William L. Kovacs

June 1, 2026

The U.S. Constitution protects the rights of citizens. It says nothing about protecting politicians from voters. Yet with the rise of partisan redistricting — especially mid-decade redistricting — citizens are increasingly treated as political commodities to be rearranged for partisan advantage.

Elected officials are supposed to serve the people, not manipulate electoral maps to avoid accountability. When politicians redraw districts to predetermine electoral outcomes, they reduce voting to a procedural exercise with little substantive meaning. Citizens may still cast ballots, but millions of votes become effectively irrelevant because district lines have already determined the likely winner.

I live in Virginia, a politically divided state. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris received roughly 52% of the vote while Donald Trump received about 46%. Virginia elected six Democrat representatives and five Republican representatives, closely reflecting the state’s partisan balance. Yet its proposed redistricting plan could have produced congressional maps heavily favoring one party far beyond its statewide support. In such systems, many citizens would effectively lose the right to meaningful political representation before a single vote is cast.

Fortunately, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the proposed redistricting effort on procedural grounds. But the underlying problem remains unresolved nationwide: increasingly sophisticated efforts by both political parties to design districts that protect their party nominees and maximize partisan advantage.

The core constitutional principle should be simple: citizens should choose their representatives, not representatives choosing their voters. Protecting the equal rights of citizens requires that all votes carry roughly equal political weight, an outcome that is intentionally denied to citizens in partisan gerrymandered districts.

The Constitution gives state legislatures broad authority over congressional elections. Article I, Section 4 — the Elections Clause — provides that the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections shall be prescribed by state legislatures, although Congress may alter those regulations.

Over those powers stands the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying any person the equal protection of the laws. That protection necessarily includes the right to vote on substantially equal terms.

The Supreme Court recognized this principle in Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims. Those landmark decisions established the “one person, one vote” doctrine, requiring legislative districts to contain roughly equal populations so that citizens’ votes would carry similar weight.

Congress later enacted the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967, requiring states with multiple House seats to create single-member, contiguous congressional districts. Yet Congress failed to define key terms such as “contiguous” or identify meaningful geographic contiguity. As a result, many states have drawn bizarrely shaped districts connected only by narrow corridors or isolated boundary points.

Some districts now resemble political engineering projects more than coherent legislative districts. While technically “contiguous,” such districts are drawn to dilute the voting strength of disfavored political or demographic groups by scattering or concentrating them in ways that predetermine electoral outcomes.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, many states impose compactness requirements on state legislative maps, but standards vary widely and are often weakly enforced. Moreover, most states do not require compactness in congressional elections. The result is a system in which legislators increasingly design electoral maps to preserve political power rather than fairly represent citizens.

The problem became even more serious after the Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause. In that case, the Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims present a non-justiciable political question beyond the reach of federal courts because no manageable constitutional standard exists to resolve them.

That decision effectively left partisan redistricting to Congress and the states — the very political actors with the greatest incentive to manipulate the system.

Mid-decade redistricting now threatens to become a recurring political weapon. Once one party redraws districts to enhance its power, the opposing party has every incentive to retaliate when it gains control. The result is a cycle of escalating electoral manipulation that steadily undermines public confidence in representative government.

If it is unconstitutional to have statistically different voting populations in congressional districts, it is unconstitutional to intentionally stack districts so that voters with views that differ from the controlling party cast worthless ballots.

And redistricting may only be the beginning.

Article IV, Section 3 gives Congress authority to admit new states and, with state legislative consent, divide existing states. If aggressive partisan manipulation becomes normalized, political parties may eventually view state creation or the division of existing states as another mechanism for permanently entrenching power in Congress and the Electoral College.

Critics may dismiss such concerns as speculative, but the modern political system already demonstrates how aggressively parties pursue structural advantages. The Constitution never mentions political parties, yet the Republican and Democrat parties now dominate virtually every level of government and control nearly all elected offices nationwide.

Redistricting is therefore not merely a technical dispute about mapmaking. It is part of a much larger struggle over whether citizens retain meaningful control over their government. The current statutory law and court rulings leave a constitutional vacuum — Congress failed to define standards, the courts declined to establish or enforce limits, and political actors naturally exploited the opening.

As Congress and the courts hollow out the constitutional principle of Equal Protection as it applies to voting rights, they are creating a republic that cannot function indefinitely when elected officials increasingly choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.

William L. Kovacs served as senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and chief counsel to a congressional committee. His books include: Congress: An Irrelevant Institution or Guardian of the Republic; Reform the Kakistocracy, the recipient of the 2021 Independent Press Award for Social/Political Change; and Devolution of Power. He can be contacted at [email protected]