It is a rather unfortunate circumstance that any discussion of gerrymandering in non-specialized circles necessarily needs to begin with semantics. There seems to be a reverse correlation, I regret to observe, between public awareness of an issue and the degree to which it affects our everyday lives as citizens. One need not open an essay about football, for instance, with a thorough clarification of what football is, even though the sport is of miniscule consequence beyond the entertainment it provides. (“America’s true religion” is how the political commentator Shaun King once characterized football.)

I am mindful of the fact that my seemingly holier-than-thou rhetoric — in the opening paragraph of the essay, no less — may be of no service to me or to my readers. Indeed, it might even stymie the very objectives that this piece of writing is intended to ultimately accomplish. Sanctimony, I find, is no way to go about provoking interest in anything, much less an arcane political endeavor whose immediate effects are far from obvious. I nevertheless cannot think of a more appropriate place or time to air my grievances in this regard, especially given the growing relevance of gerrymandering in our current political climate.

As I write these words, court battles are underway at the federal level and in the states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Maryland, and Texas to litigate the legality — and, in some cases, constitutionality — of gerrymandering practices. The question that lies at the core of this debate is whether elected officials could actively disadvantage people with a particular party identification — who, in most cases, happen to belong to minority groups — in the electoral process. What is at stake here, in other words, is the very democracy that we pride ourselves in in this country.

The term “gerrymandering,” as Jane Sloan and Carlos E. Cortés explain in their comprehensive 2013 book Multicultural America, is derived from the name of former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1811 signed a bill readjusting the state’s representative districts so as to favor the Democrats at the expense of the Federalists. In essence, gerrymandering is “the political manipulation of legislative boundaries for partisan or [incumbency-protection] purposes.” For a more colloquial definition, I will refer to The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham: “drawing political boundaries to give your party a numeric advantage over an opposing party.”

I must note that at various points in American history, gerrymandering has been used to both enfranchise and disenfranchise minority voters, albeit not uniformly across the country. Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for instance, several states implemented gerrymanders to create majority-minority districts, thereby empowering minority voting blocs in the electoral process. That said, we have also witnessed congressional majorities in Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Texas gerrymander the competitiveness of their districts away, and states such as New Jersey, California, and New York redraw their districts in order to protect the seats of their incumbents.

The paradox that readily comes into view upon close examination is that, for decades, our political leaders have recognized and spoken publicly about the undemocratic mischiefs of gerrymandering, and yet very little action has been taken to curb the practice in any way. President Ronald Reagan once called for “an end to the antidemocratic and un-American practice of gerrymandering congressional districts,” characterizing the issue as “a national scandal.” President Barack Obama, a Democratic president, employed the same language in his remarks about partisan redistricting: “We’ve got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Pa.) did not make a secret of his misgivings about the issue, either. “I think it’s wrong,” he once observed. “I think it leads to bad government.”

There are two major ways in which congressional districts are gerrymandered for electoral gain. One is through drawing districts is such a way as to concentrate voters of one type into a single district, thereby reducing their influence in other districts. The other strategy, often referred to as “cracking,” entails spreading out a voting bloc in as many districts as possible in order to deny them sufficient influence in any one district. That these two strategies often prove effective is by no means in dispute. But nor is the fact, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, that they are antithetical to our American ideals of democracy and equal representation.

The graphic below, courtesy of The Washington Post, is essentially a visual illustration of the ways in which district lines could be drawn to engineer a desired election outcome. Voter population and the partisan distribution of voters in any given area, as the graphic aptly demonstrates, are only secondary predictors of the parties’ vote shares. What ultimately determines the winners and losers is instead the shape of the congressional map and the manner in which it allocates voters across the state.

That partisan gerrymandering is anathema to democracy — and could potentially be in violation of the United States Constitution — has been recognized multiple times by state and federal courts, but not with the unanimity required to systematically curtail or outlaw the practice. Indeed, the question that concerns the implications and limits of gerrymandering is one that has appeared before the judicial branch an awful lot of times over the past two centuries. While we might have gotten closer to a definitive verdict on the matter, by no means have we reached anything of the kind.

Several states are currently grappling with the gerrymandering issue, some of whom have even drawn the attention of the United States Supreme Court. In the state of Pennsylvania, for instance, the congressional map drawn by Republicans in 2011 has been repeatedly recognized as an extreme gerrymander intended to electorally benefit the G.O.P. This is borne out by the fact that in all of the three elections held so far under the current map — namely in 2012, 2014, and 2016 — Republicans won the same 13 U.S. House seats out of the state’s 18, even though Democratic candidates captured about half of the state popular vote in every election.

In late February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found the state’s Republican-drawn congressional map to “clearly, plainly, and palpably” violate the state Constitution and be “aimed at achieving unfair partisan gain.” The Court then proceeded to redraw the state’s congressional districts, thereby overturning the Republican gerrymander previously in place. The state Republican lawmakers originally faced a Feb. 9 deadline to amend the congressional map on their own, in the face of which they instead opted to publicly dispute the Supreme Court’s ruling, with one of them brazenly calling for the justices’ impeachment. The newly drawn district map all but ensures that Democrats will pick up several new seats in the November midterm elections.

We have witnessed more or less the same sequence of events unfold in North Carolina, except that the state’s gerrymandered congressional map has yet to be effectively overturned by the courts. Earlier this year, a state trial court deemed the district maps of Wake County and Mecklenburg County as racially gerrymandered and hence in breach of the U.S. Constitution, ordering state lawmakers to produce a revised map by January 24. Days before the deadline expires, however, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a request to temporarily stay the lower court’s order, handing Republican lawmakers a partial victory until further notice. Despite its temporary nature, this stay greatly advantages North Carolina Republicans by way of increasing the likelihood that the current map will be in place during the next congressional election cycle.

The Supreme Court is currently considering another partisan-gerrymandering case, namely Gill v. Whitford out of the state of Wisconsin. As Michael Li and Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice explain, a federal court struck down a redistricting plan for the lower house of the Wisconsin state assembly in 2016, ruling that the plan was “an aggressive partisan gerrymander.” What distinguished this redistricting plan from those implemented in other states was that it effectively “[locked] in a disproportionate and unfair advantage for one party over the other — making maps unresponsive to voters in individual districts and deeply unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole.”

When the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Wisconsin gerrymandering case last October, legal analysts prognosticated that the justices will most likely strike down the state’s proposed congressional map as unconstitutional. In early March of 2018, however, the Wisconsin Public Radio reported that the Court’s ruling, whichever form it takes, “likely won’t lead to new district lines being drawn for the 2018 elections.” This, again, is a partial but significant victory for Wisconsin Republicans, as it gives them an (unfair) advantage in the November midterm elections.

The gerrymandering case in the state of Maryland, in which Democrats are at fault for taking their redistricting efforts too far, serves as an illustration of the fact that this issue is not distinct to any particular political party and manifests itself in both Republican and Democratic molds — although not at the same frequency. The Democrat-enacted gerrymander in question is so extreme that, in the 2016 elections, Republican candidates’ 37-percent vote share in the state translated to only one U.S. House seat of the state’s eight.

In late March, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Maryland case, Benisek v. Lamone, during which the justices conveyed the impression that they found the state Democrats’ gerrymandering endeavors to be deliberate and problematic. The Court was nevertheless hesitant to quickly strike down the state’s congressional map, as legal precedent suggests that a certain degree of partisanship in redistricting is permissible. As with nearly any legal quandary, the question that lies at the center of the gerrymandering debate concerns boundaries: Just how much is too much?

Most legal challenges to gerrymanders are predicated upon a claim that the practice violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. More specifically, the anti-gerrymandering proposition holds that it discriminates against candidates and voters on the basis of their political beliefs (thereby violating their Fourteenth Amendment rights) and burdens their First Amendment rights to speech and association. This is a conundrum that the Supreme Court has been grappling with for decades. “Partisan redistricting,” as Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker once observed, “is easier to identify than to rectify.”

The Wisconsin State Assembly case currently before the Supreme Court is a highly consequential one that, as The New York Times’s Michael Wines writes, “could remake an American political landscape rived by polarization and increasingly fenced off for partisan advantage.” Experts estimate that a decisive ruling by the Supreme Court striking down the Wisconsin map could potentially invalidate redistricting maps in up to 20 other states and open at least a dozen House districts to court challenges. Gill v. Whitford might ultimately prove to be the Roe v. Wade of partisan gerrymandering.

This country was founded upon a number of principles that are inherently democratic: one person one vote, equal representation, government by the people and for the people. It is rather self-evident that it is not in keeping with these principles to enable our elected officials to influence their political fortunes through an undemocratic process of redrawing district maps. President Obama spelled out the problem succinctly and elegantly when he characterized it as “politicians [picking] their voters, and not the other way around.”

Partisan gerrymandering, in other words, is the very perversion of democracy in its most palpable form, with tangible effects that dramatically alter the way in which individual citizens participate in their government. Some might be inclined to dismiss the content of this essay as, to borrow a phrase once employed by a dear professor of mine, “theoretical gobbledygook.” The reason why we have the luxury of dismissing this issue today, however, is that our country’s Founding Fathers did the exact opposite: they took it seriously and pondered it long and hard. Indeed, it is in darkness that democracy withers away.