Cracking and Packing Gerrymandering: The Real Cure Is Smaller Government

The moment the political class starts talking about gerrymandering, I reach for my wallet. Not because the problem is fake-it is real, corrosive, and a standing insult to self-government-but because the proposed cure usually transfers more power to the very people who created the mess.

Cracking and packing are the two great sins of district-drawing. Cracking scatters like-minded voters across several districts so they fall just short of a majority everywhere. Packing crams them into a single district so their votes are wasted in a landslide. A cracked district might split a city of two hundred thousand people four ways into distant rural counties. A packed district might stuff eighty percent of one party's voters into a single urban seat. Both methods turn voters into raw material for a mapmaker. Both destroy the idea that a representative answers to a community.

But here is what most commentary misses: the map is not the root of the disease. The root is a government large enough, and districts remote enough, that the line-drawer can decide elections before a ballot is cast. If you want to fix gerrymandering, you have to change the structure. The map is only the symptom.

The Mapmaker's Hubris

The deeper error behind our gerrymandering wars is the assumption that a central authority can know what a community is. Friedrich Hayek taught us in The Use of Knowledge in Society that knowledge is dispersed. No commission, no supercomputer, no panel of good-government experts can know the hundreds of local ties-county lines, school districts, parish boundaries, commuting patterns, natural borders-that make a district a real place rather than a statistical zone.

When we ask a central mapmaker to draw lines, we ask him to do something he cannot do: see from the ground level. So he falls back on partisan data or crude demographic categories. That is exactly how cracking and packing get baked in. The mapmaker does not know your neighborhood, but he knows your party registration. The result is a district that looks fine on a screen and feels wrong on the ground.

This is why the fashionable cure-independent redistricting commissions-is a mirage. The logic sounds nice: take the maps away from self-interested politicians and give them to neutral experts. But who are these experts? They are people with policy preferences, appointed by someone. Worse, the entire project is central planning applied to politics. It presumes a commission can gather the dispersed knowledge that no legislature can. It cannot.

The commission will either fall back on the same partisan data or draw districts that ignore local communities in the name of clean lines. The cure is not to replace one mapmaker with another. The cure is to make the map matter less.

Why Politicians Crack and Pack

Why do legislators crack and pack in the first place? Because the prize is worth it. A House seat controls votes over a federal budget measured in trillions, regulatory power over every business, and the direction of the entire economy. The more Washington controls, the more valuable each district becomes. When a single vote in Congress can direct billions in spending or impose national rules on your state, every line on the map becomes a fight to the death.

Add to that the fact that the average House district now contains roughly 760,000 people. We did not amend the Constitution to make districts anonymous and distant. Congress simply froze the House at 435 seats in 1929 and never let it grow. The first Congress had just 65 members serving a nation of fewer than four million people. The Constitution itself contemplated a much closer ratio: no more than one representative for every thirty thousand inhabitants. The Founders wanted representatives close enough to know the people they served. We have drifted far from that standard.

That combination-enormous districts and an enormous federal government-is a cartographer's dream.

Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson taught us to look for the seen and the unseen. The seen benefit of a gerrymander is a partisan majority. The unseen cost is the destruction of community, accountability, and trust. A voter who lives in a cracked district learns that his vote does not matter. A voter packed into a safe district learns that his representative does not have to listen. Both learn that the system is rigged. And when people conclude the system is rigged, they either check out or turn to destructive politics. That is the real price of a clever map.

Both parties do it. Blue states crack and pack; red states crack and pack. The word itself is older than the Constitution's ink. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a state senate map so misshapen that one district looked like a salamander. A newspaper cartoon dubbed it the Gerry-mander, and the name stuck. The sin is as old as the republic. If you only hate gerrymandering when the other team does it, you do not hate gerrymandering-you hate losing. The real problem is structural, and it will not be solved by whichever party is out of power at the moment.

The Constitutional Cure

This brings me to a point that annoys the professional good-government crowd: the Supreme Court was right in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 to refuse to invent a judicial standard for partisan gerrymandering.

There is no constitutional text that says fairness means some mathematical symmetry. Federal judges have no mandate to sit as redistricting czars. Justice Antonin Scalia made the same point years earlier in Vieth v. Jubelirer: the Court has no judicially manageable standards for partisan line-drawing. That is not an invitation to tolerate abuse. It is a recognition that the cure is not a lawsuit. It is a structure.

What would that structure look like? Four steps, none of which requires a new federal commission.

The first step is to repeal the 1929 law that froze the House at 435. The Constitution did not set 435; Congress did. A substantially larger House-one that grows with the population, as the Framers understood-would bring representatives closer to the people, make districts smaller and more local, and dilute the statewide power of any single gerrymander. Smaller districts are harder to crack and pack because they are more likely to follow real communities. Yes, more representatives means more salaries. But that cost is trivial next to the cost of unaccountable government. As Milton Friedman liked to remind us, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The price of a distant, rigged system is far higher than a few hundred more desks.

The second step is to insist that state legislatures adopt clear, pre-committed rules before map-drawing begins. Keep counties and cities whole wherever possible. Require contiguity and compactness. Forbid the use of partisan election data in drawing lines. These are state-level reforms under the Constitution's Elections Clause, not federal judicial decrees. A state that wants to bind itself may do so. That is federalism working as intended: fifty laboratories, not one central planner.

The third step is to cut the federal government down to size. The reason politicians fight so hard over lines is that Washington hands out enormous rewards. When the federal government returns power to the states and the people, district lines lose their value. The best anti-gerrymandering law is a smaller state. When politicians can buy lunch for their districts with other people's money, every map becomes a food fight. Shrink the menu, and the fight loses its stakes.

The fourth step is to hold map-drawers accountable at the ballot box. If a legislature draws an absurd salamander, voters can throw them out. That is the republican remedy-not a lawsuit, not a commission, not a federal takeover. It requires an engaged citizenry, which is exactly what self-government demands.

Restore the Republic

James Madison described the House of Representatives as needing an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people. That is the standard. A district of 760,000 people drawn by a central planner cannot meet it. A representative cannot know 760,000 constituents. A constituent cannot get his phone call returned. The relationship becomes a broadcast, not a conversation. And when that happens, the mapmaker-not the voter-becomes the real lawgiver.

Cracking and packing are not an accident. They are the logical outcome of a political system that has centralized too much power in too few hands and made districts too large to be accountable. The answer is not to hire better central planners. It is to restore the republic of small districts, local communities, and limited government.

That is the reform worth fighting for. Not more mapmakers. More freedom. Smaller government. Closer representatives. And a citizenry that, once again, actually matters.