Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the per

Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the person with the plurality of votes in a given district, irrespective of magnitude) tends to generate the latter even if apportionment is fair. Example: the United Kingdom. We have independent redistricting, and the Boundary Commission are genuinely not in anyone's pocket. The criteria are debatable in some areas, but gerrymandering is essentially absent. And yet, if you look at the most recent general election, the SNP won the overwhelming majority of the seats in Scotland with only 45% of the vote! [0] Now that's partly because there are four effective parties in Scotland, but they would have done very nearly that well against any single opposition party. FPTP magnifies the seats for the more popular party. Bluntly, if the votes are distributed completely evenly, 51% of the votes gets you 100% of the seats. See the Eisenhower/Stevenson presidential election in 1956: Eisenhower got 86% of the electoral college votes for only 57% of the popular vote, because he was (a bit) more popular nearly everywhere. There are systems which aim to have seats and votes be proportional: they're very popular in democracies beyond Great Britain's former colonies. So the gap you mention is, in principle, fixable. But it's not in either party's interests to do so, so it's likely to persist. [0]: https://i0.wp.com/ballotbox.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Results-with-Changed-Seats-scaled.png https://i0.wp.com/ballotbox.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/...