What Happens When Proportional Representation of Political Parties Is Ruled Off the Table? Equal Treatment in the Context of Plurality-Based Elections

In the United States, the way a country draws the lines on its political map is a matter of deep consequence. These lines, known as districts, determine who gets to vote for whom and, ultimately, who holds the power to make laws. For most of the nation's history, the system has relied on a simple method: the country is divided into many small areas, and in each area, the candidate with the most votes wins the seat. This is a system of plurality, where the winner takes all, and it is the standard for almost every election in the country. Because of this setup, the number of seats a political party wins in a legislature often does not match the total number of votes that party receives across the entire nation. A party might win a majority of the popular vote but still end up with fewer seats than its opponent.

For decades, legal scholars and activists have wondered if there is a way to make the system fairer, perhaps by ensuring that a party's share of seats matches its share of votes, a concept known as proportional representation. However, the highest court in the land has made it clear that this specific idea is not a requirement under the American Constitution. This leaves a difficult question: if we cannot use proportional representation to fix the system, what other ideas of fairness can the courts use? How do judges decide if a map is unfair when the obvious solution is off the table?

A recent study by Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, explores exactly this territory. The paper examines how American courts have handled the concept of "equal treatment" in elections now that the door to proportional representation is firmly closed. Grofman organizes the complex world of election law into four distinct categories to show how the rules have evolved: the person, the place, the party, and race. By looking at these four angles, the study reveals a legal landscape that has shifted dramatically in recent years, moving from a focus on protecting minority groups to a stance that largely accepts partisan advantage as a normal part of the political process.

The first category, the person, deals with the most basic rule of American democracy: one person, one vote. This principle means that every district must have roughly the same number of people living in it. The courts have been incredibly strict about this. In fact, the requirement for population equality is so precise that the difference between the largest and smallest district in a state is often just a few people. This rule is treated as the most important factor, taking priority over almost everything else. If a map does not have equal populations, it is usually thrown out immediately. This ensures that every vote carries the same weight in terms of population, even if the system does not guarantee that votes translate into seats in a perfectly proportional way.

The second category, the place, looks at the shape and boundaries of the districts. Historically, there were rules that districts should be compact and connected, meaning you should be able to travel from one end of a district to the other without leaving its borders. While these rules are still written in many state constitutions, they are no longer strictly enforced by federal courts. Today, a district can be a strange, sprawling shape, and as long as it is connected, it is generally allowed. The focus has shifted away from whether a district looks neat and whether it respects existing city or county lines, and toward other factors.

The third category, the party, is where the most significant changes have occurred. For a long time, there was a hope that courts would step in to stop politicians from drawing maps specifically to help their own party win more seats than they deserve. This practice is called partisan gerrymandering. In the past, the Supreme Court hinted that extreme cases of this might be illegal. However, in a major 2019 decision, the Court declared that there is no legal standard for judges to use to decide when a partisan map goes too far. They ruled that this is a political problem, not a legal one, and that federal courts cannot fix it. More recently, in cases decided in 2026, the Court went even further, stating that partisan motivation is a legitimate goal for legislators and that there are no federal limits on how often states can redraw their maps to perfect their advantage. This means that if a party controls the redistricting process, they can draw lines to ensure their victory, and federal courts will not stop them.

The fourth category, race, is perhaps the most complex and has seen the most dramatic reversal. For decades, the Voting Rights Act was a powerful tool used to protect minority voters from having their influence diluted. Courts used to look at whether a map made it harder for a racial minority to elect a candidate of their choice. If a map broke up a community of voters so that they could not win any seats, it could be struck down. However, the study shows that recent Supreme Court decisions have effectively neutralized this protection. The Court has introduced a new, extremely difficult test for proving that a map is racially unfair. To win a case, challengers must now propose an alternative map that keeps the same number of seats for the party in power while also creating more opportunities for minority voters to win. The study argues that this is often impossible to do, especially when the party in power is the same party that minority voters tend to support. By setting this impossible standard, the Court has made it nearly impossible to prove that a map is a racial gerrymander, effectively ruling out many challenges that would have succeeded in the past.

The study concludes that the legal landscape for redistricting in the United States has changed fundamentally. The idea of proportional representation, which would have offered a clear mathematical way to ensure fairness, was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court long ago. In its absence, the courts have retreated from policing the system. The strict rules for population equality remain, but the protections against maps drawn to favor one party or to disadvantage a racial group have been dismantled. The result is a system where the party that controls the state legislature has broad power to draw the lines to suit its political needs, with very little fear of legal challenge. The study suggests that the concept of "equal treatment" in American elections has narrowed significantly, focusing almost entirely on the number of people in a district rather than the fairness of the political outcome.

This shift has real consequences for how power is distributed. Because the federal courts have stepped back, the only checks on unfair maps now come from state courts or from the voters themselves through state laws. However, these protections exist in only a few states and are often limited by the political makeup of those states. The study paints a picture of a system where the rules of the game are set by the players themselves, and where the idea of a neutral, fair map is no longer a requirement enforced by the highest court. The research does not offer a solution to this problem but rather documents the reality: in the current legal environment, proportional representation is off the table, and the other traditional tools for ensuring fairness have been largely removed, leaving the political process to be shaped by the raw power of the parties in control.