On Monday, the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to reconsider whether the Constitution bars extreme partisan gerrymandering, returning a case from North Carolina to a trial court. The move followed two decisions last week that sidestepped issues in partisan gerrymandering cases from Maryland and Wisconsin, leaving unresolved questions of whether designing voting districts according to political interests is unconstitutional. Here are three books that explore the history and implications of redistricting.

RAT____ED

The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy

By David Daley

257 pp. Liveright Publishing. (2016)

According to Daley, former editor in chief of the website Salon, the 2008 election of Barack Obama presented Republicans with a crisis, and in an effort to take back the government, they used so-called dark money and sophisticated mapping technology to redraw the American political map such that their dominance in government would be set until at least 2020, when states will be able to redraw their maps. Daley uses Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin as examples of states where “the drawing of district lines has been rigged to such a perverted degree that the resulting congressional delegation bears little resemblance to the actual votes cast,” as explained by our reviewer.

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GIVE US THE BALLOT

The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

By Ari Berman

384 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (2015)