Two voting issues have been dominating headlines recently: state battles over gerrymandering and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply limited the use of race-conscious districting when race predominates in drawing district lines. Both issues point to the same deeper problem: our reliance on single-member, winner-take-all districts.
Most people would probably agree with a basic democratic principle: everyone’s vote should count, and every community should have a fair chance to be represented. Gerrymandering violates that principle. Whether done for partisan or racial purposes, it manipulates district lines so that some voters have more power and others have less. If we agree that this is wrong, then the obvious question is: why do we allow it? Too often, the answer is simple. We tolerate unfairness when it benefits our side.
But what would we think if we were on the other side of the equation?
Majority-Black districts are one attempt to protect representation in a system that has long diluted Black political power. Given the history of racial exclusion in the United States, those protections matter. But they are also a remedy for a deeper structural problem. In a winner-take-all district system, a group’s political power often depends on whether it can form a majority inside a particular set of lines. That means representation turns on geography, mapmaking, litigation, and judicial doctrine.
That is not a fair way to build a democracy.
If we truly want everyone’s vote to count, then we should be willing to ask a bigger question: why should representation depend so heavily on district lines at all? What about Black voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters, Democrats in heavily Republican districts, Republicans in heavily Democratic districts, independents, and other political minorities? I am not saying these groups have faced the same history of discrimination, nor that they require the same legal remedies. They have not, and they do not. But a truly fair electoral system should not require any politically significant group to be geographically packed into just the right district in order to have a voice.
Proportional representation offers a more structural solution. Instead of allowing one side to win all representation from a district, proportional systems translate votes into seats more fairly. If a group earns a meaningful share of the vote, it should earn a meaningful share of representation. Such a system would not erase racial inequality or political conflict, but it would reduce the need to fight endlessly over district lines. It would make gerrymandering less powerful and representation less dependent on whether mapmakers draw the “right” boundaries.
The test of a fair electoral system is not whether it helps our side win. The test is whether we would accept it without knowing which side we would be on.
Many people will read that and agree in principle. They may think, “Yes, that would be fairer.” But agreement is not reform. We have become too comfortable accepting a broken system because it is familiar, because changing it seems unrealistic, or because the unfairness sometimes benefits our side. That is exactly the mindset that keeps the system in place.
If we believe every vote should count, then we have to demand institutions that make votes count. A democracy should not depend on clever mapmaking, racial sorting, or endless litigation over where one district ends and another begins. The status quo will not change because we quietly recognize that it is unfair. It will change only when we stop rewarding politicians for protecting the system that protects them.
Dr. Raymond E. Barranco is professor of sociology at Mississippi State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Louisiana State University, and his work has been published in multiple criminology and sociology journals. Dr. Barranco invites readers to send feedback and sociology-related questions you’d like him to address in this space to [email protected].
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