Gerrymandering

Letter to the Editor

Here’s a Letter to the Editor I sent to the New York Times last week:

Dear Editor,

Mr. Holder is exactly correct that the redistricting chaos has gone on long enough (“This Redistricting Chaos Must End,” Opinion, 5/18/26). Unfortunately, his proposed solutions have all been tried before and have failed before. As long as people are born, die, and move around, the problems will not go away as long as we continue to use geography for our basis of representation. But in the age of computers, there is no reason to suspect that geography is the best way to group people.

An alternative means would be alphabetically by surname. One Representative could serve, for example, the Andersons, Baileys, and Changs of a state while another serves the Joneses through the Murphys. Each state could set their own cutoffs. Alternatively, we could allocate representation by birthday. The math all works the same, but politics would be transformed.

Pork barrel spending, a favorite among elected officials, runs on geography. A Congressperson can deliver a bridge or an Air Force base to a district, but not to surnames. A diffuse constituency, scattered across every town and county in the state, is a constituency that is hard to bribe with targeted spending.

The problem Mr. Holder identifies isn’t who draws the lines. It’s that we’re still drawing lines on maps to begin with.

David Hebert
Director, Economics & Economic Policy
American Institute for Economic Research

Ok, I’ll admit that the representation-by-surname example is a bit absurd. BUT, the underlying point that there’s no reason to automatically assume that geography has to be the answer to issues of representation.

If we’re going to continue drawing lines on maps, we’re going to continue having problems of gerrymandering. It is an unavoidable problem with this kind of system because you have to define what “better” and “worse” mean in the context of the decision. If you are a Republican, for example, the redistricting efforts going on in certain states would make those districts better for you. If you’re a Democrat, then those efforts will make those districts worse for you. If you think proportionate representation by race/gender/socioeconomic class/whatever is an ideal to strive for, then those districts may or may not lead to better districts for you.

Before we draw lines, we need to figure out what goal it is that we’re trying to accomplish with those lines, acknowledge it, and then go about determining where to draw the lines with that goal in mind. Instead, what we’re doing is exactly what we’ve done every time this comes up: argue about the lines and the goals at the same time. And as we’ve seen, that only produces problems.