In the news, Texas and California, the nation’s two largest states, are embroiled in a war over gerrymandering. California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to Texas’s mid-decade redistricting plan by proposing his own version. Fight fire with fire he announced. In both cases, the redistricting plans entrench the majority party’s power. I wanted to be an informed voter, so I did some research. It surely opened my eyes.

What’s gerrymandering?

Gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor the political party in power. It’s probably as old as elections and political parties themselves. You often hear doomsday predictions that this is “the end of democracy.” But is that true? Let’s take a closer look.

As with many political issues, we need to take a giant grain of salt when it comes to how mass media presents them. Free press is essential to democracy, but the mass-media economy often thrives on distortion. After all, doomsday sells.

Let’s measure it.

One way to assess gerrymandering is to define a metric. I propose looking at the ratio between the percentage of seats won and the percentage of votes received by the minority party. Let’s call this minority seat-to-vote.

  • If the ratio = 1 → minority votes are fully represented.
  • If the ratio < 1 → the minority is under-represented.
  • If the ratio > 1 → the minority is over-represented.

Let’s apply this to the 2024 congressional elections:

  • California: Republicans (minority) won 9 out of 52 seats (17.3%) while receiving 39.23% of votes → ratio = 0.44.
  • Texas: Democrats (minority) won 13 out of 38 seats (34.2%) while receiving 40.39% of votes → ratio = 0.85.

So Texas’s minority fared much better than California’s.

In other words, California penalized its minority party far more than Texas did—by a wide margin. What’s even more interesting is that California uses a non-partisan redistricting commission, while Texas uses a partisan one. So much for the idea that non-partisan commissions always protect minority voices.

The 2020 elections show a similar, though less extreme, pattern:

  • California: Republicans won 11 of 53 seats (20.8%) while receiving 33.73% of votes → ratio = 0.62.
  • Texas: Democrats won 13 of 36 seats (36.1%) while receiving 44.14% of votes → ratio = 0.83.

Again, the Texan minority did better than the Californian one.

What’s the “dark magic” beyond gerrymandering?

How can a non-partisan commission produce worse outcomes than a partisan one, if we define “good” as protection of minority votes? The answer is that gerrymandering isn’t the only cause, nor even the primary cause, of minority vote dilution.

The deeper issue is the winner-takes-all system. If you consistently get 49% in every district, you may end up with zero seats.

A single statewide district with proportional or ranked-choice voting would produce fairer results for minorities. But why do we have geography-based districts at all? That goes back to the U.S. Constitutional design: states are sovereign entities with distinct interests. Geography is a natural proxy for those interests: economies, cultures, and local priorities differ dramatically across the country.

How bad is it really?

At the national level, things don’t look so dire:

  • In 2024, Democrats (minority) won 215 of 435 seats (49.4%) with 47.2% of votes → ratio = 1.05.
  • In 2020, Republicans (minority) won 197 of 435 seats (45.3%) with 47.2% of votes → ratio = 0.96.

That’s pretty fair overall. Despite the media’s doomsday tone, the system balances out nationally.

Designing a better electoral system

We’re stuck between two goals:

  • Local representation, to keep a diverse country stable.
  • Fair minority representation, to keep democracy legitimate.

California shows these goals can conflict. One way forward is multi-seat districts with ranked-choice voting—blending local representation with proportional fairness.

This isn’t hypothetical. Illinois used multi-seat districts for a hundred years, until the Cutback Amendment of the 1980s. That reform punished legislators for giving themselves a pay raise, but in hindsight, it threw out a system that better represented minority voices. There are even calls to revive multi-seat districts.

While there is a federal statue limiting single seat district for congressional elections (1967 Uniform Congressional District Act), the U.S. has a two-level government system (states and federal), states are free to experiment at state level. California could lead here. If Governor Newsom truly wants to “save democracy”, he could champion multi-seat districts with ranked-choice voting, rather than trying to entrench Democrats’ already overwhelming advantage. Democrats likely would still win a majority, but will have a meaningful opposition.

On the contrary, his proposed gerrymandering change (Proposition 50) will add 5 more Democratic seats. If we assume the same vote share as 2024, the minority seat-to-vote ratio in 2026 would collapse to 0.19. That’s an extraordinary imbalance.

That’s where real reform, not window dressing, could make California a national leader. And since it’s at state level, he can’t use Texas as an excuse.

PS, it turns out 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act was passed to address southern states’ scheme of using multi-seat district with multiple votes (not ranked choice) to dilute black votes.