Gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon, having been employed as a political weapon in America for almost the entire duration of the country’s existence. Though it has long been a nefarious method of protecting incumbents and ensuring job security, its use as a weapon for political parties to amass power has increased in recent years as computer modeling has made predicting voter trends more accurate and made gerrymandering a more precise science.
Americans overwhelmingly view gerrymandering as plainly undemocratic and have expressed a desire for judicial intervention from the Supreme Court. However, the Court held that partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political question in Rucho v. Common Cause, effectively punting the issue to the legislature. But there is a conflict of interest inherent in letting politicians draw political boundaries. Part II discusses the use of redistricting commissions to mitigate that conflict of interest. Though commissions can produce incremental changes in the fight against gerrymandering, two factors will prevent them from being able to completely solve problems posed by gerrymandering. First, it is impossible to wholly remove partisan influence from the line-drawing process, and having lines drawn by an independent commission will not stop both parties from alleging bias and claiming that the lines have been drawn unfairly. Second, to achieve “fair” representation, there must be some degree of gerrymandering of single-member districts. Completely neutral maps will lead to majority groups—whether political, racial, economic, ethnic, etc.—winning at disproportionate rates and minority groups being underrepresented when compared to their population.
As such, measures like the Fair Representation Act have proposed unique ways to eliminate gerrymandering. Part III discusses the Fair Representation Act and its use of multimember districts and ranked-choice voting as a way to minimize gerrymandering by having fewer district lines to gerrymander. In doing so, advocates of the act argue that it will decrease polarization, increase competitive races, and lead to the election of congressional delegations that are more reflective of their constituents.
Despite the benefits of such voting reform, the Fair Representation Act has not garnered widespread support. Part IV discusses potential reasons for this lukewarm reception of comprehensive reform like the Fair Representation Act—most notably—fear that multimember districts will be used for discriminatory purposes, and that it is a piece of legislation that requires legislators to vote against their personal self-interests.
Given the lack of support for the Fair Representation Act, Part V proposes an alternative solution. Rather than an act that dictates voting reform through multimember districts and imposes the use of ranked-choice voting on the states, this Comment discusses changing 2 U.S.C. § 2c to allow states, should they choose, to use multimember districts. This Part also considers whether it is prudent to allow for the unconditional use of multimember districts or whether their use should be made conditional on the use of ranked-choice voting to elect representatives from the multimember districts.
