On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Louisiana v. Callais to set limits on the ability of states to use race as a determining factor in creating election districts.
Also on April 29, the Virginia State Supreme Court decided to keep in place a lower court’s decision to block a voter-approved referendum that would allow Democrats to redraw congressional lines midcycle.
Two days earlier, on April 27, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to reinstate a redrawn Texas electoral map that was designed to add more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Clearly, redistricting is a “hot topic” in courts and state legislatures nationwide. But of course, redistricting—and the gerrymandering that seems inevitably to accompany it—is nothing new.
In 1991—fully 35 years ago—The Heartland Institute released “Partisan Gerrymandering: Harms and a New Solution,” a Policy Study by Daniel D. Polsby and Robert D. Popper. The analysis is even more timely today than it was then.
The paragraphs below are taken from the introduction of that Policy Study:
Redistricting, at least as it is practiced today, inevitably involves gerrymandering. Broadly defined, “gerrymandering” refers to any manipulation of district lines for partisan purposes. The term is derived from the name of former Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, whose party in 1812 was responsible for [a] salamander-shaped district depicted [in the study].
There are different varieties of gerrymandering, including racial gerrymandering, remedial racial gerrymandering, collusive bipartisan gerrymandering, and probably others. But the most common kind, the subject of this paper, is gerrymandering undertaken by the political party in control of a state legislature in order to help itself and injure its competitor. …
In Part I of this Heartland Policy Study, the authors describe gerrymandering as a real, not illusory, danger to democratic practice — the moral equivalent of stealing elections.
The phenomenon can, as the authors argue, be readily identified and effectively remedied. The constitutional framework for so doing already exists and is discussed in Part II.
The remaining sections of the paper describe procedural norms for safeguarding the constitutional rights that are now violated by gerrymandering.
In Part III, three such safeguards are described in some detail: equinumerosity (the requirement that districts have approximately equal populations), contiguity (the requirement that districts consist of contiguous territory), and compactness (the requirement that district boundaries be drawn without uncalled-for spikes, indentations, or silly meanderings).
The compactness standard — one district map-makers are currently not required to meet — is shown to be essential to the effectiveness of the other two, more commonly accepted, standards. The potency of the compactness standard in combatting gerrymandering is described in Part IV.
In Part V, the authors present a simple, but powerful, mathematical technique for the measurement of the “compactness” of any district map. The authors strongly encourage its adoption as a legal standard against which claims of gerrymandering may be evaluated. A summary and concluding remarks constitute Part VI.
Read the Policy Study here: https://wipatriotstoolbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Partisan-Gerrymandering-Harms-and-a-New-Solution.pdf