Supreme Court Holds the Mapmaking Veto

Millions of Americans live in congressional districts where their votes may not elect their preferred party, while legislators who benefit from safe seats have little reason to outlaw the mapmaking practice. That’s the power arrangement behind the gerrymandering fight: voters cast ballots inside districts drawn by political institutions, and the Supreme Court can decide which efforts to change those rules survive.

Votes Trapped in Safe Seats

Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser wrote that congressional gerrymandering has cut the number of competitive seats. Legislators may hesitate to ban it because many owe their seats to districts designed to keep them secure. Voters whose ballots lose influence bear the cost. Lawmakers who gain from the maps hold the levers.

Millhiser argued that Congress, rather than the states, would need to deliver viable reform of congressional maps. California and Virginia adopted constitutional amendments meant to stop gerrymandering, but Democrats were trying to bypass those bans to counter Republican gerrymanders in Republican-led states. State-level fixes, in other words, have become another arena for competing mapmaking power.

The electoral route remains uncertain. Democrats could take control of both houses of Congress in November and, if President Donald Trump remains a political liability for Republicans through 2028, could control both elected branches of government, Millhiser said. Yet Democrats previously passed the For the People Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and both bills died in the Senate. A change in who holds office won't erase those institutional roadblocks.

The Court's Veto Points

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority held in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that federal courts cannot hear claims that lawmakers drew a legislative map to benefit one party. Millhiser also cited Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which he said abolished longstanding safeguards against racial gerrymandering and ushered in new maps favoring white Republicans in the South.

The article describes reforms to racial gerrymandering as especially vulnerable. Millhiser said the Court’s six Republican justices would likely strike down a new federal law requiring states to consider race when drawing maps. He said they adhere to “colorblindness,” treating laws that make racial distinctions as equally objectionable regardless of purpose. The Voting Rights Act’s 1982 amendment had restricted many racially polarized states from drawing maps that maximized white political power. The article says the Republican justices effectively repealed the amendment in Callais, though President Ronald Reagan signed it.

A race-related provision could also put a broader redistricting law at risk. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), four Republican justices said the Affordable Care Act should be struck down because they considered two provisions unconstitutional. The article says today's Court is more conservative and Republican than the Court that decided NFIB, and could strike down an entire law, or broad portions of it, because one provision refers to race.

Reform Through the Same Machinery

The For the People Act proposed a 15-member commission in each state: five Democrats, five Republicans and five people unaffiliated with either major party. The bill would bar elected officials and their immediate family members, candidates, significant political donors and lobbyists from serving. One study cited in the article found that commissions would raise the average share of competitive seats in a state from 25 percent to 38 percent.

But the commission plan still raises questions of authority. The bill called for state-run commissions and a “nonpartisan agency” to appoint commissioners. Millhiser said the anti-commandeering doctrine suggests Congress may not order states to appoint commissioners or control how they draw maps. Courts haven't tested whether that doctrine applies to federal laws governing congressional elections, and a Supreme Court with a 6-3 Republican majority would decide the issue.

Congress could instead set map-drawing criteria under its constitutional power to “make or alter” congressional-election rules. It could retain single-member districts and set rules, or repeal that requirement and introduce proportional representation, under which seats reflect each party’s share of the vote. The For the People Act proposed criteria such as respecting communities of interest and using mathematical measures of partisan advantage. Federal courts could enforce the rules, though lawsuits can take so long that states sometimes use unlawful maps for one or more elections before courts replace them.

The article also discusses nationwide preclearance and judge-drawn maps, while laying out the legal obstacles to each. Its final caution is practical as well as constitutional: compact districts may pack Democratic voters into overwhelmingly Democratic districts while distributing Republicans across more districts. The article was produced in partnership with Protect Democracy and Journalism Funding Partners.