When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, it handed politicians a powerful new tool to dismantle districts where voters of color can elect their preferred candidates—simply by claiming partisanship, not race, drove the lines. Tennessee Republicans wasted no time, carving up Memphis to eliminate the state's only Black-majority district. Similar moves are underway or being signaled in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere.
Some reformers argue the answer is to remove both party and race from redistricting entirely. Let neutral algorithms draw compact districts, they say, and Black representation in Congress could remain roughly comparable to what it was under Section 2. That sounds appealing, but it's dangerously inadequate.
Section 2 protected far more than Black Southern voters in congressional races. It guaranteed Latino, Asian American, Native, and other voters of color across the country an equal opportunity to elect candidates to federal, state, and local offices. A race-blind, nonpartisan algorithm would almost certainly fail to replicate that for all these groups—research on state legislative maps already suggests it wouldn't.
While neutral algorithms are better than blatant gerrymandering, they can't fix the deeper problems baked into single-member, winner-take-all districts. For several reasons, these maps fall short of a more durable solution: proportional representation, where a group wins a share of legislative seats roughly equal to its share of the vote.
The Limits of Nonpartisan Redistricting
First, politics inevitably seeps into supposedly nonpartisan processes. Commissioners are selected through political processes, and algorithms don't choose their own goals. People must decide which criteria matter most—compactness, municipal boundaries, or competitiveness—and how much weight to give each. Those choices are far from neutral. Residential patterns reflect generations of exclusionary zoning, highway construction, and housing discrimination. Judges reviewing these maps can also be partisan or hostile to voting rights. Florida's state constitution explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering, yet gerrymandering wars still rage there.
Proportional representation reduces these vulnerabilities. In a five-member district using proportional representation, it's much harder to engineer lines to determine which candidates or parties win.
Why Single-Member Districts Fail
Second, single-member districts reward residential segregation and punish dispersed communities. In Massachusetts, for instance, Republicans make up about a third of voters but hold none of the state's nine U.S. House seats because they're geographically spread out. Under proportional representation, they'd likely elect about three representatives. The same logic applies to voters of color integrated across metro areas. The redistricting chaos in Southern states shows how this dynamic plays out in practice.
Third, even when communities are concentrated, single-member districts often waste votes. If Black voters are packed into a district where they make up 85% of the electorate, many of their votes become surplus and have no influence elsewhere. Proportional representation avoids this entirely.
Single-member districts have other flaws. Even when drawn with supposedly neutral criteria, many districts are so lopsided that voters know the outcome before Election Day, depressing turnout. Under proportional representation, each additional vote can help a group win an additional seat, giving more voters a meaningful stake in the outcome—regardless of where they live.
As one researcher put it, maps drawn by algorithms still generally “deal out representation far short of proportionality to virtually all minorities … as a matter of mathematics.” They're an improvement over maps designed for partisan advantage, but they're not nearly good enough.
The Path Forward
Proportional representation faces real obstacles. It's common around the world and has a history in the U.S., but many Americans today don't know how it works. For U.S. House elections, Congress would need to adopt the change, and many incumbents who benefit from the current system will resist. But reform has overcome similar obstacles after moments of crisis. The Voting Rights Act followed Bloody Sunday. Federal campaign finance and ethics reforms followed Watergate.
We're facing a similar watershed moment now. If a political window for democracy reform opens, we shouldn't settle for half-measures. We may not have another opportunity for decades. Since the Supreme Court's decision, Southern states are again moving to weaken representation for voters of color. The answer isn't to draw nicer lines—it's to build a system where lines matter less and voters, not mapmakers, determine how representation is distributed.
