Cole Baggett, news editor and Roxanne Gasana, deputy news editor

On May 13, Governor Brian Kemp issued a proclamation scheduling a special legislative session on June 17 to redraw Georgia’s voting district maps. Despite Georgia Republicans refusing to redistrict Georgia’s maps, this proclamation stands as part of a nationwide redistricting trend as the November midterms approach.

Most redistricting efforts begin with the U.S. Census that occurs every ten years. The census counts the population of each state, which determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. Congressional representation for each state must be adjusted as people move and populations fluctuate.

“Because of polarization, each of the parties are getting further away from each other, and both parties have greater incentives to maximize their own representation while limiting the other party’s influence,” Stacy Evans

Once the number of representatives is decided, the states are responsible for redrawing the lines for their congressional districts. The end goal is to create a map where each district holds the same number of people, ensuring that each person’s vote is equivalent to one another.

Sam Call, a Professor of Political Science, explained that redistricting has a long history of political influence in America.

“Redistricting has been used politically through almost all of U.S. history, so it is political by nature. Most of the time it’s state legislatures that are doing the redistricting, and state legislatures are either majority Democrat or majority Republican, so they have political incentives to try to draw the lines in a way that is going to benefit them,” Call said.

So long as the districts of each state are equal in population size to one another, political parties may draw these maps and group voters based on several common factors, though there are notable exceptions to this. When districts are redrawn to increase a political parties’ influence, it is referred to as gerrymandering.

Call notes that historical examples of gerrymandering include the Jim Crow era of southern states, where districts were shaped to decrease the influence of African American voters. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has since outlawed racial discrimination through the use of gerrymandering, but recent supreme court decisions have since called this protection into question.

“Gerrymandering based on race is illegal according to various Supreme Court decisions, but Gerrymandering based on the partisan makeup of various areas is not, [so] every state does it in some degree.” Call said.

“There’s a lot of cases that have gone through circuit courts and through the Supreme Court, but for now, the Supreme Court has ruled racial gerrymandering is no.”

Stacy Evans, representative of Georgia’s 57th district, has cited 2026 Supreme Court Case Louisiana v. Callas as a profoundly influential decision that affects the future of minority population’s voting influence. This case saw the Supreme Court deem the existence of a second majority black district within Louisiana unconstitutional, arguing this to be a racial gerrymander that violations the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

“[Louisiana v. Callais] was a devastating decision,” Evans said. “Before the decision, the law said you cannot draw districts that have the effect of diluting minority voting strength.”

After the decision, if a case of racial voting discrimination is presented, one must prove that the intent behind the district’s lines is to weaken minority voting power, which is significantly harder to prove.

Both the impacts of gerrymandering and the increasing political polarization in the United States have contributed to the importance of redistricting. Likewise, the country’s two-party political system makes this significant because district boundaries affect the number of seats each party gets.

“Because of polarization, each of the parties are getting further away from each other, and both parties have greater incentives to maximize their own representation while limiting the other party’s influence,” Call said.

Evans cites political polarization as an incentive of gerrymandering. She states that this is due to the fact that each district is drawn to reflect the interests of the population residing there. As a result, areas that contain populations with a tendency to vote for republicans, for example, are reflected by districts that group these populations together, improving the odds of a republican win.

“By using a software that identifies what primary folks vote in, you can figure out roughly how many Democrats or Republicans are in each district, and [parties] can adjust the lines until [they] get what [they] want,” Evans said.

This can have consequences that go beyond deciding which party wins a specific district. When lines are drawn that favor one party, elections may become less competitive because one candidate begins with an advantage. This can also influence what issues the candidates choose to highlight, as appealing to the voters in their district may take priority.

Recently, however, representatives of some states are pushing to redraw their district maps between censuses.

“The mid-census period redistricting is purely about power,” Evans said. “This can become confusing for voters. For example, I’m your legislator one minute, and the next minute it’s somebody a couple streets over.”

Considering the political significance of the midterm elections in November, Call points to this event as a cause for the rise in redistricting cases we have seen this year.

“Typically, redistricting happens right after the census is done, so on the 10, so 2010, 2020, in the future 2030,” Call said. “More recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of mid census redistricting in a way that it hasn’t happened before, and mostly this is due to parties trying to get a leg up in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. We’ve seen Texas and Florida come out with new maps. We’ve seen some battles in places like North Carolina and California has also had a referendum on whether they’re going to redistrict or not.”

The rules regarding redistricting vary from state to state. Some states have changed their systems to reduce the role played by political parties and shifted the responsibility of drawing district lines to independent commissions or judges. Despite this, state legislatures are still major players in the redistricting process.

Call believes redistricting will remain a persistent political issue. She described the process as a cycle: if one party succeeds in redrawing the districts and increases its representation, the opposing party may respond by seeking the same once it gains control. “If Republicans are successful in their redistricting, Democrats will respond with their own redistricting,” Call said.

Evans maintains that despite redistricting happening largely behind the scenes, it is imperative that voters contact their elected officials and advocate against gerrymandering on the basis on partisanship and instead focus on the issues that concern them, like affordability, healthcare and education.

“[Redistricting] affects everything, and I encourage the general electorate to reach out to their representatives and say ‘we don’t want you to spend time trying to keep your jobs, we want you to spend time thinking about how to make our lives easier’,” Evans said