Who Draws
Georgia?

What the ruling actually changed

Georgia's current maps were drawn after extensive litigation in 2023 and include majority-Black districts created specifically to remedy earlier maps found to violate the Voting Rights Act. Under the new ruling, those remedies may now themselves be unconstitutional.

Georgia is also one of the fastest-diversifying states in the country. More than a third of Georgians are Black, and that population drove much of the state's growth in the decade before the 2020 census. How that population gets distributed across districts — and what political power it holds — is exactly what's at stake.

What happened, in order

Two numbers worth knowing

The basic rules every map must follow

Who actually draws the maps?

In Georgia, as in most states, the state legislature draws the maps. That means the same elected officials whose own districts are being redrawn have a direct hand in designing them. Lawmakers use specialized GIS mapping software that lets them redraw boundaries block by block, running demographic and political analysis in real time as they adjust the lines.

Some states have moved to independent redistricting commissions — bodies made up of citizens rather than politicians. California, Michigan, and Arizona all use some version of this model. We'll look at the tradeoffs in Post 8.

What Georgia law actually requires

Georgia law sets a high floor and not much else. The Georgia Constitution requires that state legislative districts be contiguous and roughly equal in population. Federal law adds the Voting Rights Act requirements. Beyond that, criteria like compactness, community preservation, and public input are not legally mandated. They are guidelines the legislature can adopt, modify, or ignore.

Critically: Georgia law does not require public hearings on redistricting. The legislature is not subject to Georgia's open records or open meetings laws. Any public hearings that take place are a matter of legislative choice, not legal obligation. The committee guidelines that govern how and when draft maps are shared with the public are also self-imposed, not statutory, and can be changed at any time.

What the process looked like in Georgia's last special session

The closest precedent for what's about to happen is the 2023 redistricting special session, called after a federal court ordered Georgia to redraw maps that violated the Voting Rights Act. That session ran for seven days. The House Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee held public hearings throughout the session — meaning hearings on maps that had already been drafted, with the vote following days later. Maps were introduced, hearings were held, and final passage came within the same week.

What we know about the June 17 session

As of the time this post was written, no proposed maps for the June 17 session had been made public. The session was called on May 13 — about five weeks before the session begins. Whether draft maps will be released before June 17, whether public hearings will be held before or during the session, and how long the session will run are all questions without public answers yet.

What is known: the session was called to address redistricting in response to Louisiana v. Callais, along with a separate issue regarding ballot QR codes. Any new maps passed during the session will take effect for the 2028 election cycle, not 2026.

One thing worth holding onto: there is no single correct map. For any given population data, thousands of configurations could satisfy the basic legal requirements. The choices made among those possibilities — which communities to keep whole, which to split, where to place boundaries — are value judgments, even when made by people trying to be neutral. That's why who draws the maps, and under what constraints, matters.

Principles most people agree on

Every one of these principles requires judgment calls in practice. "Reasonable compactness" doesn't have a universal definition. "Communities of interest" can be defined in ways that produce very different maps. And when the people making those calls have something to gain, the maps tend to show it.

Despite general bipartisan agreement, most of these principles are not legally required in Georgia. Some appear in committee guidelines. Some have no formal standing at all. The common ground exists. The enforcement doesn't.

That's not bad faith — it's just how decision-making works when stakes are high. Which is why the next few posts matter: how do we design a process that produces fair maps even when the people drawing them have something to gain?

The two main techniques

How to read a district map critically

Shape alone isn't enough to prove gerrymandering — and a normal-looking map can still be gerrymandered. But these are the questions worth asking when you look at a map:

One important nuance: not every odd-shaped district is a gerrymander, and not every gerrymander looks odd. Geography is complicated — rivers, mountains, and highways create natural irregularities. Some districts take irregular shapes specifically to keep communities together, not to split them. Shape is a clue. It's not a verdict.

What compactness measures — and what it doesn't

Compactness measures the shape of a district. Several mathematical formulas exist for it — some compare a district's area to its perimeter, others to the smallest circle that could contain it. All of them answer the same question: how close to a circle or square is this thing?

What none of them measure is who lives inside. Whether communities are divided. Whether the people in that district can actually elect someone who represents them. A district can score perfectly on every compactness metric and still be designed to dilute a community's voice.

Two ways to think about this

Both arguments come from people who genuinely want fair maps. The real disagreement isn't about shapes. It's about what fair means. Is it a process that applies the same rules to everyone? Or is it an outcome where communities actually have a voice, whatever the map looks like to get there?

What the Voting Rights Act was designed to do

Passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was a direct response to documented, systematic suppression of Black voters across the South. Section 2 of the Act — the part at issue now — prohibits any voting practice or procedure that discriminates on the basis of race. Courts interpreted this to mean that states couldn't draw maps that deliberately split or diluted minority communities to prevent them from electing candidates of their choice.

Over decades, this produced the concept of "majority-minority districts" — districts where a racial minority group makes up more than half the population, giving that community a realistic chance of electing a representative of their choice. Georgia's current maps include several such districts, drawn after previous maps were found to be illegal in court.

What Louisiana v. Callais changed

Two ways to think about this

There's no easy resolution here. Both arguments are grounded in real principles with real historical weight. Where you land probably depends on how you weigh the harm of classifying people by race against the harm of leaving structural inequality in place. Neither side has a monopoly on caring about fairness.

Why seat share and vote share don't always match

In a district-based system, you win seats by winning individual districts, not by accumulating votes statewide. Where your voters live matters as much as how many there are.

In the United States, voters who favor one type of candidate tend to cluster in cities. Voters who favor the other tend to spread across rural and suburban areas. That sorting means even a perfectly neutral map would produce some mismatch between statewide votes and seats — concentrated voters burn more of their votes on blowout wins that don't translate into additional seats.

Two ways to think about this

One tool researchers use is the "efficiency gap" — a measure of how many votes each side wastes on blowout wins or losses compared to the other. A large, persistent gap in one direction suggests the map is doing more work than geography alone would explain. The concept is useful, but contested. Critics argue it bakes in an assumption that proportional outcomes are the goal, and that's not actually what the Constitution requires.

The four main options

What the evidence shows

States with independent redistricting commissions tend to produce more competitive districts and smaller efficiency gaps than states where legislatures draw their own maps. That doesn't mean commissions are perfect — they face real challenges around representation, transparency, and political capture. But the structural conflict of interest in legislative redistricting is real, and removing it appears to make a measurable difference.

Georgia doesn't have an independent redistricting commission. Bills to create one have been introduced in the General Assembly multiple times. None have passed. The maps being drawn this summer will be drawn by the same body that benefits from them.

The question this series has been building toward

Eight posts have established that shared principles for fair maps exist, that applying them requires judgment, that the people making those judgments usually have an interest in the outcome, and that structural alternatives exist that can reduce — though not eliminate — that conflict of interest.

What you do with that is up to you. But this much is true regardless of where you land: the people of Georgia are about to have new district lines drawn, and those lines will shape who represents them for the next decade. Who's in the room, what criteria they follow, how much the public can participate — every Georgian has a stake in that.