Computers made gerrymandering worse. Can they fix it?

HERE’S HOW DEMOCRACY IS SUPPOSED TO WORK: Citizens go to the polls to choose who will represent them, and when all the seats are filled, the legislative body looks roughly proportional to the makeup of voters. But that’s not what happened in Wisconsin’s 2012 election, when Republicans took more than 60% of the seats in the state assembly despite getting less than half the votes. That outcome—and similar results in five other states that year—occurred largely thanks to computer-driven partisan gerrymandering.

On Oct. 3, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Gill v. Whitford,