The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the gen

The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways. A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage. If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them. In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states. I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.