I have said in the past that almost all elections are rigged, just not the way you think.
The relatively rare instances of fraudulent voting has not, at least after numerous investigations by both political parties, been found to in any way influence the outcome of any particular election.
However, politicians since virtually the beginning of the Republic have found other ways that can influence the balance of power in the country despite relatively clean elections themselves.
Elbridge Gerry, who eventually went on to become the fifth vice president of the United States, was elected governor of Illinois in 1810. He pioneered the practice of drawing the lines of voting districts that would unfairly benefit one political party over another.
A political cartoon at the time compared the shape of the voting districts he created to a salamander, and thus the term “Gerrymandering” was born.
Redistricting, or the practice of re-drawing district boundaries, is a necessary practice that has been traditionally carried out every 10 years after the census. Its purported goal is to draw boundaries that make all the districts have roughly the same number of voters and to provide fair representation.
But more often than not, the boundaries that get drawn tend to favor the party that is in power at the time they are drawn.
While it is illegal to draw district lines that disenfranchise voters according to race, it is not illegal to draw lines that disenfranchise voters according to their political parties.
Texas, under the encouragement of Tom DeLay at the time, is the state that pioneered the practice of re-drawing districts more often than every 10 years when the opportunity arose to increase the political power of the party in charge.
And so, here we are, with a special session of the Texas Legislature being asked to re-draw district lines in between censuses.
The stakes are high at the national level for the 2026 mid-term elections because the balance of power in the House of Representatives is on a razor’s edge. One or two seats either way could put either Democrats or Republicans in charge.
A while back, I was at a newspaper meeting in Springfield, Illinois, and found myself in conversation with the head of the Illinois Press Association. We were each lamenting the use of gerrymandering in our states. He called attention to Democrats drawing lines in Illinois that gave that party outsized representation in Illinois’ congressional delegation.
I commented that Texas Republicans have done the same.
If you are a Republican in Texas, you might ask “what’s the big deal? We’re good and they’re evil, so we should be in charge.”
And if you are a Democrat in Illinois, you might ask “what’s the big deal? We’re good and they’re evil, so we should be in charge.”
The big deal, of course, is that if you see your party as good and the other as evil, you’re drinking too much Kool-Aid.
It is in the interest of a healthy democratic process that all voices are heard and can participate. But if you are in the minority party of a district that was drawn to benefit the other side, your vote counts for little. You will never win, and you are therefore discouraged from participating.
Gerrymandering has the effect of making the representation in voting districts m ore and more extreme and less and less competitive. Too often, the decision of who will represent a district is made in the party primary, not in the November general election.
In Texas, 71% of elections at all levels are unopposed. What motivation is there for a representative to listen to his or her constituents when that person won’t even have an opponent in the next election?
And to make it worse, if that representative actually does buck the system and takes an action that doesn’t conform to party bosses, that representative is likely to be “primaried” by an even more extreme candidate.
But getting back to Texas, it is not difficult to understand the purpose of this round of redistricting. The party in power typically loses seats in the mid-term election, and Republicans don’t have that many seats to lose in the House of Representatives. But if Texas can draw lines that increase the Republican number by five (and thereby decrease the Democrats’ number by five), that action alone could guarantee that the House stays in the hands of Republicans.
It is not my purpose here to say what party should be in control of Congress, it is to question how we get there.
Do you take the road of working your hardest to convince voters that they should support your side, or do you just move the lines so that you win anyway?
I heard one Republican Congresswoman over the weekend defend the current re-drawing of congressional districts by referring to what Democrats have done in Illinois.
Let’s be clear. It is not right when Democrats do it in Illinois, and it is not right when Republicans do it in Texas. As every kindergartner knows, just because someone else does something, it doesn’t make it right for you to do it.
If representatives in the Texas and Illinois legislatures are drawing lines for the purpose of strengthening their political party and not for the purpose of allowing their constituents to be heard, they are putting their parties ahead of the people they supposedly represent, and they don’t deserve the title “representative.”
Randy Keck has been the owner and publisher of The Community News in Aledo, Texas for 30 years. He currently serves as president of the National Newspaper Association Foundation.