When Aria Branch walks into the New York State Supreme Court on June 8 to deliver her opening statement, she will be concentrating on the arcana of Article III, section 4E of the state constitution—or perhaps the even more thrilling section 5BA. “We’re really focused on the procedure here,” she says, coolly. But Branch is keenly aware of the stakes involved: if she wins, New York’s congressional district lines could be redrawn yet again, increasing the chances of Republican George Santos losing his reelection bid in 2024 and shifting as many as five seats and control of the US House of Representatives back into Democratic hands, elevating Brooklyn’s Hakeem Jeffries to become the first Black speaker of the House. So, no pressure. 

New York’s redistricting fight is a key piece of a larger battle, playing out in state courts and legislatures, that threatens to gerrymander democracy to death. In North Carolina, a new Republican State Supreme Court majority recently validated a plan that could lock in a long-running, lopsided GOP majority in the state legislature and in its congressional delegation. In Illinois, Democrats connected urban areas with rural parts of the state as much as 100 miles away to neutralize Republican voting power. “You’re seeing an intensity around gerrymandering that’s the worst it’s ever been,” David Pepper says. “And now you have a Supreme Court that looks to be on the verge of undoing the last protections against racially-driven gerrymandering.”

A former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, Pepper has seen Republicans try to gerrymander his home state to dilute the influence of Black voters. Democrats have been painfully slow to push back on the agenda Karl Rove launched in 2010 to gain control of state legislatures in order to gain control of redistricting. Pepper’s most recent book, Saving Democracy, proposes ways to level the playing field. “The ultimate solution is a federal one,” he says, “but at least you’re seeing some reform in Michigan and Arizona and California, restrictions on what legislatures can do to gerrymander.” 

In New York, Democrats are trying to fight fire with fire—again. Last year, the effort boomeranged: a Democrat-friendly map drawn by a Democrat-majority legislature wound up in court, where a small town Republican judge declared the proposed lines biased and handed responsibility to an out-of-state political science postdoctoral fellow, who crafted supposedly more neutral boundaries. New York Republicans gained three House seats in November’s midterms, helping the GOP cling to a slim majority in Washington.

There was plenty of blame to go around afterward, with many fingers pointed at the lackluster campaign run by Governor Kathy Hochul. State Senator Mike Gianaris was another main target, as one of the leading architects of the map that ended up being replaced by the court. “The lines didn’t help, but they only hurt at the margins,” Gianaris says. “Good candidates could have still won these races. Better lines would not have made the ultimate difference—perhaps for maybe one seat.” Gianaris still believes Democrats were right to initially propose a more favorable map, even though that strategy led to an unfavorable court decision. “That is the most absurd criticism,” he says. “Any less aggressive map would not have yielded a better outcome. The other side shows no hesitation to even cross legal boundaries to advance their cause. We would never do that. But we should certainly use whatever means are available to us within the law to fight back.”

Enter the Elias Law Group, founded by Marc Elias, the former counsel to Hillary Clinton for her presidential campaign. In 2020, Elias and his team were crucial players in fighting off dozens of lawsuits filed by President Donald Trump seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Now ELG—where Branch is a partner—is arguing that the lines used for New York’s 2022 elections were only supposed to be an interim, emergency fix, and that the map should be sent back to the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission for a do-over. The case is being brought, officially, on behalf of 10 aggrieved New York residents; the firm did return a call for comment on who is paying its bill in the case, though the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been one of Elias’s clients.

Even if Elias and Branch win the current round, the whole thing is likely to eventually return to New York’s appellate court, its highest judiciary body. This time, though, state Democrats are banking on the result going in their favor. In April, after knocking down Hochul’s first nominee, the state legislature approved a new chief appellate judge, Rowan Wilson, who is generally more liberal than his predecessor, Janet DiFiore. DiFiore voted with the court’s majority against the pro-Democrat map last year; Wilson was in the minority. While his elevation did not generate many headlines outside New York, the change could end up having nearly as much impact on redistricting as the high-profile win by Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, which in early April, flipped the ideological balance of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.

Attempts to carve electoral districts for partisan advantage have existed for a very long time, going back to at least 1812, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill legalizing a Boston-area district shaped like a mythological salamander and guaranteed himself political trivia immortality. But thanks to shamelessness, polarization, and easy access to data, we are living in a golden age of gerrymandering. Perhaps there’s a silver lining in that, says Steve Romalewski, whose “Redistricting & You: New York” project has contributed to transparency: “The good news is that because of social media and mapping software, more people are paying attention—gerrymandering isn’t just a backroom political thing anymore.” Attention is a start. More equitably-drawn districts would be even better.