The lines around your house decide a lot. Here is who draws them, and what the law still says.

You vote where the map says you vote, for a seat the map created. After the 2020 Census, seven House seats moved among thirteen states: Texas gained two; Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon each gained one; California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each lost one.^[1] Then every state redrew its lines, and 100 lawsuits in 30 states followed.^[8]

A strange shape is not fraud, and a fair map is not a guarantee. District lines are drawn years before any ballot is cast, and they are public records adopted by a legislature or a commission.^[6] What the lines can do is spread your neighbors out or pack them together so that their votes count for less, which is the harm the Voting Rights Act exists to reach, and the question of what that law still reaches changed on April 29, 2026.^[9][10] If you read something about Section 2 written before that date, it describes a standard that no longer governs.^[10]

It starts with the census. Every ten years the Census Bureau counts the population, the 435 House seats are divided among the states by a formula in use since 1941, with every state guaranteed at least one seat, and then each state redraws its lines.^[1] The first rule is equal population: congressional districts must be as nearly equal as practicable, a rule the Supreme Court set in 1964.^[2] After that, states add their own criteria: contiguity, meaning you can travel across a district without leaving it; compactness; keeping counties and cities whole; and preserving communities of interest, a neighborhood, a farming region, a group with a shared language.^[3]

Who holds the pen depends on your state and on which map you mean. For congressional districts, ten states give a commission primary responsibility: Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington.^[4] Everywhere else the legislature draws, and some states have a backup body that acts only if the legislature cannot agree.^[5] Iowa is the odd one: nonpartisan staff draw the maps without any political data, including where incumbents live.^[5] A commission is not a cure. The people who track this most closely say reformers often wrongly assume a commission will be less partisan than a legislature, and that it depends on how the commission is designed.^[5]

It depends which kind, and that distinction is the whole answer. Partisan gerrymandering, drawing lines to help a party, is not illegal under federal law. In 2019 the Supreme Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering claims are political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts; that is a holding about which court can decide, not a ruling that the practice is fine.^[6] The same opinion pointed to the remedies that remain: state constitutions and state courts, state laws creating commissions or banning partisan favoritism, and Congress, which keeps its authority under the Elections Clause.^[6]

State courts can and do throw out maps under their own constitutions, and in 2023 the Supreme Court confirmed in Moore v. Harper that the Elections Clause does not put state legislatures beyond the reach of their own state courts.^[7] Racial gerrymandering is different again: a district where race predominated in the line-drawing is a constitutional claim that federal courts still hear, and shape is evidence in that case, not the test.^[10] Of the 100 post-2020 map cases the Brennan Center tracks, 82 challenged maps drawn under single-party control, 65 of them against Republican-drawn maps.^[8]

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bans voting rules that deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race or color, and it applies to every state, county, city and school district in the country.^[9] It has not been repealed, and Congress has not changed its words since 1982.^[9] What changed on April 29, 2026 is how courts read it. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6 to 3 Court held that Louisiana's congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, because the Act did not require the second majority-minority district the state had drawn.^[10]

Four things changed in that decision. Section 2 now imposes liability in a districting case only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred. Plaintiffs drawing a sample map to show a fairer district cannot use race as a criterion. They must show that the voting pattern is about race and not party, with an analysis that controls for party. And the old assumption that complying with the Act could justify drawing a district by race was left standing but never decided.^[10] Section 2 lawsuits are still available, and they are harder to win.^[10] The decision did not overrule Allen v. Milligan from 2023, and it does not touch voter ID cases, which run under a different line of Section 2 law.^[11][16] The dissent, by Justice Kagan, warned that under the majority's approach a state could systematically dilute minority citizens' votes without legal consequence.^[10]

Start by finding out who drew the map and which lines are actually in effect; your state election office publishes the map for the next election, and that is the authoritative answer for where you vote, because it changes.^[8] If the complaint is partisan, federal court is closed and your state constitution is the route.^[6] If you believe the lines dilute minority voting strength, the routes are a Section 2 claim under the new standard or a constitutional claim, and both are decided on evidence, not on shape.^[10]

Two more things are worth knowing. Where people are counted matters: the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people at the prison, which adds population to the district around it rather than the one they came from, and a number of states now reallocate them home before drawing lines.^[13] And your vote still matters in a gerrymandered district: it elects a representative, and it carries every other race on the ballot, from the legislature and statewide offices to judges and local government, none of which the congressional map touches.^[6]