This is gerrymandering at its worst. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lawmakers across the country are redrawing state legislative and congressional districts in a high-stakes process known as redistricting, which happens every 10 years. The emerging consensus is that their new maps are not terrible because, nationally, neither party looks likely to gain a large number of congressional seats as a result of the altered lines. But that is a poor way to judge redistricting. The old maps were already highly skewed to maximize partisan advantage, so keeping things about where they were is no reason to cheer. Line-drawers in many states are also aggressively limiting the number of districts where minorities have a shot at winning, heading in precisely the wrong direction as the country’s non-White population grows.

The most common tactic is partisan gerrymandering, in which one party gains an unfair advantage by redrawing maps in ways that benefit its candidates. In recent cycles, Republicans have gerrymandered more than Democrats — but both parties are guilty.

Here we highlight four of the worst gerrymandering sins — crystallized in the new maps lawmakers have drawn in North Carolina, Illinois, Texas and Alabama — and how to fix them.

How Republicans gerrymander

Republicans pack Democratic cities into tiny blue districts and spread other Democrats across light red areas, diluting their influence. Here’s how they did it in North Carolina:

How Democrats gerrymander

Democrats combine urban and suburban areas where the party is most powerful with small-towns and rural areas where Republicans dominate. This is how they did it in Illinois:

Why gerrymandering is a problem

Some readers might shrug. Partisan state legislators have manipulated political maps since the country’s founding, the thinking goes, and political winds can blow in unexpected directions.

In fact, much has changed since 1812, when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a contorted state Senate map and lent his name to an enduring bug of U.S. politics. Partisan line-drawers now have high-resolution population data and technology that enable them to slice up their states with diabolical accuracy. Meanwhile, the country has sorted into ideologically homogeneous zones, politics have nationalized and voters have become more predictable, making gerrymandering easier than it was in the 19th century.

[Play mini golf to see how politicians tilt elections using maps]

Partisan gerrymandering in states such as North Carolina and Illinois enables one party to take more seats than its underlying support warrants. North Carolina’s median congressional district — under the new maps — favored President Donald Trump by 14 percentage points in 2020, so only an astonishingly large anti-GOP wave would win Democrats the number of seats the state’s overall voting patterns would suggest they should hold.

Gerrymandering can also be used to kill competitive districts. In Texas, for example, mapmakers drew deeply red and blue districts — and few that lie in the middle. To understand the damage, let’s look into how district lines have changed in north Texas since 2020.

The problem is not just the disproportionate number of seats one party might win; it is also that the politicians elected under these maps face less popular accountability than they should. The nation’s policies are determined not by median voters, who should call the shots, but by electorates that have been artificially skewed district by district. Parties that gerrymander can more easily impose radical ideologies, spurn compromise and ignore the majority’s wishes.

But gerrymandering isn’t all about partisanship. Diverse districts, where minority communities have an opportunity to elect a House member, are essential for representative democracy. But many states draw too few of these districts — and too many overwhelmingly White ones.

Alabama is one good example. Last week, a federal court ordered Alabama to redraw its new congressional map to include at least two districts in which Black voters were a sizable portion of the electorate. One in 4 Alabamians are Black — but only one of the state’s seven districts was majority Black in the map blocked by the court.

A better solution to redistricting: Independent commissions

Virginia’s new map shows there is a better way. After the initial process failed, the Virginia Supreme Court chose two experts — one from each party — who drew lines that produced a fairer map. The new map includes strong red and deep blue districts, two majority-minority districts and real battlegrounds elsewhere. Here’s the result:

Virginia also comports with a broader trend: States that use some kind of independent process to draw maps tend to end up with more competitive districts.

No map is perfect, because even commissions acting in good faith must balance competing interests. Drawing maps that reflect the preferences of a state’s overall electorate can conflict with ensuring that communities of interest remain in the same district. For example, Virginia’s map may overrepresent White voters because it packs many Black voters into two districts to ensure minority communities can elect representatives of their choice. Even so, maps drawn by independent commissions, who lack the glaring conflict of interest state legislators bring to the table, have over and over again proved fairer.

Ideally, every state would embrace a strong redistricting commission process, in which the line-drawers are nonpartisan, balanced between the parties or some mix that produces maps on a binding, not an advisory, basis. But only 10 states have fully independent commissions. Most state legislators have proved unwilling to surrender the power to choose their own voters.

[How redistricting is shaping the 2022 U.S. House map]

Congress could require states to impanel redistricting commissions to draw congressional-district lines (though not state legislative maps, over which federal lawmakers have no say). An effort to do this died in the Senate last year. Alternatively, Congress could impose new standards governing congressional redistricting, requiring maps to meet certain measures of fairness. Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would do this on Jan. 19.

That leaves a final resort: the courts. Federal law empowers judges to reject political maps that curb minorities’ voting rights. But the Supreme Court in 2019 unwisely rejected arguments that courts can strike down maps that are merely noxiously partisan. For now, they must be racially discriminatory to elicit court intervention.

Gerrymandering is an increasingly severe affront to the nation’s democratic structure. The solution is as obvious as it is popular: When given the choice, voters in state after state have empowered commissions to draw the lines. As long as politicians block this simple, proven reform, the nation’s system of government will be less fair, less democratic and less responsive to the people.