Dislike gerrymandering? Then the proposed map from Illinois Democrats should be appalling.

Stopping gerrymandering is something democracy needs but will be hard to accomplish. Many advocates of good governance want courts to step in, but that’s inherently problematic. There’s no obvious objective standard that courts could use to judge whether a map is fair, as there is with official population counts that empower the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” standard. A local candidate’s popularity, or whether both parties decide to target a particular district, can have a great effect on an election’s results, rendering any simple comparison of vote share to seats gained dubious.