme Court would wade in to stop this bold-faced political corruption. Nope, in 2019 it ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a political question and cannot be blocked by federal courts. It can, however, be blocked by state Supreme Courts and some have done so. But if the state’s Supreme Court is the same political complexion as the legislature then there is little chance of change. This in turn raises the issue of the politicization of the American legal system.
The only way in which gerrymandering can be successfully challenged is if can be proven that constituency boundaries were drawn along racial lines. This is forbidden under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But redistricting bias along the issues of income, age, gender or single-parent families is perfectly legal.
The convention is that electoral boundaries are reconfigured after each ten-year census. That way the politicians can at least pay lip service to the claim that the constituencies are based on shifting populations and numbers of people. Each congressman represents about 716,000 constituents. It is very rare—and frowned upon—for a state to redraw its constituencies twice in the same decade.
Texas is the exception. In 2003 Republicans led by state house leader Tom Delay redrew the map a second time between censuses in preparation for the 2004 elections. It worked. Texas’s Republican representation in the US congress jumped from 15 to 21 seats even though the party only narrowly won a state-wide majority.
Now they are trying for a repeat performance. The last census was in 2020 and in October 2021, the Republican-controlled legislature approved the last voting map. It was slightly skewed towards the Republicans, but generally considered fair.
Fair is not in the interests of Donald Trump. He needs to retain his majority after the mid-term elections next year. It is a narrow majority, currently 215 Democrats to 220 Republicans and his policies are growing increasingly unpopular. So, the president took the highly unusual step of ordering Texas Republicans to gerrymander the electoral map to give Republicans another five seats and, hopefully, retain his majority in the lower house.
Texas Republicans complied with their leader’s demand. They quickly drew up the gerrymandered map; called a one-day inquiry at short notice; ignored the tsunami of complaints and moved to pass the new electoral districts into law.
However, they needed a quorum to push the necessary Act through the Texas legislature. Texas Democrats blocked it by walking out and leaving the state. Governor Greg Abbot has threatened to arrest and replace the Democratic legislators.
Democrat-controlled state legislatures are now threatening to redraw their boundaries to increase the likely number of Democrat-held seats after the 2026 mid-terms. Trump is threatening to instruct other Republican-controlled states to follow the example of Texas. Indiana, Ohio and Illinois are expected to fall into line.
It looks as if the composition of the 2024-26 House of Representatives will be determined not by the electorate, but by politicians with their blue pencils determined to cling to power at the expense of democracy and the individual voters.
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Tom Arms is the foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He is also the author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain.”
