How Gerrymandering Undermines Fair Representation

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Vicki Reed: After 40 years of living in Minnesota, we were just sort of tired of the winters there, and so we're open to trying new things.

Simone Leeper: This is Vicki Reed. She's an educator and a consultant in public affairs.

Vicki Reed: We thought, " Well, let's go someplace else."

Malcolm Reed: We lived in Salt Lake County in the city of Millcreek, which is a fairly newly incorporated city, although it's a larger suburb of Salt Lake City.

Simone Leeper: And this is Malcolm Reed, Vicki's husband. He retired not long ago from a career in marketing and IT. Malcolm and Vicki are residents of Utah and they love it there.

Malcolm Reed: We live near the mountains. There's canyons and mountains abounding in our area so we can get our share of wilderness to explore.

Simone Leeper: They also enjoy living in the state's most urban county, one that shares a name with the state's capital.

Malcolm Reed: Salt Lake County, it's the largest county in the state. About a third of the population of the state lives in Salt Lake County and it's really the only swing county. Although the legislature says they believe in local control, it often seems that they want to micromanage Salt Lake County and the city on such things as bike lanes and speed limits.

Simone Leeper: Malcolm and Vicki didn't know when they moved west that they would soon clash with that very state legislature. At issue, fair representation for them and other local voters. I'm Simone Leeper and this is Democracy Decoded, a podcast where we examine our government and discuss innovative ideas that can lead to a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. I work for Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to solving the wide range of challenges facing American democracy. This season on Democracy Decoded, we're focusing on acute threats to our system of government. Safeguards at the core of our democracy are being challenged or ignored, threatening our very form of governance.

In today's episode, we're looking at the issue of gerrymandering. This topic hits particularly close to home for me since my day- to- day legal work at Campaign Legal Center revolves around redistricting and challenging gerrymanders. Gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating the voting map drawing process to tilt elections is as old as American democracy itself. But in this current moment, the old contentious practice of drawing these maps is to say the least, stretching the bounds of the law. The president has encouraged gerrymandering to an alarming degree, kicking off a nationwide redistricting arms race. He has been very vocal about the reason, the president and his partisan allies want to lock in a congressional majority for their party in the 2026 midterm elections before a single voter casts a ballot. To understand gerrymandering, it is first important to understand how states draw political district maps. Every 10 years on the years that end in zero, Americans participate in the U. S. census.

Data from the census is then used to create congressional and state legislative district maps. It is also used for redistricting at the local level, including county boards, city councils and school districts. The redistricting process is supposed to reflect changes in the population so that every person can have the opportunity for equitable representation in our government. It plays a vital role in determining whether we will be able to make our voices heard on the issues that matter the most to our communities. Ultimately, the job of dividing a state into congressional districts falls to the leaders of states themselves. This past summer Republicans in Texas announced an aggressive redistricting that would effectively disenfranchise millions of voters in that state in an effort that amounts to blatant racial discrimination.

Democrats in California seeing a political opening announced a possible redistricting of their own and more states, both red and blue jumped into the fray. When Republicans in Missouri announced they too would gerrymander their state's congressional map, President Trump cheered on social media that quote, " The great state of Missouri is now in." For Americans who believe elections should be fair and representative of the voter's will. This has been a stormy year. Yet involved citizens like Victoria and Malcolm Reed are making a difference. We'll hear more about their fight soon.

Mark Gaber: The Constitution set up a process where states would be in charge of drawing congressional districts.

Simone Leeper: This is Mark Gaber, Campaign Legal Center's Senior Director of Redistricting, a colleague of mine who leads our efforts to monitor and fight for fair redistricting.

Mark Gaber: And I suspect there was an expectation given that one of the major problems that caused people to flee the power of the throne in England was the rotten borough system of preventing fair representation in England. And I would expect the framers to have thought they were setting up a constitutional republic, a democracy that wouldn't have that flaw, and unfortunately turns out they were largely wrong about how that would play out.

Simone Leeper: At some point, you may have come across a famous political cartoon from 1812. It shows an unusually shaped Massachusetts voting district with added on wings, talons, and a forked tongue, to highlight that the district resembled a long- necked dragon- like creature. We get the word gerrymander after Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry, who was our fifth vice president. Critics combined his name with the word salamander, a nod to the slithery shape of that particular partisan district he signed into law when he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Mark Gaber: Throughout American history, this has been an endemic problem of drawing district lines to thwart the will of the voters and instead create a situation where politicians could insulate themselves from accountability, the problem ends up with unfair representation in our government, and then as a result of that, distorted policies that don't reflect the views of the voters.

Simone Leeper: Mark and Campaign Legal Center have fought court battles against unfair redistricting across the country, including in North Carolina and North Dakota and in Wisconsin. In each of these states, politicians drew up districts meant to cement their power by selecting particular voters who would in turn select them. In Utah, a similar story would play out and in the Reed household it was going to run through two voters with different party affiliations.

Malcolm Reed: I'm a Democrat and Vicki is a registered Republican.

Simone Leeper: Once again, Malcolm Reid.

Malcolm Reed: Both consider ourselves moderates, and so I think there's a lot of areas where we can find a lot to agree about. We both feel like government should serve the public interests. I think we're both interested in a clean environment and the natural resources here.

Vicki Reed: We actually have voted often for different presidential candidates, but sometimes one of us has crossed over and joined the other in our vote.

Malcolm Reed: Vicki Reid.

Vicki Reed: At the local level, we're more often aligned because it's sort of more clear which of the two candidates is superior. With our kids we learned early on that it was not a good idea to debate our political differences and that we just tried to explain the tenets of each party in as neutral way as possible.

Malcolm Reed: I think it was probably easier to describe ourselves as moderates in years gone by. We live in a more polarized world right now. When we first came here and we did some house hunting for several months, I went so far as I downloaded a map of the legislative districts in the state of Utah and found those districts where Democrats had been elected. It's not that many. It wasn't a deal breaker if we'd had to live in a Republican district because 80% of the seats are held by Republicans, but fishing was a good sport.

Simone Leeper: The Reeds chose their home in Salt Lake County a couple of years before the 2020 census. Every 10 years, the U. S Census tracks how many people live in which states. States often get assigned more or fewer members of Congress based on population changes and within states, officials draw up voting districts to accommodate changes.

Mark Gaber: Redistricting is a process that is required as a result of the decennial census. So every 10 years, the federal government fans out across the country sends people to go and count how many people are in the country and how many people are in each state, each city, each county, every political subdivision, every census block,

Simone Leeper: Mark Gaber again of Campaign Legal Center.

Mark Gaber: The Constitution's requirement that districts be equally populated requires that states political subdivisions, cities, school boards up and down, the type of governmental entity engage in what's called redistricting, and that is, as it sounds, redrawing the district boundaries so that there's an equal population in all of them.

Simone Leeper: Redistricting should be a process that ensures voters have an equal say in their local state and federal elections, but it's also a process with a lot of power at stake, hence gerrymandering.

Mark Gaber: Gerrymandering is where the people who are drawing those lines, often the politicians who have a conflict of interest because they're elected from the districts, draw them in a way that insulates them from accountability. They pick their voters who they think are most likely to vote for them rather than paying attention to things like communities of interest or lines that are boundaries of cities or counties, and instead they draw them with one goal in mind, which is to benefit themselves.

Simone Leeper: In Utah where one party dominates in state and federal elections, and as a result one party dominates in drawing voting maps, residents saw the 2020 census and redistricting as a chance to protect against gerrymandering. They got a measure on the ballot Proposition 4.

Vicki Reed: We moved to Utah just a few months before the 2018 election where Prop 4 was on the ballot. I have to say I was just very excited when I saw it.

Simone Leeper: The Reeds once again.

Malcolm Reed: What Prop 4 called for was the creation of an independent redistricting commission. The commission would have membership from both political parties and then some additional members that would be nominated by the governor. That independent commission was given the responsibility to create in a nonpartisan way a set of maps for congressional districts, for state legislative districts, state senate, and the state school board. The 2018 proposition passed by popular vote, and so this independent commission was created from that.

Mark Gaber: Utah has been one of the worst perpetrators of bad gerrymandering for a long time. In 2018, the voters said they'd had enough.

Simone Leeper: Campaign Legal Center's Mark Gaber.

Mark Gaber: They passed an initiative to have a redistricting commission made up of a bipartisan group of folks who would propose maps after engaging in a robust and transparent process, follow strict guidelines about maintaining cities and municipalities and having compact districts and contiguous districts and following natural boundaries and an overall requirement not to engage in partisan gerrymandering. The legislature would then take those recommendations and if it agreed with it, pass the map that the commission had proposed or explain why it was making changes to those maps. And then that same set of criteria and the prohibition on partisan gerrymandering would apply to the legislature as well.

Vicki Reed: I thought this would be great to have Utah draw fair boundaries, and I also thought the legislature's allocated $ 1 million for this commission, they must be committed to listening to what it has to say. However, it turned out differently.

Malcolm Reed: The independent commission held a series of open meetings across the entire state of Utah soliciting input from citizens and other stakeholders. They started to develop some, I'll call them candidate maps for the various offices, the Congress and the state legislature, et cetera, but what I liked about it was that there was a lot of citizen input. Citizens were encouraged to upload their own maps as well. Those were reviewed by the commission. I offered comments at several of the meetings and I uploaded some maps. There's software that you can use to create candidate maps, if you will. What I saw from the commission was that they adhered to principles of fair redistricting, and so those are things like having equal representation in all of the districts, racial and ethnic balance, respecting city and county boundaries, looking for other communities of interest, looking at geography. We have a big mountain range here in Utah, The Wasatch Front, the Independent Commission did a very fair job of applying those principles and creating their maps.

Simone Leeper: What Malcolm is describing is a remarkable process of citizen input and good governance, but this is still Utah we're talking about. So we need to cover two more concepts related to drawing districts. Up first, the difference between racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering.

Mark Gaber: There's racial gerrymandering, which is drawing district lines with a predominant view toward the racial makeup of the district and then setting aside race. There's also partisan gerrymandering. Partisan gerrymandering, as it sounds, is drawing district lines to benefit one political party over the other or one incumbent or politician over another.

Simone Leeper: The second concept is the difference between packing and cracking. This is gerrymandering 101. Packing is how a gerrymander blunts a voting group's power by concentrating certain voters together.

Mark Gaber: Packing them into as few districts as possible.

Simone Leeper: To dilute their influence in surrounding districts. By contrast, cracking draws lines that disperse a certain group of voters into as many districts as possible.

Mark Gaber: Splitting them apart so that they're not able to elect their preferred candidate in any one district.

Simone Leeper: These fundamental reasons for and methods of gerrymandering are hundreds of years old. At least back then it was a clumsier process, but today, software and big data give officials unprecedented abilities to make districts that are fair or unfair.

Mark Gaber: Technology has made the ability to gerrymander more precise. Back when Elbridge Gerry was engaging in gerrymandering, they might've had a map on paper. They might've had some election results on paper. But now in a number of ways, you can see and visualize this data at a granular level. Also, you can use computers to draw maps with a particular goal in mind, to draw versions of a map to try to find the one that most maximizes either your party's outcome in the election or is most harmful to Black or Latino or Native American voters.

Simone Leeper: As Utah's voters worked to unwind gerrymandering in that state, the legislature was also at work even before the redistricting commission could meet. Elected officials began to buffer themselves against the impact of ballot measure Proposition 4.

Malcolm Reed: Before the commission started its work in 2021, the legislature passed a bill that was known as SB 200 Senate Bill 200.

Simone Leeper: Here's Malcolm Reed again.

Malcolm Reed: And that bill in the legislature's intent is essentially replaced Prop 4. It stripped the independent commission of its authority and made it just a purely advisory body, so it removed the Prop 4 ban on partisan gerrymandering and allowed the legislature basically to ignore maps. It was effectively a veto of Proposition 4 SB 200.

Mark Gaber: What makes it hard to fight against gerrymandering is once the bad actors are elected once and they engage in gerrymandering, they're pretty powerful.

Simone Leeper: Campaign Legal Center's Mark Gaber.

Mark Gaber: They can draw the lines so that they're not held accountable, so it becomes really hard to defeat it at the ballot box. Short of gathering together your fellow citizens and having y'all move to different districts, there needs to be some other mechanism. Campaign Legal Center files a lot of lawsuits about redistricting. The mechanisms there are to sue in states where there are prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering to sue over efforts by states to engage in racial discrimination in redistricting.

Simone Leeper: Back in Utah, with the Decennial Census complete, the legislature continued its move to head off the commission's maps.

Malcolm Reed: The legislature had a joint senate house committee that met in November of 2021. The legislature had been going through a fairly similar process in parallel with the independent commission.

Simone Leeper: Here's Malcolm Reed again.

Malcolm Reed: They'd been holding hearings and creating maps. However, when this joint committee got together in November of 2021, they ignored their own maps and they ignored the independent commission's maps, and lo and behold, they had a new set of maps. We never determined what the origin of this third set of maps was. Over a weekend basically, they introduced those new maps and ratified those from a Friday over the weekend into Monday. And if you looked at those new maps, you'd say, " This is probably the most perfect job of gerrymandering you could ever do."

Vicki Reed: I Was frankly appalled both by the process that the legislature used

Simone Leeper: Vicki Reed again.

Vicki Reed: And also by the outcome, by the maps that they put forth in one week, they managed to introduce a bill, hold a hearing, pass it in both houses of the legislature and have the governor sign it into law. It just felt like frankly, a bait and switch here. They had said that they were going to listen and compromise with the independent redistricting commission, and there was absolutely no effort to do so. It felt arrogant. Before we were in a district that the partisan control had switched back and forth for the last five elections, so it was sort of a swing district, and now we're in a district that has a 60% Republican majority.

Mark Gaber: A galling and remarkable move.

Vicki Reed: Mark Gaber. Again.

Mark Gaber: The legislature of Utah then repealed the initiative that the voters had enacted and said, no thanks. We're not interested in your independent redistricting process voters. We'll continue doing it our way instead.

Simone Leeper: As Mark mentioned earlier, this is the point when Campaign Legal Center steps in with a legal challenge

Mark Gaber: Campaign Legal Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Mormon Women for Ethical Government, the League of Women Voters of Utah, and a number of individual plaintiffs, and we challenged the repeal of Proposition 4 as a violation of the right of the people of Utah under their constitution to alter or reform their government. We also challenged the congressional NAP that resulted from the 2021 redistricting process as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander under the Utah Constitution.

Simone Leeper: This lawsuit is how we came to meet Vicki and Malcolm Reed of Salt Lake County. They were excited to step up as individual voters to challenge the repeal of Prop 4 and the unfair congressional map.

Vicki Reed: Malcolm and I took one look at each other and we said, we are all in, and we were just so thrilled that someone was taking this issue on.

Malcolm Reed: I had already written an op- ed opposing the gerrymandering that had been published in one of the newspapers, Deseret News in Salt Lake City.

Vicki Reed: We had just been stewing about it for weeks. Obviously I think it's clear to understand that for Malcolm as a Democrat, his voice is diminished as a minority party when all the are basically sliced up so that Republicans are pretty much guaranteed to win. But it's also true for me as a moderate Republican that I feel like my voice is also not getting heard, and so let me explain that. In Utah or in any place where you have extreme partisan gerrymandering, the election that matters most is the one that happens at the party caucus or the state convention because that's where the candidate is truly elected.

And the people who go to the state convention tend to be the most party- faithful, which means the most sort of extreme members of the party. And the fact that this has happened in Utah is pretty clear because the convention delegates really do not represent even the party or the citizens at large. What happens when you have this extreme gerrymandering is that the election itself just really doesn't matter, and as a result, the candidates who win are more beholden to the party than to the people that they represent.

Mark Gaber: Not long after the lawsuit was filed, it worked its way up quickly to the Utah Supreme Court because we won in the district court on whether we could bring these constitutional claims and actually the legislature won on whether or not we could bring the alter or reform claim about the repeal of Proposition 4. All of us appealed to the Utah Supreme Court.

Simone Leeper: Mark Gaber traveled in the summer of 2023 to argue Vicki and Malcolm Reed's case before the highest court in Utah.

Mark Gaber: I think there was a general feeling in the legal community that because Utah is viewed as a conservative Republican state, that this lawsuit that we had filed stood little chance of succeeding. We were always confident that the judiciary in Utah would be neutral and fair, but that was the popular expectation. And so we had the Supreme Court argument back in July of 2023, and I argued on behalf of the plaintiffs. There was a lawyer from a big law firm that the Utah legislature had hired. I was going second since we had won on most of the issues in the district court, and so the lawyer for the legislature was going first and you could tell at the beginning sort of had this air of like, " Oh, we're going to win. Here we are at the Utah Supreme Court. Of course we're going to win." And it was pretty evident within the first 10 minutes of questioning that that was not where things were going, that the justices were taking very seriously our claim about the power of the people to alter and reform their government.

I at the same time like, " Oh my God, we're going to win this. Oh my gosh, I can't believe this. This is awesome." And you could just feel the shift in the momentum and the energy in the room kind of in real time, which was a really cool experience as a lawyer to feel that, and particularly since we're a mission- driven legal organization, it's just super empowering to feel that moment where one person who from our perspective is advocating for the bad government side of things, is on their heels and we are being listened to and taken seriously.

Simone Leeper: Mark's sense of the room that day turned out to be correct. The court ruled in favor of the voting groups and Malcolm and Vicki Reed.

Mark Gaber: In a unanimous decision, the Utah Supreme Court sided with us and ruled that the Utah Constitution protects the ability of voters to pass initiatives and in particular to pass initiatives that alter or reform the government and that the legislature can't just repeal those government reforms without some compelling justification.

Malcolm Reed: Utah became a state in 1896, and one of the things that the Utah State Constitution says is that the citizens have the right to alter or reform their form of government.

Simone Leeper: The Reeds, once again.

Malcolm Reed: The court ruled unanimously that a citizen initiative that's dealing with the form of government, so in this case redistricting must be respected, and so this was really a landmark decision.

Vicki Reed: The court decision seems to be encouraging other good government groups to propose initiatives, and right now another organization is proposing four ballot initiatives that would, among other things, make public records laws more open and also continue to reform Utah's citizen initiative process.

Simone Leeper: With the court decision in place, Mark and the team worked toward a final, crucial step moving to see the gerrymandered map tossed out in of a fairer district map.

Mark Gaber: After the Utah Supreme Court issued its decision, we filed a motion in the district court for what's called summary judgment. Basically we're saying that there is no factual dispute. This is a legal question, did the legislature overstep its authority when it repealed proposition four because it had no compelling interest. A desire to engage in partisan gerrymandering is not a compelling governmental interest and can't be the basis for violating the right of the people of Utah in their constitution to pass government reforms. So we filed that motion and at the same time, we asked the district court to invalidate the map that resulted from that unlawful repeal of the People's Initiative, and the district court agreed, it ruled that the right to alter and reform the government protected the power of the people to pass Proposition 4 that brought Proposition 4 back into effect, and the congressional map that the legislature had enacted violated the procedural and the substantive requirements of that law, and so that map was invalidated.

Simone Leeper: From the perspective of Campaign Legal Center, this was the best outcome we could hope to see in this case, the Citizen initiative and Fair Maps won the day, and Malcolm and Vicki Reed emerged with a victory for the voters of Utah. As well as a story to tell.

Malcolm Reed: Sometimes people tell us how courageous we are, and that's not really the case. We've had a lot of people that have congratulated us for doing this, and there's really nothing to be afraid of raising your voice and taking a stand.

Simone Leeper: The Utah case has been playing out over about seven years, and it hasn't ended yet. The Utah legislature has continued to fight to weaken Proposition 4 and to draw its own unfair maps, but our victory sets the stage for the potential for the most fair congressional elections in decades in Utah, and we are still in court ensuring that will happen, but a different sort of gerrymandering drama is happening elsewhere around America. It struck in the middle of 2025 like a lightning bolt

Mark Gaber: What President Trump has demanded of Texas. It's a pretty shocking situation. Actually.

Simone Leeper: Mark Gaber explains how 2025 put gerrymandering on center stage

Mark Gaber: In 2021, Texas enacted congressional maps and then have been sued over them, and there was just recently a trial and the defense of the state of Texas throughout that lawsuit before there was a lawsuit during the legislative process and then all of the witnesses in all of the proceedings was that the maps were drawn without any consideration of racial data, racial information. They blinded themselves to that is their defense. While the trial was ongoing, there was a news report in the New York Times that President Trump was demanding that they redraw the congressional lines.

Simone Leeper: Texas has 38 congressional seats. Democrats hold just 13 of those. It's been reported that people in the White House believed Republicans could capture five of those 13 seats if Texas further gerrymandered its districts.

Mark Gaber: And then on July 7th, the United States Department of Justice issued a letter to the state of Texas to the governor and to the Attorney General of Texas alleging that the districts that existed were actually racial gerrymanders and in particular that four of the minority majority districts where Black and Latino voters form a majority of the voters in the district, that those particular districts were illegal because of their racial composition. Now, that is just wildly inconsistent with Texas's defense at their trial, and in fact, the Attorney General of Texas responded in writing and said, oh, no, no, no. I love you, president Trump, but these districts were drawn without regard to race. What we have here then is the United States Department of Justice demanding that race neutral districts that were drawn without any consideration of race dismantled because of their racial composition because they have Black and Latino voters.

They're saying, take those districts apart and make them white majority. That is about as direct of intentional racial discrimination as I can imagine as a redistricting lawyer, and that's the command from the White House. It is what the governor of Texas cited as the rationale for what it is doing in this mid- decade redistricting and bringing the legislature back to special session to do it. The reason they're engaging in this redistricting is to discriminate against Black and Latino people simply because they are Black and Latino and they don't want districts to have Black and Latino majorities. So that's Texas. That's how we have set off on this 2025 redistricting soap opera.

Simone Leeper: The danger in Texas's move is obvious once a Republican controlled state moves to try to take control of Congress, whether their motivation be racial or partisan, the incentive is there for Democratic controlled states to respond with gerrymandering of their own political observers have likened it to the mutually assured destruction of a nuclear war.

Mark Gaber: We've seen responses from governors and elected officials in states across the country, principally California, but we've seen it in other states. We've seen Republicans in other states saying that they're considering redrawing their state's map, and with Democrats trying to respond to that, a lot of the Democratic states have commissions that have been enacted, and so that's an obstacle to that happening potentially depending on each state's law. But this all started with an effort to discriminate against Black and Latino voters in the middle of the decade.

Simone Leeper: Once California announced that it would be putting a partisan gerrymander on the ballot, smaller states also jumped into the fray. Republicans in Missouri, which has eight congressional districts, announced a plan to target the Democratic held seat in the Kansas City area, a compact urban district, that currently includes parts of two counties, would under the new map sprawl across 15 mostly rural counties. Campaign Legal Center believes it's a case of unconstitutional gerrymandering, and we are now leading a legal challenge to Missouri's proposed map, but the country can't keep governing itself this way.

Campaign Legal Center has been at the forefront of advocating for solutions to the issue of gerrymandering, and it is clear what we need now is a national solution to prevent gerrymandering once and for all. We need Congress to pass federal legislation that bans partisan gerrymandering and mandates independent redistricting commissions in every state and to bolster protections against racial discrimination in redistricting, which would ensure the already illegal practice of racial gerrymandering is more effectively policed. As we play gerrymandering Whack- a- Mole, we continue to urge lawmakers in Washington D. C to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to bring order to a districting process that is currently devolving into chaos.

Mark Gaber: What should happen is we should abandon this effort across the board to redraw the maps in the middle of the decennial period, but it's going to take Texas stopping its racially discriminatory effort for there to be an end to it, and if no one will stop, then it's exhibit A to Congress for why it needs to step in and just have an even playing field across the country. No party is served by having this state- by- state approach where each state gerrymanders to death the ability of any citizens in that state to have representation. Congress is not just a chart , counting up the number of Democrats and Republicans. Your member of Congress is supposed to . represent you on all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with the hot button partisan issues that we see in the headlines.

A mayor of a city needs to be able to have a member of Congress who cares about what happens in their community in terms of just running municipalities and how the federal government can help in that, and emergency relief and any number of things that your member of Congress does. And if we don't draw district lines fairly across the country with those issues in mind, and instead are solely focused on how we can extract the largest number of Democrats in Illinois or the largest number of Republicans in Texas to counteract each other, it's like this race to the bottom that leaves all of the voters everywhere behind.

Simone Leeper: But as the Utah example shows us, hope for fair districts is not lost.

Mark Gaber: There are states that have not yet adopted independent redistricting commissions where there is the ability to put that on the ballot by the voters themselves. So in those states that pathway remains open. There is also advocacy and working to get legislatures that are in states that don't currently have commissions to adopt them legislatively, that's obviously harder. Legislators don't typically like to give up power, but there are instances in which they have. And then there's the pathway of calling your member of Congress and seeking to get them to enact the Freedom to Vote Act, which would require independent commissions for congressional redistricting across the country.

If we all jump into the pool at the same time across all the states with a federal law to make this fair across the country, you will end up with a Congress that fairly represents the whole nation, but in the process, you gain representation for each community and each voter that has some semblance of sense for their needs that don't bear at all on the partisan composition of the Congress.

Simone Leeper: It is striking even to me how long America can put off solving its structural problems. Elbridge Gerry, the namesake of gerrymandering was born in 1744 and here nearly 300 years later, we are facing a potential crisis because as Gerry recognized, the shape of a voting district can determine the shape of elected power. As we heard from Mark and Vicki and Malcolm, the fight to protect voters' rights can bring together broad coalitions. From 1976 to 2004, in a string of eight presidential elections, voters made Utah the most lopsided Republican state in the country. Yet even there just a few years later, those same voters came together to make their elections more fair and more representative for every voter in the state. And the fight for fair maps in Utah continues to this day through every twist and turn in this multi- year legal effort campaign, legal center and our partners will continue our work to ensure a fair outcome.

Gerrymandering undermines the very foundation of our democracy by unfairly silencing voters and depriving them of representation. At the end of the day, elections should be determined by voters, not politicians who manipulate voting maps. When districts are drawn fairly, all voters have an equal chance to make their voice heard and elect leaders who will best serve their community. Next time on Democracy Decoded, we will look ahead to the elections of 2026 and 2028, and the people who are working to ensure those elections are free, fair, and secure. This season of Democracy Decoded is produced JAR Podcast Solutions for Campaign Legal Center. We are a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the wide range of challenges facing American democracy. We fight for every American's freedom to vote and participate meaningfully in the Democratic process, particularly Americans who have faced political barriers because of race, ethnicity, or economic status.

During this pivotal moment for our country, it is critical that Campaign Legal Center has the support it needs to continue to fight on behalf of the American people. Your tax- deductible donation can directly fund our efforts to do just that. If you would like to support our work, just go to Campaignlegal.org and click on the donate button.

Special thanks to our guests, Victoria Reed, Malcolm Reed, and Mark Gaber. I'm your host, Simone Leeper. Thanks so much for listening. If you learn something new today, you can find us on your podcast platform of choice and hit subscribe to get updates as we release new episodes.

Leading the production for Campaign Legal Center are Casey Atkins, multimedia manager and Madeline Greenberg Communications Associate. This podcast was produced by Sam Eifling and Ebyan Abdigir, edited and mixed by Patrick Emile and Luke Batiot.

Democracy Decoded is a member of the Democracy Group, a network of podcasts dedicated to engaging in civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy. You can learn more at Democracygroup.org.