Redistricting Without Maps: An End to Gerrymandering
Redistricting and gerrymandering dominate every fight over representation. The arguments circle endlessly: which lines are fair, which shapes are distorted, which “communities of interest” deserve protection. My proposal is simpler—erase the maps. If a state needs five districts, just assign every voter a random number from one to five. Each district becomes a shuffled cross-section of the population, not a geographic carve-out. No rivers, no counties, no strange shapes—just people, evenly divided by chance.
The appeal is obvious. No party can game the system with clever borders. Each district would mirror the state as a whole, its partisan balance falling out naturally from the population. Gerrymandering would vanish, not because we drew better maps, but because we stopped drawing maps at all.
Objection 1: The loss of local ties
Critics will say a representative should know the roads, schools, and industries of a single region. But that attachment to geography is an inheritance from another time, when distance defined identity. Today, most political issues—taxes, healthcare, education, rights—cut across geography. The “local link” is sentimental more than functional.
Objection 2: Randomness feels illegitimate
People expect visible borders, something they can point to on a map. A district scattered across the state looks like chaos, even if it is perfectly fair. But the order maps provide is deceptive. Those borders are never neutral—they are drawn by someone, for some purpose, and usually to someone’s advantage. Random assignment strips away the illusion of order and leaves only the one thing that matters: equal weight for every vote.
Objection 3: Campaigning and service would collapse
In truth, campaigning is already statewide. Mass communication and the internet have long since replaced door-to-door campaigning and town halls. Constituent service runs through phones and online systems—tools that don’t care where a person lives.
Objection 4: Majority domination
Imagine a state where 51 percent lean one way and 49 percent the other. Random districts would all come out close to 51–49, which means every representative could end up from the majority party. That would tilt the delegation completely in one direction. Some would call that unfair; others would call it clarity instead of gridlock. But either way, the real problem isn’t the math—it’s that “representatives” so often just vote the party line. A system like this might even make that dysfunction more obvious, pushing voters to resist politicians who act as nothing more than party enforcers.
Objection 5: Minority representation
Another objection is that random districts erase “minority representation.” The claim is that without special districts, minority groups lose their voice. But what that really means is a demand for built-in advantages—districts designed to guarantee certain groups a seat at the table. In other words: overrepresentation.
Defenders answer that these districts aren’t about extra weight, but about ensuring communities of interest can elect one of their own. And yes, some groups still cluster geographically. But treating geography as the master key is outdated. It assumes people still sort themselves into neat neighborhoods—the Jewish block, the gay district, the women’s ward. The world doesn’t look like that anymore. Geography no longer maps to identity.
And even where clustering persists, it can’t solve the problem of overlapping identities. What about a half-Asian, half-Black gay woman? Which “community” do you maximize for her? Redistricting forces a crude simplification—choosing which slice of her identity gets “representation.”
The core point
True representation doesn’t come from the shape of a district—it comes from treating every voter as equal.