The Redistricting Scam Nobody Wants to Fix

Everyone’s talking about gerrymandering again, but almost no one is talking about the bigger structural flaw baked into the system. And if you think this is just about Republicans or Democrats, you are already missing the point.

Here’s the law, not just in Texas but nationwide: congressional districts must be drawn using the total population from the most recent U.S. Census. In Texas right now, that means the official 2020 count of 29,145,505 people. That number gets split into 38 congressional districts, giving each an “ideal” size of about 766,987 residents. On paper, that sounds fair.

Here is the key to understanding the flaw. Eligible voters are citizens aged 18 or older who can legally vote. Total population includes everyone, whether they can vote or not. The starting point is not past election results. It is that total population number, straight from the Census.

During a conversation, a fellow American told me, “They’re splitting up people by how votes happened. They’ve actually said this.” It sounds convincing until you read the law yourself. Election results may shape later map tweaks, but the very first step, the foundation, is built entirely on total population.

And here is where the imbalance starts: equal population is not the same as equal voting power. Some districts are filled with people who cannot vote: minors, non-citizens, permanent residents stuck in years-long naturalization backlogs, people with felony convictions who have not had their rights restored, or those legally deemed incompetent to vote. They all count toward that “ideal” number. The result is that a voter in a district with fewer eligible voters has more influence than a voter in a district where almost everyone can vote.

This imbalance exists before a single partisan line is drawn. And it is not a Texas-only issue. California, Florida, Illinois, New York, nearly every state follows the same process. Both parties benefit. When they are in charge, they use it. When they are not, they act like the other side invented it.

When I asked Representative Vince Perez about this imbalance, he explained “packing and cracking” minority voters and said that under the proposed Texas map, “it would take about three Latino voters to have the same impact as one white voter, and about five Black voters to equal one white voter’s impact.” That is a serious problem. But when I pressed him on whether he had examined the eligible-voter versus total-population split in Plan C2308, he had no answer.

Democrats like Jasmine Crockett, James Talarico, and Greg Casar have all called the proposed map discriminatory. Their speeches make headlines. Yet, like Republicans defending their own maps, none have addressed the fact that the “equal” districts they are fighting over are built on unequal voter power from the start.

So I did the basic check MYSELF… the kind of work any lawmaker should be doing. Plan C2308 is built directly on the 2020 Census total population count, just as federal law requires. That means the imbalance is baked into the math from the first step. Lawmakers will stage quorum breaks, press conferences, and committee showdowns over the map’s lines, but they ignore the flaw sitting in the middle of the table.

The “total population” rule is the elephant in the room. It is not illegal, but it is the perfect setup for locking in power without looking like you are breaking the rules.

Socrates warned against accepting appearances without asking the deeper questions, and this is exactly the kind of appearance that hides the truth in plain sight. Hegel taught that contradictions only push history forward when they are confronted… and here, both sides are content to let the contradiction sit. Nozick argued for protecting individual rights and ensuring true representation, yet this system distorts representation before the first line is drawn.

Which brings us to the question almost no one is asking: has any lawmaker, Republican or Democrat, actually examined Plan C2308’s eligible-voter numbers compared to its total population? Or are they all too busy riding the party train to notice the deeper imbalance?

If you care about fair representation, demand that your lawmakers publish their analyses of the… data… the numbers. If they will not even measure the problem, they will never fix it.