It began with the president asking Texas to redraw its congressional map to give Republicans additional House seats in the 2026 midterm elections.

This prompted California to redraw its map, giving Democrats a comparable number of additional seats to balance the Texas gains. Virginians voted for a redraw, which would have given Democrats additional seats, until the state Supreme Court nullified the vote. Then Florida followed suit with a new map to give Republicans additional seats. Several other states are now redrawing their maps or plan to do so to effect partisan advantages.

As one state gives seats, another takes them away.

The likely end result in the battle for control of the House is a modest edge for Republicans. But there is a problem here. For voters, representation is no longer determined on Election Day. It will have already been carved out by state legislators who control the House map-drawing processes, effectively making voters innocent pawns in a high-stakes war to control the levers of government in Washington.

Holding a majority in the House is about more than having nicer offices on Capitol Hill. It is about holding the speaker’s gavel and controlling the chairmanships for committees that ultimately carve out laws and dictate how taxpayer dollars are spent. The 2026 midterms are particularly important; if Republican lose their majority in the House, the president will be more constrained. The 119th Congress has ignored its responsibility to maintain the necessary checks and balances on the executive branch. If Democrats regain a House majority, that will come to an abrupt end on Jan. 3, 2027, when the 120th Congress convenes.

What’s more, the damage done by this remapping chaos will also impact the 2028 and 2030 elections. After that, apportionment will reallocate the number of House seats to each state based on population changes reported in the census. States like Texas and North Carolina are positioned to gain seats, whereas states like California and New York are likely to lose them.

Given the slim margin in Congress between the two parties, apportionment will provide Republicans with an advantage over the next decade that Democrats won’t even be able to overcome by gerrymandering the states they control. And the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act will further muddy the mapping waters.

Any time extreme gerrymandered maps are drawn, there are winners (the parties) and losers (the people). Gerrymandering guarantees that the will of the voters is marginalized. Minimizing the number of competitive districts is the unspoken objective. Packing voters with the same political lean means that the only place where voters have a chance to express their views is in primaries.

In the gerrymandering era, competitive districts continue on their path to extinction — in this year’s midterms, 43 of the 435 House seats are expected to be close enough to be labeled battlegrounds, down from 52 in 2024. Computational redistricting has made it possible to group census blocks to draw districts with partisan precision. Just look at how Illinois’s 13th District was carved out of the 15th District to give Democrats an extra House seat in a Republican-leaning section of the state. Similarly, Texas’s 32nd District snakes around the Dallas Metroplex to grab Republican-leaning voters at every turn.

To overcome the gerrymander headwinds, voters must work hard. One method would be to contaminate the data for future gerrymandering efforts.

For example, voters will be unable to overcome headwinds at the ballot box in any district that is minus-15 or more for their party preference. Their best recourse is to not vote for their party’s candidate, who is certain to lose anyway. By obfuscating the data, they could make future gerrymandering becomes more difficult.

Such voters can also uniformly register for the plus-15 or more party, rather than the party they are more closely aligned with. This will also allow them to vote in the primary for the majority party candidate, influencing who will represent them in Congress. This too will dirty the gerrymander data for the future.

Voting data is the oil that permits the gerrymander engine to function. If the data is tainted, even the best algorithms will be ineffective.

Of course, the best solution to eliminate gerrymandering is to eliminate House control based on congressional districts and use the state House popular vote to apportion congressional seats. Each party would put forward a group of possible House Representatives in each state. Voters would then vote for a party, not for a specific candidate. The proportion of popular votes in the state would determine the number of House representatives for each party. This would make all representatives at-large members from each state. Of course, such a radical change would require a constitutional amendment.

Given that this solution would need to be proposed and passed into law by the very people who would lose political power in Washington, the likelihood of such a change is extremely low. However, what this demonstrates is that there do exist solutions to eliminate gerrymandering. Such solutions would restore power of choice back to the voters and away from the politicians, a novel concept in the partisan environment that pervades our political system.

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Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a computer science professor in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a data scientist, he uses his expertise in risk-based analytics to address problems in public policy. He is the director of the Institute of Computational Research at the University of Illinois. This piece was originally published by The Hill.

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