By Chris Satullo

To the ramparts, citizens!  Time to stop the steal!

No, not that bogus one.

I’m referring to the steal that’s really happening, right now, in slow motion, inside state capitals across the nation.

You see, it’s gerrymandering time.

It’s time for political parties to tilt the electoral playing fields as far as they can to their own advantage, to coddle their own incumbents while screwing the other side’s.

To cheat, in short.

To rob millions upon millions of Americans of any meaningful say into who their community sends to Congress, and who wields the gavel in the U.S. House and Senate – the say they might enjoy were it not for the gerrymandering of election districts. To steal legislative and congressional elections, one by one, in the dark, exploiting the acquiescence of a complicit U.S. Supreme Court.

This steal is all more or less legal. It mostly gets done by map nerds wielding computer algorithms in back offices. There’s none of the B-movie skullduggery alleged in the nonsensical Kraken lawsuits trotted out by Trump flunkies in the last year.

Some of this cheating can’t be stopped; it’s already too late. But in some places, some states, there’s still time for voter attention and activism to make a difference, to nudge maps toward upholding voter rights, rather than partisan agendas. It’s worth checking out whether you live in one of those places. ( You can do that here, here, here or here.)

I feel lucky that I live in Pennsylvania, a place where there’s some hope – and plenty of voters working hard to keep it alive.

Let’s be clear: Neither major party is an angel when it comes to devising ludicrously unfair electoral districts for partisan advantage. But let’s also be honest. This time around, it’s mostly Republicans who hold the hammer. They are swinging it around like Thor on angel dust.

Why is that?  Look back to the mid-terms of 2010, when the Tea Party rose and Obama’s legions slept, staying home from the polls out of pique that their hero hadn’t single-handedly stopped the oceans from rising…or something.

Mix that in with Democrats’ chronic inattention to those “minor” races that determine who gets to run state legislatures or sit in governor’s offices, and in 2010 you got a political shift that’s become the gift that keeps on giving for the GOP.

The party smartly focused its attention on winning statehouses in the purple states – e.g. North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania – where the bulk of Congress’ contested seats reside. That’s why Republicans worked so hard to grab hold of the mapping pen in the 2011 redistricting; the maps they drew then set them up to win more elections and dominate the mapping again this year. 

OK, by now, your head might be spinning, so let’s take a step back for some basic civics. Election districts get redrawn every 10 years, using the revised population data generated by a new U.S. Census. The population counts get done in every year ending in 0, so redistricting happens in every year ending in 1. 

Each state gets an allotment of seats in the U.S. House based on its population. So, every 10 years some fast-growing states (usually ones with more sun) get extra seats at the expense of states that grew less fast (think the industrial Midwest).

So, a party’s chance to shift or lock in control of Congress via mapping hinges on the states that gain or lose seats. You want to make sure your party grabs as many of the new seats in growing states as it can, while making sure the other party takes the hit in states that lost seats. 

Sophisticated computer programs enable you to do that with precision, through the gambits known as “packing” and “cracking.”

Understand finally, that election mapping gets done state by state, not in Washington. Once Republicans did their brilliant job of winning statehouses in 2010, they wielded their mapping power giddily in the next year’s election mapping. They also were backed up indulgently by the Supremes whenever their gerrymanders got challenged in court.

So, these days, the GOP is merrily back to gerrymandering in state after state, while progressives spend their time yelling at Joe Manchin and fulminating about anti-vaxxers.  

Ohio’s GOP-dominated legislature just passed its new congressional map, which Gov. Mike DeWine will sign. The map makes sure that the seat the state will lose thanks to the Census will be a blue one. Most analysts say the new map would pretty much lock in a 13-2 GOP advantage in seats, even though only 55 percent of Ohioans on average vote red.

Not every state is Gerrymandering Central. After the 2011 festival of partisan mapping, voters in some states revolted, demanding new mapping processes where voters or nonpartisan experts – not the very pols whose jobs were at stake – would draw election maps. In states which offer some form of independent voter input, the maps tend to produce far more competitive (i.e., fair) districts. Michigan was the shining example of such a voter revolt in favor of fairness in the last few years.

Ohio, in fact, was another place where voters pushed for reform, though they got only half a loaf. A key provision there is that, if the congressional map ends up being a partisan jam jab (which this one clearly is), it will have a shelf life of only four years, not 10. Ohio Republicans are just shrugging at that, choosing to grab what they can while they can. 

Pennsylvania, where I live, is an interesting case. The congressional map the GOP passed in the dead of night in 2011 was so blatant that a Democratic-tilting state Supreme Court tossed it out in 2018, replacing it with one drawn by a Stanford professor. Presto, in the next election the party split in the congressional delegation went from 12-6 to 9-9. But Pennsylvania is also losing a seat, so that nice map from the professor is a dead letter.

Because the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, gets to sign off on a congressional map – and because the state’s high court still waits in the wings to overturn any over-the-top Republican scheme – the parties in Harrisburg have to reach some non-crazy meeting of minds.

The Keystone State also had some reform ferment which, full disclosure, I was until recently helping to churn up as director of a program called Draw the Lines PA. Thousands of voters are watchdogging the mapping process this time around, demanding open process and fair results.

Justin Villere, who succeeded me as director of Draw the Lines, reports that the initiative has engaged more than 7,000 Pennsylvanians in drawing more than 1,500 sample legislative and congressional maps.

The project also polled those citizens on what values they thought were most important in an election map. The overwhelming winners: compactness, competitive balance, and respecting communities of interest. The overwhelming losers: partisan advantage and protecting incumbents i.e., precisely the two things that are top of mind for statehouse partisans when they fire up their mapping algorithms.

Villere, working with a crew of 40 or so fervent citizens called the Map Corps, drew a congressional map of Pennsylvania that pulled together the best ideas from all those submitted maps, while seeking to uphold Pennsylvanians’ top mapping values. Their map earns the kind of positive mapping metrics that make nerds’ hearts soar. Draw the Lines has submitted its Citizens Map to the statehouse committees working on redistricting. That map is the one you see at the top of this piece.

The clock is ticking loudly in Harrisburg, with a late January deadline to get new maps done in time for the 2022 primaries. The legislature has offered no sign yet of either a draft congressional map, or the statehouse maps, which get done through a different process mandated by the state Constitution.

“We’ve done our map, engaging thousands of people. We put it out there for public comment, showed it to lawmakers,” Villere said. “We think that’s a model for the process the General Assembly should use. We’re saying to lawmakers, and we hope all Pennsylvanian will join us in saying: Show us your map. Give us a fair chance to study it and have our say.”

In other words, not like last time.  Not like what just happened in Ohio.

Remember: Most of these maps will land in court. The more plaintiffs can show that either the public was excluded, or its input ignored, the stronger those court challenges become. It’s sad that courts, not the democratic process, might become the best chance to get these crucial mapping lines right. But the alternative – another 10 years of sham elections with predetermined results, producing arrogant, impregnable majorities – is too painful to contemplate.

“We don’t want to leave it to the courts to do the map again,” Villere said. “With our divided government, a real back-and-forth between the represented and their representatives is what can produce the most trust in the result.”

He’s right. It’s what we all should want. If you live in a state where you can still have a say, go to the ramparts, and shout it out to those in power. Nothing much is at stake, except the survival of democracy.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia