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How Math and Science saved Democracy: Gerrymandering is In 2010, Republicans — in an effort to control the drawing of congressional maps — forged a campaign to win majorities in as many state legislatures as possible. It was wildly successful, giving them control over the drawing of 213 congressional districts. The redrawing of maps that followed produced some of the most extreme gerrymanders in history. In battleground Pennsylvania, for example, the congressional map gave Republicans a virtual lock on 13 of the state’s 18 congressional districts, even in elections where Democrats won the majority of the statewide congressional vote.

Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House.

On the state level, gerrymandering has also led to significant partisan bias in maps. For example, in 2018, Democrats in Wisconsin won every statewide office and a majority of the statewide vote, but thanks to gerrymandering, won only 36 of the 99 seats in the state assembly.

In the past, courts were reluctant to make rulings because there was no "unified field theory" of partisan gerrymandering that will allow judges to determine whether each map drawn by a state legislature violates the Constitution. In fact, In Rucho vs Common Cause (2019) SCOTUS held that federal courts should stay away from partisan gerrymandering cases because they are too hard. As the Court said in that case, the justices have “struggled without success over the past several decades to discern judicially manageable standards for deciding” partisan gerrymandering cases. That is, the majority in Rucho concluded that "it is too difficult to come up with a unified theory of partisan gerrymandering" that will allow judges to determine whether each map drawn by a state legislature violates the Constitution.

In 2023, however, conservative judges heard the gerrymander cases in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Their special masters hired a team of computer scientists and mathematicians to run "fairness" tests using slight changes to the original gerrymandered map (slight area additions and subtractions which changed the compositions)--then repeat that a billion times. Their conclusion was quantifiable and logically valid, concluding that: there was only 1 chance in a billion that the original maps were NOT gerrymandered BY INTENT. When the GOP's legal team challenged the plaintiffs results using the "dumb-and-dumber" hypothesis ("ya mean I still have a chance?") mathematicians were called in to prove the infinite case by contrapositive. Judges, particularly conservative judges, are impressed bythat level of irrefutable logic and reasoning. Alas, being able to prove INTENT, GOP reluctance could be met with election fraud--a 5 year minimum prison sentence. Hence, maps in more than a dozen gerrymandered red states were redrawn. 2024 will be the first electoral test. Republicans have always feared that they couldn't win a fair election. 2024 will be the law of Karma, the year that their greatest fear unfolds. The defeat will be so massive, the cries of "fraud" will fade onto the dustbin of history.