There Is No Unrigged Map

Gerrymandering gets condemned as cheating, which flatters the alternative. There is no unrigged map. Every district line is an argument about who belongs with whom — a decision that a river, a highway, a shared school run, or a shared grievance should decide your vote's weight. Drawing those lines is not a corruption of representation; it is representation, naked.

What's revealing is the timing. The rules are remade, on a schedule, by people whose power the rules will determine. That isn't a flaw in the machine. It's the machine.

The honest gerrymander would come with a confession attached: we drew this line to win, and here is the neighbourhood we cut in half to do it. We'd still fight. But we'd be arguing about the argument, instead of pretending the map fell from the sky.