I think that gerrymandering is one of the biggest problems in this country today. They used race issues as an excuse to give them the power to set up congressional districts that are "safe" for their candidates. Both sides are guilty of this and this is one of the reasons it is so incredibly hard to get new people in congress (state or federal). There needs to be some magical non-partisan random way of creating districts. That would solve a LOT of problems in this country. Then the one vote for one person would by definition not disenfranchise anyone.
It's not magical. Anyone can do it with a GIS system and census data. For instance, Louisiana has seven congressional districts and seven major cities. You just center a district on a city and instruct the system to draw population buffers around each city until they each have equal populations, regardless of demographics. It would eliminate gerrymandering. And the legislature has such a system (actually each house does) and they could do this. But they don't. Politics demands that they gerrymander and try to make the demographics of a district fit their own agenda. This will not change unless the law gets changed so that the politicians hands are taken out of it. They could go to the LSU Geography Department or the Louisiana Geological Survey and let professional mapping scientists do the redistricting based on fair and prescribed criteria. No politics and no politicians. It will never happen in Louisiana. In fact, LSU budget cuts are eliminating the Geography Department Cartographic Section and the entire Louisiana Geological Survey.
