Gerrymander this!

We're looking at you, Texas...

August 16, 2025 ~ Vol. 37

Elbridge Thomas Gerry was an American Founding Father, a Harvard grad, the eighth Governor of Massachusetts, and the country’s fifth Vice President serving under “The Father of the Constitution”, James Madison. He is also credited with designing the political redistricting mapping process known derisively as “gerrymandering”. Go figure. You do have to appreciate the irony of a Vice President Gerry, the guy who demonstrated how to bend the rules, serving under President James Madison, the guy who wrote the rules.

Gerrymandering is back in the headlines. Texas has captured the attention of politicos this month, as Democrats try to avoid a first ever mid-decade redistricting that would redraw the lines of the state’s thirty-eight Congressional districts to favor the Republican majority (i.e.: gerrymandering). Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the Texas State Legislature in response to a request from President Trump to conduct a mid-decade redrawing of the Texas Congressional Districts.

A national redistricting occurs each decade after the national census is conducted, most recently in 2020. Texas has never conducted a mid-decade redistricting before, but there is nothing in the Texas state constitution that specifically prohibits it. As many as five seats could swing to Republicans if the maps are redrawn now, which President Trump sees as Republican’s best chance to preserve the narrow Republican majority in Congress. Blue state governors have countered with threats to conduct their own early redistricting in an attempt to counterbalance the broadside from Texas. The logistics of conducting an off season redistricting in California or Illinois make that threatened race to the bottom more bluster than likely to happen, but the threats will make for good video for Governors Newsom and Pritzker, both assumed 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. Probably just a coincidence. In an attempt to thwart the process in Texas, their Democratic caucus has decamped to blue states, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, denying a quorum in the Texas State Legislature and preventing—at least for the moment— the Republican majority from gerrymandering the maps. Observers of Texas politics may remember a similar drama in 2021, when Democratic legislators fled the state, denying Republicans the quorum they needed to pass legislation that Democrats saw as hostile to voting rights. “Quorum breaking” is a time-honored practice in Texas politics that goes back as far as 1870, but more recent legislative changes also allow for “quorum-forcing” by the majority, compelling legislators to return with incentives like $500 per day fines for being absent. Since much of the Texas Democratic caucus is staying in Illinois at the invitation of billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, I don’t think that anyone is fretting about who ponies up the $500.

Democratic attorney and voting rights advocate Marc Elias made these observations about the Texas imbroglio on his website, Democracy Docket:

When done fairly, the process of redistricting creates congressional districts that reflect the population and values of a community. When voters go to the polls on the first Tuesday in November, they are electing someone who represents the interests of the district.

Gerrymandering, however, flips this on its head and allows politicians to choose their voters. It drains competition from elections and breeds cynicism among the electorate. For example, under Texas’ proposed map, five seats currently held by Democrats are targeted to be redrawn to favor Republicans — the voters be damned. The map is so crazy that the parking lot of the state’s capitol building would literally be split into two different districts.

Sadly, these gerrymandered maps often accomplish their partisan goals at the expense of minority communities. That’s exactly what Republicans are doing in Texas, and we can’t let them get away with it.

Lunch bet: This Texas movie ends just like the last one—the Dems fold.

The term “gerrymander” dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry was credited with redrawing one Massachusetts Congressional District to look like what appeared to one local newspaper editor to be a salamander. Ergo, gerry-mander. The mechanics of the process are simply to shoehorn as many voters as possible from the minority party into the fewest number of districts, which then leaves all of the remaining districts (and political representative seats) for the majority party who controlled drawing the maps.

Each U.S. Congressional district represents approximately 761,169 people, according to the 2020 census. (The US population of 331,108,515 is divided by the 435 districts to determine the number of people in each district.) The number can vary slightly due to state population and the fixed number of 435 seats in the House of Representatives. The math also needs to be adjusted right from the jump because there are three states with populations of less than 761,169 people: Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska, and they are constitutionally entitled to at least one Congressional Representative (and two Senators). Texas is on President Trump’s radar because of their 38 seats in Congress, second only to California’s 52, which leans heavily Democratic.

There is nothing illegal about gerrymandering, per se, even though the process results in a partisan advantage for one party. The Supreme Court has opined that an excessively partisan district map would be unconstitutional but has so far declined to rule on specific challenges because there is no way to objectively determine how much partisanship is too much. Federal courts have taken a very hands-off approach to challenges to redistricting and accusations of gerrymandering, asserting that the logistics and procedures of the election process are a state’s responsibility, and not the purview of the federal courts. The exceptions have been in cases where gerrymandered districts resulted in disadvantaged racial minorities within the gerrymandered district(s), whose civil rights were violated by the proposed changes.

Even though gerrymandering is—in and of itself—legal, good government advocates and I think most reasonable people agree that the process is inherently unfair and undemocratic to minority party voters. Many states and municipalities have addressed the problem by appointing non-partisan committees to redraw the Congressional district lines each decade after a census is taken, but the product of those committees must still be approved by the state legislators who are ultimately responsible for the final product (the maps). That is the point where this nonpartisan committee process usually breaks down. Republicans have no lock on trying to take advantage of a minority party’s weakness when the opportunity is there. Look no further than New York Democrat’s flagrant attempt to gerrymander the redistricting maps after the last census, which the New York courts ultimately slapped down and sent everyone back to the cartography room.

You might might think that a fair, nonpartisan way to approach mapping congressional districts would be to draw 435 squares on the map, or at least districts with borders with straight lines, each containing the necessary 761,169 people. No squiggly lines, no stretched out districts two hundreds miles long (like ours in NY-21)—and nothing that looks like a salamander. You would think that the courts and good government advocates would love the simplicity and the objectivity and seemingly the elimination of intentional partisan advantage—but we would be wrong.

State constitutions address the objectives and the mechanics of their redistricting process, and most focus on a few key objectives. Some are easy, and obvious, but a few, not so much. Congressional (and NY State) legislative districts must be contiguous. Aggregating multiple parcels of noncontiguous real estate into one district is not allowed. Districts would strive for “compactness”. Voters who live two hundred miles away from each other are less likely to have similar values and priorities. Congressional districts must respect existing municipal districts (town or city boundaries) and many municipalities’ borders are influenced by geographic considerations: rivers, shorelines, mountains, etc.

Falling further down the redistricting rabbit hole, most states require that maps must preserve “communities of interest”. Regarding redistricting and “communities of interest”, Loyola Law School’s website had this to offer::

“communities of interest” is another common criterion reflected in state law. By constitution or statute, 15 states consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.

A “community of interest” is just a group of people with a common interest (usually, a common interest that legislation might benefit). Kansas‘ 2002 guidelines offered a fairly typical definition: “[s]ocial, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area, which are probable subjects of legislation.

The number of considerations compounds the ultimate number of variables, and the number of potential (map) outcomes increases exponentially.

With literally millions of potential mapping solutions, alternatively considering equity, fairness, existing borders of sometimes overlapping municipal districts, and communities of interest with differing priorities, it would seem to me that at least part of the solution should include the newly found extraordinary capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. AI could ostensibly process all of those myriad considerations in the time it takes to fill out a ballot. At the very least AI could remove some of the overt human biases present in the current system of manually preparing the maps.

Or not.

According to the Google machine’s AI assistant:

AI and computational tools represent a significant advancement in the field of redistricting. They can provide valuable tools for identifying gerrymandering and generating more equitable district maps. However, it's critical to address the inherent challenges of bias, transparency, and balancing competing interests to ensure these tools are used to promote genuinely fairer electoral processes. Ultimately, achieving truly fair maps will likely require a combination of robust legal standards, transparent processes, and careful human oversight of AI technologies.

In other words, AI can be a powerful tool to analyze redistricting maps, but human biases inherent in the data will be reflected in the AI recommendations distilled from that data, in addition to the biases present in the guiding algorithm, also written by humans.

Perhaps the answer is a few years away when quantum computing can examine billions instead of millions of potential outcomes. Hopefully by then the machines will have taken over and they will be able to reconstruct what is left of the democracy that we destroyed.

More reading on this topic, from Common Cause:

Fair Maps Are Essential to Fair Elections

And from The New York Times:

Geometry Solves Gerrymandering

Aug. 12, 2025

Link to Free Gift Article (No Paywall):

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/opinion/math-solution-gerrymandering.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dk8.pgCX.bLxmmpkAS9l3&smid=url-share

And another thing…

A Washington DC man was arrested this week on felony charges of assaulting a federal agent, after throwing what was described as a sub-style sandwich at a Customs & Border Patrol agent who had been deployed to patrol Washington, D.C. by President Trump. The episode occurred outside a Subway Sandwich shop and the accused sandwich thrower had been heard condemning the presence of the federal agents on domestic soil with shouts of “Shame, Shame” and “Fascists” before hurling his lunch at one of them. The crime is punishable by a year in jail if convicted, and up to eight years if there was an intent to commit a second felony. A DC Transit Police detective who processed the complaint, stated that DC resident Sean Dunn had confessed to the crime. “I did it.” Dunn was quoted as saying. “I threw the sandwich.” (I swear I am not making this up, but who among us has not contemplated launching our Subway sandwich?)

The case has already been filed in the US District Court in DC, which means it will be prosecuted by newly appointed US Attorney and FOX News personality Jeanine Pirro. Lucky us. Tune in at 8 PM.

The altercation and subsequent arrest raises a number of questions. I have a few of my own:

A sandwich? Seriously? Did the sandwich leave a mark? Did it leave a stain? Did Dunn order the meatball parm or the Subway “Healthy Choice” daily special—Bologna, Lettuce & Tomato? (Update: witnesses have identified the sandwich as s “salami hoagie”. There is no reporting on the nature of the salami, cooked or “hard” Genoa.) If Dunn had ordered the “two for one” special, would a second sandwich be considered an intent to commit a second felony, or would both sandwiches be considered a single felony punishable by a maximum one year in jail? If you throw your sandwich at some random DC tourist dressed up in Bolivian Army camo and they turn out to be an ICE agent, does it count? Is Subway complicit in any of this or do they enjoy the same immunities from prosecution as gun and ammo manufacturers?

Any suggestion that the White House is using this story as another distraction from releasing the Epstein files is purely conjecture on your part.

This is a developing story. Or not.

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