Tomasky’s first suggestion is to “end partisan gerrymandering.”

As you probably know, gerrymandering means shaping congressional or state legislative districts to the advantage of one party. Under current practices, most states allow their legislatures to draw those districts, and that give a free rein for the party in control to draw the districts to their own advantage.

Gerrymandering is not new. the word hearkens back to Elbridge Gerry, who was a Massachusetts politician and a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He was one of several who voted against it. He was later the vice president and the governor of Massachusetts. While he held that job, the art of drawing political dictrict was discovered. Gerry didn’t do it, but he got the blame in the newspapers:

In 1812 the state adopted new constitutionally-mandated electoral district boundaries. The Republican-controlled legislature had created district boundaries designed to enhance their party's control over state and national offices, leading to some oddly shaped legislative districts. Although Gerry was unhappy about the highly partisan districting (according to his son-in-law, he thought it "highly disagreeable"), he signed the legislation. The shape of one of the state senate districts in Essex County was compared to a salamander by a local Federalist newspaper in a political cartoon, calling it a "Gerry-mander". Ever since, the creation of such districts has been called gerrymandering.

, Gerrymandering is not new, but it has gotten more brazen and more scientific in the past couple of decades. If you need to be convinced of this, read the following

“Just How Bad is Partisan GerryMandering,” The New York Times

“Experts Label Gerrymandering’s Dirty Dozen,” by The Fulcrum

“How Partisan Gerrymandering Limits Voting Rights,” by the Center for American Progress

“What is Extreme Gerrymandering?” by the Brennan Center for Justice

Gerrymandering works to the advantage of one political party and against the other. This is not the reason it is bad, however. It is bad because it dilutes and distorts the voice of the voting public. It weakens the linkage between what the people want and what government does.

I think what is also important to remember in light of this is that voting is not democracy. Voting is only a very loose and tenuous means to accomplish the end of representative government.

What is supposed to happen in a republic is that representatives come together and do what the people want. For this to be even remotely possible, the people have to know what they want, and they have to be unified, and the representzativfes have to know what that shred desire of the people is.

Election are often described as “democracy in action.” But they are nothing more than a crude process for choosing the representatives.

ina letter to thomas Jefferson written in 1790:

On what principle is it that the voice of the majority binds the minority? It does not result, I conceive, from a law of nature, but from compact founded on utility.

Madison confirms here that the majority does and should dictate policy to the minority. What he means by utility is the relative ease of getting decisions made by a simple majority versus the difficulty of requiring total unanimity.