New York spent years banning gerrymandering in its own constitution. Now Democrats want to erase those rules to fight back

New York likes to think of itself as the state that took the politics out of drawing district lines. To fight the Supreme Court and Republican-led states, its Democrats now want to undo that, by erasing the very anti-gerrymandering rules they wrote into the constitution.

The vehicle is a proposed constitutional amendment that would let New York redraw its congressional maps mid-decade, outside the normal once-a-decade census cycle. It would also strip out the constitutional language that bans drawing districts to favor a party or an incumbent, and it would let the Democratic legislative majority approve maps by a simple majority if the state’s independent commission deadlocks.