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If you’d like to serve in an elected office, there are a couple ways to get there. One, you could file for a position in an upcoming election, sell voters on your ideas and earn their votes. Or you could just pick the people who are going to vote to make sure you have enough already like-minded folks living in the district where you want to run.
The latter is what’s called gerrymandering. And it is an enemy of democracy.
Gerrymandering is one of those political concepts that sounds like a dry geography lesson but actually functions as a high-stakes game of “connect the dots” with your vote. At its core, it’s the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals. Instead of the voters choosing their politicians, gerrymandering allows the politicians to choose their voters.
To pull this off, according to ballotpedia.org, partisan mapmakers, who no longer even try to hide their conflicts of interest, usually rely on two primary techniques: cracking and packing.
u Cracking: Spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting block in any particular district. Their vote becomes “diluted.”
u Packing: Concentrating as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. You “sacrifice” one seat to win all the others.
Whatever you want to call gerrymandering, a North Carolina poll shows about 84% of voters – including 87% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans – say they oppose partisan voting maps, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled are somehow constitutional.
Strong majorities in both parties say redrawing voting maps for partisan advantage is “never acceptable,” and districts should be drawn neutrally. Asked whether the practice should remain legal, 76% said it should not, including 79% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans.
The poll was conducted by Opinion Diagnostics, a Republican-leaning polling firm, and commissioned by the voting rights group Common Cause North Carolina. A total of 671 North Carolina voters were surveyed from Sept. 15-17, 2025, including a split of 210 Democrats and 214 Republicans, while 247 were unaffiliated or belonged to a third party.
The share of Republicans in North Carolina opposed to gerrymandering is higher than that seen in some national polls – such as an August Reuters/Ipsos poll in which only 46% of Republican respondents agreed redrawing districts to win seats is “bad for democracy,” as opposed to 71% of Democrats.
Not surprisingly, voters in the survey said they support a citizens’ redistricting commission by a large majority, taking the map drawing process out of the hands of lawmakers. (See this week’s poll question.) That proposal received support from 64% of surveyed North Carolinians, while only 12% said they oppose it.
If that’s the case, then why are we not doing it? Because politicians and political parties are more concerned about their self-interests rather than the interests of the people. Maintaining power at all costs trumps the will of the voters every time subjects like this or term limits come up for debate.
North Carolina’s current congressional map produced a 10-4 Republican majority in 2024, even though Republican candidates won about 53% of the overall congressional vote in the state last year, while Democrats received around 43% and remained in the governor’s office. That map replaced one drawn by court order that yielded a 7-7 split in 2022. However, a subsequent N.C. Supreme Court decision overturned the ruling that led to the evenly split map.
“So every two years is the theory that we’re gonna redistrict, so we can maximize the political advantage to stick it to one party and enhance another party?” Gov. Josh Stein said. “We cannot get into this maximalist political power worldview because it will destroy this country.”
He’s right. Giving politicians the power to pick their voters is just wrong.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email dbrown@cherokeescout.com.