‘One weird trick to end the gerrymandering wars and restore fair representation for minorities’

Is it time to change the way we vote, to proportional representation?

President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 as Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders look on. (National Archives)

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week – a move that will effectively disenfranchise millions of Black Americans – was a major blow to people who care about multiracial democracy.

It was also a rallying cry.

Dozens of resistance figures immediately weighed in on how to respond.

On MS NOW, Rachel Maddow cast the court’s decision as part of Trump’s wider effort “to get rid of the multiracial democracy that our Constitution is supposed to protect.”

“We are now about 16 months into what has been, from day one, a concerted and intense targeting of Black Americans, specifically by this president and by this administration,” she said. “It is a war on Black America. The fight to save it is looking like it’s going to be the fight of all of our lives.”

“What should we do?” asked Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Yell, loudly, for action by the one part of our government that can do something: Congress.”

Waldman called on Congress to ban partisan gerrymandering, enact new voting rights laws, and impose term limits for the Supreme Court.

Issue One policy director Michael McNulty wrote that banning gerrymandering would require “establishing clear national criteria for fair maps, requiring independent redistricting commissions in every state, and banning mid-decade redistricting. These proven, widely supported reforms would ensure voters — not politicians — choose their representatives.”

The Contrarian published a list of 15 ways to respond to the court decision, from three civil rights leaders.

“Fight Back Hard Now,” Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight urged. “We are working with existing coalitions and networks across the South alongside our national allies to push back against these cynical, racist attempts to gut Black political power and gerrymander the congressional and state maps. If we cannot block them outright, we must make the fight as long, difficult, and painful as possible for the GOP. The more we can combat its plans and expose them as the extreme and cruel measures they are, the more the public will see how GOP leaders are focused on their own power rather than meeting their needs.”

Juan Proaño of LULAC wrote that his group “will accelerate our voter registration program. We will train Spanish-language poll workers and election observers. We are building the largest Latino voter protection infrastructure the country has ever seen to challenge in real time the suppression measures that will follow this ruling.”

Common Cause vowed to continue the fight to pass state-level Voting Rights Acts — ”powerful tools that protect voters even when federal safeguards fall.” Meanwhile, the group has sued to stop Florida’s new congressional maps from going into effect. (So did a Black-led Florida group, the Equal Ground Education Fund.)

Or Is It Time for Something Different?

On Tuesday, writer and organizer Micah Sifry published something of a shot across the bow: an issue of his newsletter titled “Why ‘vote harder’ and other nostrums aren’t an answer for the Callais decision.”

Sifry criticized much of the resistance community for what he called “a crisis of political imagination.” Realistically, he said, none of their solutions will do much good – not with the current Supreme Court, and not as long as congressional elections are held in single districts under winner-take-all rules.

He and a growing number of other resistance figures support what political scientist Lee Drutman calls the “One weird trick to end the gerrymandering wars and restore fair representation for minorities.” It’s called proportional representation. Drutman wrote:

Here’s how it works. Instead of dividing a state into single-member districts where the winner takes all, you elect the whole delegation at once, proportionally. Parties present lists of candidates. Voters choose from those lists. Votes for all a party’s candidates tally up. If Party A’s list gets 40% of the votes in a five-seat district, it gets two seats, awarded to its two most popular candidates. Seats are awarded in direct proportion to the share of the votes.

Consider Louisiana, where the Supreme Court has now paved the way for Republicans to divide the state into six congressional districts, none of which would be majority Black. The result: the effective disenfranchisement of 33 percent of the electorate.

But with proportional representation, one third of the six seats would go to the candidates supported by Black voters.

And it meets the Supreme Court’s new litmus test. As Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos wrote on the Election Law Blog, “PR is inherently race-neutral; in some forms, it doesn’t even require districts, and it always operates without any reference to race…. So in one stroke, PR could do a better job fighting racial vote dilution than Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] ever did, and do so without triggering equal protection objections.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, responded to the court decision by calling on “Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country.”

And one major pro-democracy group has been advocating for this sort of change for several years. Protect Democracy proposes the adoption of “fusion voting” as a pathway to proportional representation – and maybe even an end to two-party gridlock.

With fusion voting, “more than one political party can nominate the same candidate and voters can vote for their preferred candidate on the ballot line of the party that best reflects their values,” the group explained. (Here’s a graphic that might make it clearer.)

“This allows minor parties with distinct platforms and constituencies to cross-nominate and turn their voters out in support of major party candidates, rather than asking their members to waste votes on a long-shot candidate,” the group argued.

In a 2025 report, the group explained that “expanding fusion voting presents a path to the kind of nascent multiparty system that could effectively advocate for change. Fusion voting could serve as a crucial stepping stone — an incremental but meaningful reform that expands votersʼ choices, strengthens democratic competition, and makes the adoption of proportional representation more plausible.”

May Day Not-So-Strong

There were high hopes that events on May Day this year, held under the “May Day Strong” banner, would significantly disrupt business as usual. The call was for “No Work, No School, No Shopping.”

It was intended as a “tactical escalation” for the resistance — “a structure test for the strength of the movement,” as Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, put it. “It is more than just showing up on a Saturday. It is attempting to gauge our economic power on a single day.”

As it turned out, there were a handful of boisterous events on Friday, but by and large, participation was slim and scattered.

And almost nobody noticed.

I don’t really know where the movement goes from here. Organizers maintained their optimism during a mass call last night. And there’s no denying the significance of millions of people coming out for No Kings rallies (on Saturdays.)

But the current organizational structure, in the current political climate, clearly does not have the ability to shut much of anything down. That would typically be the next step for a mass movement demanding attention and action.

That said, thousand of people turned out on Friday for events in Washington, D.C., marching, rallying, and briefly disrupting traffic.

In New York City, CBS News reported that thousands rallied across the five boroughs, “including outside Amazon headquarters in Midtown. On Wall Street, hundreds of climate activists blocked entrances to the New York Stock Exchange, and some arrests were made.” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani enthusiastically addressed a heavily union crowd in Washington Square Park. “Together we will show the world what solidarity means,” he said.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a protest “briefly shut down the departure-level roadway at San Francisco International Airport’s international terminal Friday.” Several elected officials were arrested. Hundreds of protesters also briefly shut down Oakland International Airport.

In Los Angeles, members of the Sunrise Movement briefly “took over” a Home Depot to protest the company’s support of ICE.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Madison, Wisconsin, and organizers told the Wisconsin Examiner that 250 immigrant-led businesses across 17 cities in Wisconsin shut down for the day.

The biggest turnout by far was in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the state teachers union held a rally to protest school funding.

Brooklyn vs. ICE

The word spread in Brooklyn on Sunday night: ICE officers had taken an immigrant to a local hospital after he was injured during his capture.

Soon, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick protesting ICE’s presence in the hospital — and then clashing with NYPD officers who had been called to the scene. Nine people were arrested.

Harrowing video showed ICE agents literally dragging the immigrant they had detained out of the hospital and into an ICE vehicle, as police officers cleared their way and demonstrators yelled in outrage.

One witness shared a video with independent journalist Marisa Kabas showing a police officer brutally throwing a peaceful protester to the ground.

At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Mamdani said NYPD officers were not involved in the ICE operation and were just there because of the protest. He said he had seen videos of the officer throwing the man to the ground. “That is incredibly disturbing and that is being actively investigated right now,” he said.

On Monday, at a rally outside the hospital, lawmakers and community activists called for ICE to stay out of New York.

This Week in the Courts

A slow week, for once!

• A group of detained immigrants filed a class action lawsuit challenging a new DHS policy that effectively blocks immigrants held in detention from successfully filing immigration applications. DHS rules require individuals to submit biometrics with their applications, but the agency now refuses to collect that information from people in detention centers. “DHS’ new Biometrics Policy violates the law many times over,” wrote lawyers for Democracy Forward, National Immigration Project, and the National Immigrant Justice Center.

• Environmental groups are suing to block a Trump order that would open the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

End Notes

• From the San Francisco Chronicle: “Bay Area neighbors are turning their blocks into Trump resistance networks.”

• From WGBH: “Faith coalition protests Citizens Bank’s work with detention centers operators”.