To combat gerrymandering, reformers rely on a stack of overlapping tools rather than any single fix: handing map-drawing to independent commissions, locking legislatures into objective criteria, passing citizen ballot initiatives, challenging maps in state and federal court, using mathematical tests to expose partisan bias, and, more ambitiously, changing the single-member district system that makes gerrymandering possible in the first place. Each approach closes a different loophole, and the states that have made the most progress use several at once.
Take the Pen Away From Legislators
The most direct fix is removing map-drawing authority from the people who benefit from the result. Independent redistricting commissions are bodies created specifically to draw district lines outside the normal legislative process. Roughly 11 states use commissions for congressional redistricting, and about 16 use them for state legislative maps. Some are fully independent panels of non-politicians; others are hybrid models that mix citizens with legislators or elected officials.
What makes a commission work is who is allowed to sit on it. Typical models require a balanced mix of members from different parties along with unaffiliated members, and they bar people with direct ties to elected office, legislative staff, or lobbying. Many states apply cooling-off periods of up to ten years for former candidates and registered lobbyists. Public hearings, published draft maps, and open comment periods are usually built in, which is a sharp break from the closed-door process legislatures traditionally used.
Commissions are not a cure-all — a poorly designed panel with weak independence rules can still produce a partisan map — but they remove the most obvious conflict of interest in the process.
Lock In Objective Drawing Criteria
Whether a commission or a legislature draws the map, written criteria limit how far a mapmaker can bend the lines. These rules give courts and the public a concrete standard to measure any proposed map against.
Population equality is the baseline. The Supreme Court held in 1964 that congressional districts must contain populations “as nearly equal as practicable,” and even small deviations have been struck down.1Justia Law. Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964) State legislative districts have more give under the Equal Protection Clause, which requires “substantial equality” and generally tolerates a total deviation of up to 10 percent between the largest and smallest districts.2Justia Law. Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964)
Beyond equal population, most states layer on additional rules:
- Contiguity, meaning every part of a district must physically connect. About 45 states require it, making it the most common redistricting rule in the country.
- Compactness, meaning reasonably regular shapes rather than long tendrils reaching across a state.
- Preservation of counties, cities, and towns, so political subdivisions are not needlessly carved up.
- Communities of interest, meaning groups that share social, economic, or political concerns should be kept together rather than split apart.
A district that snakes across a state to connect two pockets of one party’s voters likely violates compactness and subdivision rules on its face. When these criteria are written into law, they give judges something to enforce and give the public a plain-language basis to object.
Use Ballot Initiatives Where Legislatures Won’t Reform Themselves
In states that allow ballot initiatives, voters can go around a legislature that refuses to change the system. Petitioners gather signatures to place a redistricting measure on the ballot and put it to a direct public vote. This is the route several states have used to create independent commissions or write non-partisan criteria into their constitutions, sometimes over strong opposition from incumbent lawmakers.
Signature thresholds vary. States that allow initiatives generally require signatures equal to between 3 and 15 percent of votes cast in a recent election or of registered voters, with constitutional amendments usually requiring more than ordinary statutes. Some states add geographic distribution rules to prevent one metropolitan area from carrying a measure by itself.
The catch is that only about half the states allow citizen-initiated ballot measures at all. In the rest, redistricting reform depends on the legislature acting voluntarily or a court intervening — which is part of why some of the most durable gerrymanders sit in states where voters have no direct override.
Detect Gerrymanders With Data
Over the last decade, quantitative tools have made it much harder for a mapmaker to claim that a lopsided map is a coincidence. These tools do not draw the map, but they change what mapmakers can get away with.
The efficiency gap measures how effectively each party turns votes into seats by counting “wasted” votes — ballots cast for a losing candidate or surplus ballots beyond what a winner needed. When one party wastes far more votes than the other across all districts, the number exposes systematic disadvantage. The metric drew national attention in federal litigation, though the Supreme Court sidestepped the question of whether it alone could prove an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
Ensemble analysis is more powerful. Algorithms generate thousands or millions of hypothetical maps that satisfy every legal criterion, and the enacted map is compared against that distribution. If the real map produces outcomes that fall far outside anything the neutral maps produce, that is strong statistical evidence of partisan intent. Judges have found this persuasive in state court challenges because it doesn’t ask them to define “fair” in the abstract; it asks whether the map could plausibly have been drawn without partisan intent.
Advocacy groups and academics now publish these analyses within days of a map’s release, so legislatures can no longer quietly enact a gerrymander before anyone notices.
Challenge the Map in Court
When the political process fails, litigation is the backstop. The available legal theory depends on what kind of gerrymander is being challenged.
Racial Gerrymandering
Drawing lines to dilute the voting power of racial or ethnic minorities violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.3Constitution.congress.gov. Racial Vote Dilution and Racial Gerrymandering Section 2 is a nationwide prohibition against redistricting plans that discriminate on the basis of race, whether the discrimination was intentional or resulted from the map’s structure.4U.S. Department of Justice. Redistricting Information Where race is the predominant factor behind a district’s boundaries, courts apply strict scrutiny and require the state to prove a compelling reason and narrow tailoring.
The Supreme Court reinforced these protections in a 2023 ruling that upheld Section 2 in a challenge to a congressional map likely to dilute Black voting power. The 5-4 decision preserved the requirement that states draw majority-minority districts when certain conditions are met.
A year later, the Court made racial claims harder to prove where race and party overlap. In 2024, it held that challengers must disentangle race from partisan politics when the two are highly correlated, and that if partisan motive is a plausible explanation for a map’s shape, the challenger has not met the bar. The Court starts from a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.5Supreme Court of the United States. Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP In states where minority voters vote overwhelmingly for one party, that standard is a serious hurdle.
Partisan Gerrymandering
Federal courts are effectively closed to purely partisan gerrymandering claims. In 2019, the Supreme Court held that these claims present “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts” because no manageable standard exists for judges to decide when partisanship crosses the line.6LII / Legal Information Institute. U.S. Constitution Annotated Partisan Gerrymandering The Court acknowledged the problem was real but said the federal Constitution provides no basis for judges to police it.
The same opinion pointed to state courts as the remaining forum, noting that state constitutions and statutes “can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply.”7Supreme Court of the United States. Rucho v. Common Cause Since then, state courts in multiple states have struck down maps as partisan gerrymanders under state constitutional provisions. Some of those rulings produced measurably more competitive elections. Others ran into enforcement problems when legislatures refused to comply, or were reversed after the court’s membership changed. State-level litigation is unpredictable, but it is currently the only judicial route against a purely partisan map.
Change the Electoral Structure Itself
Every fix above accepts single-member districts as a given. A more fundamental approach questions that premise. Single-member districts are uniquely vulnerable to gerrymandering because a mapmaker only needs to control which voters fall inside each boundary to predetermine outcomes. Multi-member districts paired with proportional representation shrink that vulnerability.
Under a proportional system, a party that wins 50 percent of the vote in a six-seat district wins roughly three seats. The ability to pack or crack voters into throwaway districts collapses because seat shares track vote shares. Research modeling this approach in U.S. states found that proportional multi-member districts brought each party’s seat share into line with its statewide vote share regardless of how boundaries were drawn.
Multi-member districts alone are not enough. Winner-take-all elections in larger districts can actually deepen the problem by handing every seat to whichever party holds a slim majority. Research has found that compact three-member districts using ranked-choice voting severely limit a gerrymanderer’s ability to engineer a partisan advantage. These changes would require congressional action for federal races and a substantial rewrite of state election codes, which is why they remain aspirational for now.
Federal Legislation That Would Set a National Floor
Two federal bills have been introduced repeatedly without becoming law. The Freedom to Vote Act would require every state to use an independent commission or follow specific non-partisan criteria when drawing congressional districts, and would mandate public hearings and published draft maps nationwide. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the Voting Rights Act’s federal preclearance formula, which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013, so that jurisdictions with recent records of discrimination would again have to clear map changes with federal authorities before enacting them. It was most recently introduced in 2023 and has not advanced through both chambers.
Federal reform hits the same wall that keeps gerrymandering entrenched: the legislators who would have to vote for it often owe their seats to the current system. Until that changes, the practical fight against gerrymandering runs through state commissions, ballot initiatives, mathematical scrutiny, and litigation — in whatever combination a given state’s rules allow.