Few events in politics are more consequential while being less understood than redistricting. The consequences are obvious. If your party controls a state legislature, then once every ten years, when it comes time to redraw district boundaries for state legislative seats and seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, you can redraw them to your advantage.

The methods are less obvious, but intuitive enough. Create geographical boundaries that concentrate registered members of the opposition party into a single district, thereby shifting the majority in your favor in surrounding districts. Or, equally effective, disburse registered members of the opposition party into carefully apportioned districts where they will not have a majority anywhere, completely nullifying their voting power.

The intelligibility of the process ends there. How redistricting commissions parse voter geolocations—deemed favorable or unfavorable based on precinct-level registration—is a complex science. And since the people drawing these new boundaries are almost invariably partisan hardliners, a lot of time and money is invested in calculating maps that precisely optimize the ruling party’s prospects of preserving and enhancing their advantages in the next election.

This increasingly complex process is almost always undertaken every ten years following the decennial U.S. Census, but that is changing. In the State of Texas, Republicans are attempting to redraw their district boundaries now, in time to affect the 2026 election. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom is poised to return the favor.

In light of this looming fracas, it’s helpful to ask: which of these states—one ruled by Republicans and one by Democrats—has more decisively rigged its district boundaries? In Texas, Republicans hold 25 out of 38 congressional seats, or 66 percent of the state’s delegation. In California, Democrats hold 43 out of 52 congressional seats, or 83 percent of their delegation to Congress.

One way to assess whether district boundaries in California and Texas reflect voter sentiment is to examine the results of statewide executive elections. In Texas in 2022, Republicans won the office of governor by 54.8 percent of the vote, attorney general by 53.4 percent of the vote, and comptroller by 56.4 percent of the vote. Averaging these three statewide results, 55 percent, and comparing them to Republicans holding 66 percent of their state’s congressional seats, suggests that Texas Republicans have succeeded in rigging their district boundaries by about 11 percent, the equivalent of four seats in the House.

Considering how inexact this method must be in reality, it would be fair to suggest Texas Republicans have given themselves a slight advantage through redistricting, but in the case of California, the difference is not at all subtle. In 2022, Democrats in California elected Newsom with 59 percent of the vote, and elected Democrats to the offices of attorney general and controller with 59 percent and 55 percent of the vote, respectively. The average of these three statewide elections is a majority of 58 percent, compared to control of 83 percent of the state’s congressional seats. This suggests that Democrats in Congress are overrepresented in California by 25 percent—roughly 13 seats in the House.

Perhaps the most immediate conclusion one may draw from this analysis is that Governor Newsom and his execrable henchman, Attorney General Rob Bonta, have already managed to deny California’s Republicans over a dozen House seats. To illustrate just how contorted the congressional districts in California already are, consider this post-2020 redistricting map, which zooms in on Los Angeles:

In reviewing this map, it doesn’t take a cartographer to quickly recognize how the boundaries are twisted in ways that bear no resemblance to city limits or natural geographic features. These boundaries are contorted to the point of absurdity for one reason: to ensure California Democrats control 83 percent of the state’s congressional delegation, to ensure that California’s Republicans are denied 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that they might otherwise have earned based on voter behavior in California’s statewide elections.

There are solutions to the practice of partisan redistricting that plagues every state, California most of all. It is to rely on algorithms that can assign district boundaries without taking into account voter demographics or party affiliation. It would automatically generate district borders, sorting at the precinct level, according to the following conditions:

(1) Maintain equal populations;

(2) select for district centers based on areas with the highest population density;

(3) solve for convex edges; and

(4) minimize the cumulative length of the polygons formed by the districts.

While it would be glib to claim that implementing this algorithmic solution would not invite multiple interpretations and intense controversy, it has never been more feasible. Today’s programming tools and datasets make it more feasible than ever not only to develop these tools but also to render their design transparent and readily evaluated for bias or other flaws. The more daunting challenge would be to convince a state legislature, anywhere, to consider such a solution.

Meanwhile, if the Texans open the Pandora’s Box of midterm redistricting exercises, expect politicians in other states to come crawling out in force to implement their own partisan version of the same exercise. If so, only two things are certain: representation in Congress will become even more unrepresentative, and California will still lead the pack as a one-party state where Democrats wield absolute power.