New at Reason: Did the Resolution of Pennsylvania’s Gerrymandering Crisis Solve Anything?

Since January, Pennsylvania has been embroiled in a bitter fight over how congressional districts should be drawn—and who should do the drawing.

It began when the state Supreme Court in January invalidated the congressional district lines drawn in 2011 by a Republican-controlled state legislature. The old map “plainly, clearly, and palpably” gave Republicans (who held, at the time, 13 of the state’s 18 House seats) an electoral edge, the high court said.

The ensuing struggle pitted Republicans in the state legislature against the state’s Democratic governor, divided the state Supreme Court along partisan lines, and even turned father against son—literally. Legislative efforts to produce a new map were thwarted by Gov. Tom Wolf, who vetoed the replacement. With no map in place by mid-February, the state high court’s Democratic majority imposed it’s own map, and Republicans cried foul. Former Gov. Dick Thornburgh, a Republican, filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that justices should toss a new map drawn by the state Supreme Court, while his son David, president of the Philadelphia-based Committee of Seventy, a good government group, filed an amicus brief arguing the opposite.

Democrats seem to have won the battle. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would not review the map crafted in February by the state Supreme Court, ignoring Republican protests that the Democrat-controlled court had substituted one gerrymandered map with another.

The whole thing is the type of fight that excites only the nerdiest of political nerds, but Pennsylvania’s hyperpartisan fight over who gets to draw congressional districts and what those districts should look like reveals a broader flaw within American democracy. Gerrymandering has been a staple of politics for centuries, but new mapping technology has allowed both parties to exploit the redistricting process like never before. And more partisan districts, no surprise, make for more partisan politics.

There might not be any singular solution to the necessary evils of redistricting. But the same technology that’s allowing lawmakers (and, now, state supreme court justices) to draw ever-more-partisan maps can also be employed to detect—and maybe prevent—those abuses of political geography, writes Eric Boehm.

Read the whole thing.