“Allowed”, meaning that it’d still be optional? Under what circumstances would a state ever choose to do so?
You never need contiguity requirements for any gerrymander, so long as you’re willing to accept nearly fractal borders. Take any finite set of points in a plane (like, say, the homes of all of the voters in a state), and any partition of those points you choose, and it’s possible to draw bounded regions of the plane that contain each of the partitions.
Of course, you might run into a situation where the boundary for N-1 districts all run between adjacent households, but that’s the price we pay for fairness, I guess.
State initiative. I could see Colorado doing that with 1/3 Dem, 1/3 Pub, 1/3 neither.
It’s not optional now except via hackery like I described. The Uniform Congressional District Act disallows it:
requires that all members of the United States House of Representatives in the 91st United States Congress and every subsequent Congress be elected from a single-member district
You can’t have a true proportional system without a multi-member district (whether it covers the whole state or a subset).
I whipped up a spreadsheet calculating a thing I’d been interested in:
Essentially the calculation is this: suppose you take the number of house seats for a party, divide by the total, and multiply by the total voting population. That’s the population that would have had to vote for the party had the outcome been proportional. Then, subtract the actual voting population for that party (based on 2024 House results). Sum the positive values and you get the population “advantage” for that party. Alternately, do the reverse: given the voting ratio, compute the expected proportional number of representatives, round to an integer, and subtract that from the actual number.
What I get is 12.9M for Republicans and 12.4M for Democrats for the population advantage, and 38 vs. 38 representative advantage. So almost exactly equal advantage at the moment.
With the expected Texas change, the numbers go to 14.3M for Reps, 12.4M for Dems, and 43 vs. 38 reps.
Independently, if California goes through with this, the advantage will be 12.9M for Republicans but 13.8M for Democrats. And the representative advantage will be 38 vs. 43 (i.e., the expected gain of 5 Reps).
With both, it’s 14.3M vs. 13.8M and 43 vs. 43. So balance is restored but the level of gerrymandering gets worse.
So which is the most imbalanced state? That’s sorta difficult to answer. Strictly by the numbers, it’s Rhode Island. They have two Democratic reps but by the vote it should really be one of each. And they have a tiny population, so that +1 advantage looks bad in comparison. Hawaii is basically the same story, as is Montana in the other direction. But the populations are so low that it’s a bit silly.
In absolute numbers, it’s California, with a +10 Democrat advantage. But among states with a >5M voting population, Illinois has the worst imbalance, with 15 Democratic reps vs. 2 Republican despite the voting split being 55%/45%.
It’s not too surprising, but Republican gerrymandering is in smaller numbers but across more states (23 total), while Democratic gerrymandering is in larger numbers across fewer (15) states. That’s part of why Democratic states are in a sense more gerrymandered than Republican ones but the overall numbers come out balanced.
The most balanced is Pennsylvania. They’re the highest population state without any advantage on either side (there are other balanced states, but I consider population to be a good tiebreaker).
Gerrymandering [by both sides] over the past 30+ years, is hew we got to where we are today, with only handfuls of voting districts in this country that really decide national elections. It has also virtually wiped out the voice of the moderate voter. It is why we are so polarized as a country, and why the fringe of both sides control the narratives.
And if only on side had gerrymandered over the past 30+ years, then we would have gotten to where we are today 30+ years ago.
For those who didn’t know, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s twin brother, Danny DeVito, came out in favor of the California redistricting plan (and against Schwarzenegger’s staunch opposition):
DeVito tossed in a thousand bucks for the Proposition.
When politics pits brother against brother…