Principle #2. Representatives are chosen by voters

Democracy was invented in a place small enough to practice it in person. The citizens of ancient Athens could assemble, hear the arguments, and vote together on the questions that governed them. That mode of governance was already considered unworkable by the Founders at the scale of a single nation, and the problem has only intensified since. Hundreds of millions of people scattered across a continent, deciding continuously on questions that require sustained attention and technical expertise, cannot govern themselves by assembly. Every modern democracy has solved this problem the same way: representation. Citizens choose representatives, and those representatives deliberate on what the laws should be.

This is the standard implementation of democracy at scale, as is the case in Norway, Ireland, Japan, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and practically every other functioning democracy. Parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multi-party, federal or unitary, democracies often vary widely in their architecture, but what they share is representation. There is no functioning modern democracy in which the people themselves, rather than their representatives, do the legislating, because no such system has ever been made to work above the scale of a township.

America's version of representation was designed with this scale problem in mind. The Constitution created two chambers with different logics: the House of Representatives, popularly elected every two years with seats apportioned by population, and the Senate, with equal representation per state and members originally chosen by state legislatures rather than voters. The same amendments that progressively expanded who could vote, the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th, also widened, by definition, the circle of who got to choose. In 1913, the 17th Amendment went further, taking the selection of senators away from state legislatures and giving it directly to voters. The arc of American democratic development has been a long, contested movement toward putting the choosing in the hands of "the People."

If representation is the only viable form of democracy at scale, and if America has spent its history working to make the choice belong genuinely to "the People," then the way representatives are chosen matters as much as the principle of equal voice itself. So, how are representatives chosen?

Primarily A Secondary Issue

The way Americans choose their representatives today is not the way they always have. For most of the nineteenth century, candidates for office were selected by party leaders in conventions and caucuses. A small number of insiders decided who would appear on the ballot, and voters decided between the two names the parties had handed them. By the late 1800s, this had become a target of reform. The Progressive Era's leading figures, such as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, argued that candidate selection should not be left to party bosses but given directly to voters.¹ The remedy was the direct primary. La Follette pushed it through the Wisconsin legislature in 1903, where voters ratified it the following year; by 1917 all but four states had adopted some form of it.² The reform was sold as more democracy, not less. Its purpose was to take power from a small group of party insiders and put it in the hands of the people.

A century later, it is worth asking how that worked out.

The most basic measure of whether voters control candidate selection is whether voters show up. In American primaries, they generally do not. Across the past quarter-century, primary turnout has hovered between roughly fourteen and thirty percent of eligible voters, with the lowest figures concentrated in midterm years.³ In 2014, fewer than fifteen percent of eligible Americans cast a primary ballot. In 2022, the figure was about twenty percent.⁴ General-election turnout swings with the calendar, climbing past sixty percent in presidential years and falling closer to forty in midterms, but even the worst-attended general election in this period drew more than twice the share of eligible voters as the average primary. The general election that follows then ratifies a choice that a much smaller electorate already made.

The state-level picture can be even more grim. Consider New Jersey, where most congressional districts have leaned reliably toward one party for most of this period, which means the primary in the dominant party is usually the election that decides who serves.⁵ Primary turnout in New Jersey was 6.9 percent of eligible voters in 2014, 8.2 percent in 2010, and 7.1 percent in 2006.⁶ Across every midterm cycle of the past quarter-century, fewer than one in eight eligible New Jerseyans cast a primary ballot, and in five of those cycles it was fewer than one in ten. The general elections that followed drew far higher participation, in line with the national average, but in the safe districts that make up most of the state's congressional map, the names on the November ballot had already been chosen by an electorate of fewer than one in ten eligible voters.

Behind the turnout numbers is a simpler fact. In most congressional districts, the general election is a formality. The way district lines are drawn, combined with where voters of each party live, means the outcome of the great majority of House races is predictable long before November. In 2024, the Cook Political Report rated only 22 of 435 House races as toss-ups in its final pre-election ratings. The vast majority of the other 413 were rated likely or solid for one party, and the dominant party's candidate in each was already on track to win.⁷

If the general election is a formality, the primary is the consequential election, because that is where the dominant party's nominee is chosen. In 2024, about 18 million voters cast primary ballots that decided the occupants of 380 House seats. That is roughly seven percent of voting-age Americans choosing eighty-seven percent of the House. In 169 of those districts, the dominant-party nominee faced no primary opponent and secured a seat in Congress without earning a single vote. The general election that followed ratified outcomes that had been settled months earlier, and in nearly two-fifths of House seats, by no voter at all.⁸

One response is that if primaries decide outcomes, more people should vote in them. But for millions of Americans, the question of whether to vote in a primary is not theirs to answer. The rules of who counts as a primary voter exclude them by design.

In most states, primaries are open or partially open, meaning any registered voter, or any voter not registered with the opposing party, can participate. However, in fifteen states, the primary is closed, meaning only voters who have registered with a party in advance can cast a ballot in that party's primary. New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maryland are among those fifteen.⁹ In those states, voters who have declined to register with either major party are formally excluded from the only election that, in safe districts, decides who represents them. Roughly 17.6 million registered voters are in that situation, and the share of voters not registered with either major party has grown by about twenty percent in the past fifteen years.¹⁰ According to Gallup, forty-three percent of American adults now identify as political independents, compared to twenty-eight percent each for Democrats and Republicans.¹¹ The group most reliably excluded from primaries is also, by a substantial margin, the largest political group in the country.

The closed-primary problem is part of a larger one. Even where independents can vote in primaries, a registered Republican in a safely Democratic district has no meaningful vote in the election that decides who represents them. They can vote in the Republican primary, but it selects a candidate who will lose the general by a wide margin. They can vote in November, but the outcome was settled before the campaign began. The same is true in reverse for a Democrat in a safely Republican district.

So the question of who has a meaningful vote does not really come down to turnout, closed primaries, or who shows up to a primary. It comes down to how many districts are safe in the first place. If most districts were genuinely competitive, every voter in November would have something at stake. The fact that they are not is what gives the small primary electorate its outsized power, which raises the question of how the districts came to be that way.

Gerry Meandering Around Town

In March 1812, the governor of Massachusetts signed a bill redrawing the boundaries of the state's senate districts. The map had been engineered by his party, the Democratic-Republicans, to disadvantage the rival Federalists in the upcoming election. One of the resulting districts, in the area north of Boston, was so contorted that it ran for nearly a hundred miles in a thin curve along the coast. A cartoonist for the Boston Gazette drew the district as a winged dragon, and the editor coined a new word by combining the governor's name with "salamander." The governor was Elbridge Gerry, and the practice has been called gerrymandering ever since.¹²

Gerry was a serious figure. He had signed the Declaration of Independence, served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and would later be elected vice president under James Madison. By contemporary accounts he disliked the redistricting bill and signed it reluctantly. He lost his reelection that fall.¹³ The map he had signed survived him, and so did the word. Two centuries later, the practice it named has become more sophisticated, more deliberate, and considerably more effective than anything Gerry's mapmakers could have managed with a pen and paper. But the basic idea is the same. The party in power draws the lines so that its own voters are distributed efficiently across many districts and the opposing party's voters are concentrated into a few. The result is a legislature whose composition reflects the cartography as much as the votes.

The most candid descriptions of gerrymandering come from the people who do it. In 2000, Thomas Hofeller, the Republican strategist who would go on to design many of the most aggressively partisan congressional maps of the next two decades, described his trade to a conference of state legislators. "Redistricting is like an election in reverse," he said. "It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters."¹⁴ Sixteen years later, in 2016, Republican state representative David Lewis defended a North Carolina congressional map he had helped draw with similar candor on the floor of the General Assembly. "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats," he said. "So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country." He went on to say that he had proposed a ten-to-three Republican advantage only because he did not believe it was possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats.¹⁵ North Carolina that year was a state where Republican congressional candidates would win 53 percent of the statewide vote, and Democratic candidates 47 percent. The map produced ten Republican seats and three Democratic ones, exactly as Lewis had said it was designed to do.¹⁶

The pattern is bipartisan. In a 2017 deposition, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, was asked under oath about the congressional map he had overseen in 2011, which had transformed a six-to-two Democratic delegation into a seven-to-one one. "I did everything in my power to draw a map that would be more favorable to the election of a Democratic congressional delegation," he said. Asked whether the redrawn district had been intended to elect a Democrat rather than a Republican, he replied, "Yes, this was clearly my intent."¹⁷ What gets called fair maps in public is described, in private rooms and sworn testimony, as something else.

The principle at stake is that voters choose their representatives. A congressional district is the unit through which that choice is made: a defined geographic area whose residents share enough common ground that one person can credibly speak for them in Washington. A district should outline a cohesive area representing a cohesive group of people with shared concerns a single representative could meaningfully address.

Gerrymandering inverts this. Instead of drawing districts that fit communities, the lines are drawn to fit electoral outcomes. The illustration below shows how. Imagine a state of fifty voters, sixty percent of whom support one party and forty percent the other, divided into five equal districts that will each elect one representative. Three different ways of drawing the lines produce varied outcomes. In the first, the lines roughly track where voters live, and the resulting delegation reflects the population, three to two in favor of the majority. In the second, the lines are drawn so that every district contains a slim majority of the larger group, and the larger party wins every seat. In the third, the lines bend and twist so that the smaller party wins three districts out of five, despite being a minority of the total population. Same voters, same votes, three different governments. The lines decide. And in most American states, the people drawing the lines are the legislators themselves, which means the people whose jobs depend on the outcome of the next election are the ones deciding which voters they will face.

Having seen what gerrymandering can accomplish, the question is how often it actually happens in the United States. After the 2020 census, of the 435 congressional districts in the country, 177 were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures and roughly 50 by Democratic-controlled ones. Another 28 were drawn by political commissions, 82 by independent or advisory commissions, around 50 by courts after legislative deadlocks or successful gerrymandering challenges, and the remaining 48 by bipartisan compromise or in single-seat states with no district lines to draw at all.¹⁸ In other words, roughly half of the country's congressional districts were drawn by the legislators of one party, sitting in a state capitol, deciding which voters they would face in the next election.

The dynamic this produces is most visible in real time. The events described below were still developing as this was written, and some of the maps will have been changed, challenged, or reinstated by the time it is read.¹⁹

In the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump asked the Republican- controlled Texas legislature to redraw the state's congressional map mid-decade in order to add Republican seats before the 2026 midterms. Texas did so in July, in a special legislative session, producing a map projected to flip up to five Democratic-held seats to Republicans.²⁰ In the weeks that followed, Trump described the effort plainly. "We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats," he told CNBC in early August. "I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats."²¹ Within weeks, Republican legislatures in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Utah followed, each drawing new maps targeting Democratic seats in their states.²²

California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded by placing Proposition 50 on the November ballot, asking voters to suspend the state's independent redistricting commission for one cycle and adopt a new Democratic-drawn congressional map. The official title voters saw on the ballot was unusually direct. "Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas' partisan redistricting."²³ California voters approved it, and the new map was projected to flip up to five Republican-held seats to Democrats.²⁴ Virginia's Democratic-led legislature began a similar process. Florida and Indiana Republicans considered the same. Within six months, six states had adopted new mid-decade maps drawn for partisan advantage, more than at any point since the 1960s.²⁵

What was most striking was not that any individual map was unusually contorted by historical standards. It was that the maps were drawn outside the normal redistricting calendar, in direct response to a political moment, and entirely without the participation of voters in the affected districts. Voters in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and California found themselves in different districts than they had been in months earlier, and would vote in 2026 under maps they had no part in choosing.

The practice of letting elected legislators draw their own districts is not a feature of representative democracy itself. It is a feature of American democracy specifically. In late 2025, in the middle of the mid-decade redistricting wave, the Pew Research Center analyzed how 107 democracies around the world elect their national legislatures. The researchers found that exactly one other country gives the job of drawing legislative districts to subnational legislatures the way the United States does. That country is the Federated States of Micronesia, a Pacific nation of roughly 100,000 people.²⁶

The other 105 democracies in the study, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, and every other wealthy democracy the United States is usually compared to, draw their legislative districts through national election agencies, independent boundary commissions, or other bodies whose members are not the legislators whose seats are being drawn. The American arrangement is not how representative democracy works in the world. It is how it works here. The problem the United States has spent two centuries discussing is one that every comparable democracy has solved.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymandering, Justice Elena Kagan read her dissent aloud from the bench, a step justices reserve for decisions they find catastrophically wrong. "If there is a single idea that made our Nation," she wrote, "it is this one: The people are sovereign…. The people get to choose their representatives. And then they get to decide, at regular intervals, whether to keep them…. Election day…is what links the people to their representatives, and gives the people their sovereign power. That day is the foundation of democratic governance. And partisan gerrymandering can make it meaningless."²⁷

The principle this section opened with was that representatives are chosen by voters. When the people choosing the voters are the people running in the districts they drew, the principle is a farce.

Footnotes

1. On La Follette's role in the direct-primary movement, see Robert M. La Follette, La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison: The Robert M. La Follette Co., 1913); and Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). ↩

2. Wisconsin enacted the first statewide direct-primary law in 1903 (effective 1905). By 1917, all but four states had adopted some form of direct primary. See Alan Ware, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–3. ↩

3. Author's calculation from States United Democracy Center, "Voter Turnout in American Elections Since 2000," and U.S. Election Project voting-eligible-population estimates from Michael McDonald, University of Florida. https://statesunited.org/resources/voter-turnout-since-2000/ and https://www.electproject.org ↩

4. Joshua Ferrer and Michael Thorning, 2022 Primary Turnout: Trends and Lessons for Boosting Participation, Bipartisan Policy Center, March 2023, finding 21.3 percent eligible-voter turnout in 2022 primaries; 14.3 percent in 2014. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/2022-primary-turnout/ ↩

5. On the partisan composition of New Jersey's congressional map in 2014, see "Only One Congressional District in N.J. Considered Competitive in 2014," IVN, November 3, 2014. https://ivn.us/2014/11/03/one-congressional-district-n-j-considered-competitive-2014 ↩

6. Author's calculation from States United Democracy Center and U.S. Election Project VEP estimates. ↩

7. The Cook Political Report's final 2024 House ratings (issued November 1, 2024) classified 22 of 435 House races as Toss Up. https://www.270towin.com/2024-house-election/cook-political-report-2024-house-ratings — live ratings at https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings ↩

8. Unite America Institute, "Analysis: 87% Of U.S. House Elections Already Determined In Primaries By Just 7% Of Americans," October 8, 2024. The analysis identifies 380 of 435 House seats as effectively decided in their primaries. https://www.uniteamerica.org/articles/analysis-87-of-u-s-house-elections-already-determined-in-primaries-by-just-7-of-americans ↩

9. Ballotpedia, "Closed Primary"; National Conference of State Legislatures, "State Primary Election Systems," January 2024. https://ballotpedia.org/Closed_primary and https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Elections/Primary-Types-Table-2024.pdf ↩

10. Unite America Institute, Not Invited to the Party Primary: Independent Voters and the Problem with Closed Primaries, February 2024. https://www.uniteamericainstitute.org/research/not-invited-to-the-party-primary-independent-voters-and-the-problem-with-closed-primaries ↩

11. Lydia Saad, "GOP Holds Edge in Party Affiliation for Third Straight Year," Gallup, January 8, 2025. Combined 2024 Gallup telephone surveys (n = 14,162). https://news.gallup.com/poll/655157/gop-holds-edge-party-affiliation-third-straight-year.aspx ↩

12. Erin Allen, "Gerrymandering: The Origin Story," Library of Congress Blog, July 2024. The "Gerry-mander" cartoon first appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2024/07/gerrymandering-the-origin-story/. See also https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_509530 ↩

13. Greg Bradsher, "A Founding Father in Dissent," Prologue Magazine 38, no. 2 (Spring 2006), National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/gerry.html ↩

14. Miles Parks, "Redistricting Guru's Hard Drives Could Mean Legal, Political Woes For GOP," NPR, June 6, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/730260511/redistricting-gurus-hard-drives-could-mean-legal-political-woes-for-gop ↩

15. Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow, "North Carolina's Gerrymandered Map Is Unconstitutional, Judges Rule," Washington Post, August 27, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2018/08/27/fc04e066-aa46-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html ↩

16. Simon Jackman, Assessing the Current North Carolina Congressional Districting Plan, expert report submitted in Common Cause v. Rucho, 2017. https://roseinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Expert-Report-of-Simon-Jackman.pdf ↩

17. Robert Barnes, "Democrats Did 'Duty' in Md. Redistricting," Washington Post, March 27, 2018. O'Malley's testimony was given in a deposition for Benisek v. Lamone in spring 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/democrats-did-duty-in-md-redistricting-now-the-supreme-court-will-evaluate/2018/03/27/e41b4ad0-30fc-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html ↩

18. Brennan Center for Justice, "Who Controlled Redistricting in Every State," October 5, 2022. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/who-controlled-redistricting-every-state. See also https://ballotpedia.org/Redistricting_commissions ↩

19. This section was drafted in May 2026. The mid-decade redistricting effort that began in July 2025 was ongoing at the time of writing. ↩

20. Acacia Coronado and Nadia Lathan, "Texas Republicans Pass Trump-Backed Congressional Map," Associated Press, August 23, 2025. ↩

21. Donald Trump, interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, August 5, 2025, as reported in Russell Lewis, "Trump Says GOP Is 'Entitled' to Five More Texas Seats Amid Redistricting Push," Axios, August 5, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/05/trump-texas-five-seats-entitled ↩

22. David A. Lieb, "Missouri Governor Signs Trump-Backed Plan," Associated Press, September 28, 2025. On North Carolina, see Travis Fain, "NC Republicans Pass New Congressional Districts Into Law," WRAL News, October 22, 2025. ↩

23. California Secretary of State, "Proposition 50: Title and Summary," November 4, 2025 special election. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/public-display/prop-50-title-summary.pdf ↩

24. Marisa Lagos, "Federal Court Allows California's Redistricting Plan to Proceed," NPR, January 14, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5647442/midterm-elections-redistricting-trump-california ↩

25. Nathaniel Rakich, "How Trump's Redistricting War Is Affecting Texas, Indiana, and North Carolina," Votebeat, December 8, 2025. https://www.votebeat.org/2025/12/08/2025-redistricting-problems-texas-indiana-north-carolina/ ↩

26. Drew DeSilver, "U.S. Stands Out Globally in How It Draws Legislative Districts," Pew Research Center, December 19, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/19/us-stands-out-globally-in-how-it-draws-legislative-districts/ ↩

27. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting opinion, Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), as delivered from the bench on June 27, 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-422 and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/elena-kagan-audio-partisan-gerrymandering-dissent.html ↩