Some Thoughts on Gerrymandering and Mid-Term Redistricting in the United States

Posted on 2025/09/30 by J.W.J. Bowden

Gerrymandering means that the party in power manipulates the boundaries of electoral districts to maximize the votes of its own supporters and dilute the votes of its opponents in an attempt to stay in office as long as possible. [1] This blended word comes from the combination of Governor Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts and salamander; the original Gerrymander refers to the serpentine shape of one infamous congressional district that the legislature established in the 1810s to preserve a Democratic-Republic voting block and which Gerry signed into law.[2] Ideally, the electoral districts within a province would each contain roughly the same number of people within a narrow variance of the average number of people per MP, and these districts would also be established without regard to political party and would instead follow the general geographic contours of the province. Since single-member districts cannot by definition overlap with one another, the most mathematically “compact”, or perfect, electoral district has only four sides. In contrast, a gerrymandered district sprawls out into the squiggly lines of a pernicious polygon that cobbles together multiple pockets of support for one political party.[3] This pattern held for the first few decades after Confederation in Canada and still holds sway in many American states today.

A series of rulings by the US Supreme Court have mandated both the equality of population of congressional districts within a state and affirmative racial gerrymandering, and the legislatures in most states still establish the boundaries of both federal congressional districts and state legislative districts by statute directly. Consequently, even districts gerrymandered to favour one party over another must still contain roughly equal populations which deviate by far smaller percentages from the mean than what EBRA and all provincial equivalents allow in Canada.[4] American congressional districts within each state can be both gerrymandered and contain very similar populations within narrow margins as low as ±1% or less of the average number of people per congressional representative, what EBRA would call the electoral quota.[5]

For example, the legislature of Texas undertook a highly controversial mid-term redistricting of the state’s 38 congressional districts in August 2025; Plan C-2308 relied upon the state’s population under the most decennial census of 2020 (29,145,505).[6] But 37 of the 38 new congressional districts contain populations of precisely the average number of people per district (what EBRA calls the electoral quota and what the Lone Star State calls the “ideal constituency population”) of 766,987; the one other district contains one less than this average, at 766,986 out of arithmetic necessity.[7] This electoral map, overtly gerrymandered with the express goal of helping the Republicans win five more seats in the US House of Representatives in November 2026, therefore registers at 0.00% on the Loosemore-Hanby Index.[8] Nothing could better illustrate that disproportionality in the number of people per elected representative and gerrymandering remain separate and distinct concepts which by law (since the 1960s) cannot overlap in the United States. Incidentally, the congressional apportionment of representatives per state under the census of 2020 came in at only 1.39% on the Loosemore-Hanby Index as well, compared to malapportionment of 4.40% of the number of MPs per province in Canada in 2022.[9]

This does not compute in the Canadian experience, where the Doctrine of Effective Representation coupled within high acceptable deviations from smaller electoral quotas have produced electoral districts at once more compact (closer to having only four sides) and also with higher variances from the average population within a province. Parliament created independent electoral boundaries commissions to eliminate partisan gerrymandering, but not to impose an absolute equality of population within each province, because EBRA still allows the populations of electoral districts within a province to vary in the normal course of events by up to ±25% of the electoral quota and by even more under “extraordinary” circumstances. Parliament could only enforce individual equality by amending the Representation Formula to lower the malapportionment of MPs per province and by amending EBRA to lower the disproportionality of people per MP within each province.

While the malapportionment of representatives per polity and the disproportionality of the number of people per representative within each polity depend on quantitative arithmetic, gerrymandering or not gerrymandering stem from qualitative judgements. Gerrymandering necessarily means that politicians act in bad faith to serve their own selfish interests, which is why the combination which continues in so many American states of zero disproportionality  coupled with gerrymandering seems so disappointing or infuriating.

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Notes

[1] Nick Seabrook, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022), 4-5.

[2] Seabrook, One Person, One Vote, 13-14.

[3] Zach Taylor, Jack Lucas, J.P. Kirby, and Christopher Macdonald Hewitt, “Canada’s Federal Electoral Districts, 1867-2021,” Canadian Journal of Political Science (2023): 6.

[4] Taylor et al., “Canada’s Federal Electoral Districts, 1867-2021,” 14.

[5] Kent Roach, “Chartering the Electoral Map into the Future,” in Drawing Boundaries: Legislatures, Courts, and Electoral Values, edited by John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon, and David E. Smith, 200-219 (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Fifth House Publications, 1992), 206.

In the 2020s, the average population of an American congressional district across the 50 states also came to 752,689, compared to an average electoral quota across the 10 provinces of 91,106. United States. Department of Commerce. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Results – Table 1: Apportionment Population and Number of Representatives by State: 2020 Census,” 26 April 2021. <https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/dec/2020-apportionment-data.html&gt;

[6] United States. Department of Commerce. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Results – Table 1 : Apportionment Population and Number of Representatives by State: 2020 Census,” 26 April 2021. <https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/data/apportionment/apportionment-2020-table01.xlsx&gt;

[7] Texas, Texas Legislative Council, Congressional Districts – Plan C 2308, District Population Analysis with County Subtotals, 29 July 2025. <https://data.capitol.texas.gov/dataset/planc2308/resource/7913dc72-1d21-4b71-adfd-e2bea96835c7&gt;

[8] Liz Crampton and Zach Montellaro, “Texas GOP Passes the House Gerrymander Trump Asked For,” Politico, 23 August 2025. <https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/23/texas-passes-congressional-map-gerrymander-00519116&gt;

[9] United States. Department of Commerce. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Results – Table 1: Apportionment Population and Number of Representatives by State: 2020 Census,” 26 April 2021.

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About J.W.J. Bowden

My area of academic expertise lies in Canadian political institutions, especially the Crown, political executive, and conventions of Responsible Government; since 2011, I have made a valuable contribution to the scholarship by having been published and cited extensively. I’m also a contributing editor to the Dorchester Review and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law.
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