Computers Made Gerrymandering Worse. Can They Fix It?

Here’s how democracy is supposed to work: Citizens go to the polls to choose who will represent them, and when all the seats are filled, the legislative body looks roughly proportional to the makeup of voters. But that’s not what happened in Wisconsin’s 2012 election, when Republicans took more than 60% of the seats in the state assembly despite getting less than half the votes. That outcome–and similar results in five other states that year–occurred largely thanks to computer-driven partisan gerrymandering.

As a political strategy, gerrymandering is hardly new; the term dates back to the 1800s. But critics say increasing polarization of Democrats and Republicans and sophisticated software have made it much worse in recent years.

Some states have tried to address partisan gerrymandering by assigning the redrawing process to nonpartisan commissions. More typically, though, in states like Wisconsin, the task falls to the sitting politicians. And that means the majority party controls the process that will be used to fill its own seats.

Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of using partisan gerrymandering to their advantage. But about 20 years ago, the GOP gained a national edge, and Democrats have struggled to redraw the lines in their favor ever since. The digital age is partly to blame; district lines are drawn with the use of increasingly sophisticated data-analysis and mapping technologies. These days, once a party makes a gerrymandered map, it’s harder than ever for the opposing party to regain control and flip the map in their favor.

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