Voters in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maryland deserve fair maps that don’t lock in a partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats. Federal courts nationwide had recently begun to insist on that, repeatedly declaring districts tainted with extreme partisan intent unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court put an end to that dream last month. Its 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause closed the federal courts to anyone seeking review of this undemocratic practice, despite those bipartisan panels of judges who repeatedly found they had all the tools and standards they needed to evaluate when district lines egregiously favored one side over the other.

But sometimes maps produce unrepresentative results not because of smoky backroom deals or elaborate data-driven gerrymandering. If you’re a Republican in most of New England or a Democrat in many parts of the South or the Midwest, good luck electing a member of your own choosing, regardless of who draws the lines.

That’s largely a function of geography, not gerrymandering, but the end result is the same: unfair maps, skewed representation, and hundreds of thousands of voters without a voice of their own in Congress. And where this is the simple result of geography, even the best-intentioned nonpartisan redistricting commission will fail to cure it.

The under-recognized conclusion is that while gerrymandering is a serious problem, it’s also a symptom of a bigger one: districting itself, and our very system of single-district, winner-take-all politics. It’s time to think about how we fix both.