Kansas Has the Map.
Congress Has the Excuse.

For years, redistricting in this country has operated as a kind of legal theater. Legislatures drew political maps. Lawyers challenged them on racial grounds. Courts tried to disentangle race from politics in a system where the two are often correlated. The result was not clarity, but contortion — districts shaped less by geography than by the anticipation of litigation.

That system is showing strain — and it matters, because for the first time in a long time, states have a real opportunity to ask a simpler question: what would a rational map actually look like?

In Kansas, we do not have to guess.

The answer is mechanical — almost embarrassingly so.

The algorithm starts with the Secretary of State's most recent data on party affiliation by county. Group those counties into four districts. Keep them whole — drawn along lines you can actually recognize on a map. Minimize shared borders between districts, a simple proxy for compactness. You do not need a partisan consultant. You do not need a theory of representation. You need an honest process, and this is one.

Do that, and something surprising happens. You do not get a wildly different political outcome. You get four districts that look broadly similar to what Kansas has today: one Kansas City–anchored seat that is competitive, though still slightly Republican-leaning, and three that lean Republican to varying degrees. A clean map doesn't change the result. It just makes it harder to hide.

That matters beyond Kansas. Because the real problem isn't how to draw a fair map. It's how to get anyone to adopt one.

If that approach were adopted broadly, it would change more than maps. Fewer engineered districts would mean fewer artificially safe seats — and fewer safe seats would mean fewer primaries dominated by the ideological fringes that most Americans find exhausting.

No party is going to unilaterally adopt an algorithmic solution while the other side runs the table. And right now, both sides are running the table. All year, Republican and Democratic legislatures alike have been redrawing maps to lock in advantages. Callais makes that easier. An algorithm doesn't just fail to appeal to a legislature in that position. It threatens everything they are trying to build. No majority party surrenders a structural advantage it is actively exploiting.

But Callais may have done more than narrow race-based challenges.

It may have cleared the constitutional path for the one intervention that could break the standoff entirely.

An algorithmic map — drawn on county lines, without reference to race — fits neatly within the Court's new framework. Under Callais, a map's vulnerability increasingly turns on whether race — rather than politics or neutral criteria — drove the lines. An algorithmic map driven only by geography and compactness presents no such target. The race-neutrality of the methodology is the defense.

And Congress has clear authority to mandate exactly that. Article I of the Constitution — the Elections Clause — gives Congress explicit power to regulate federal elections. When the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymandering, the majority was explicit: Congress could. That authority has not gone anywhere.

Federal action is the only mechanism that can solve a collective action problem no individual state can fix alone. Congress has the authority. It lacks the incentive. The members who would have to vote for algorithmic redistricting are, in many cases, sitting in seats that an algorithm would make competitive — or erase entirely. Reform asks them to vote against their own political survival. That is not a trust problem. It is a self-preservation problem.

Kansas's congressional delegation does not face that dilemma.

An algorithmic map leaves their seats broadly intact. That's what makes Kansas the right state to make this argument — and the right delegation to carry it to Washington.

A federal standard mandating algorithmic, race-neutral congressional redistricting would be far more likely to survive constitutional scrutiny, and far more difficult to challenge under the Court's current framework, than anything states have tried before.

Kansas — a Republican state, with a clean map to point to — could make that case loudly to Congress. Not as a plea for bipartisan goodwill. But as a demand for a level playing field, from a state with nothing to hide.

The law is ready. The data is ready. The argument is ready. Congress just has to decide whether it wants to fix the rules — or keep hiding behind their absence.

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Josh Dambacher is a Kansas native and lawyer based in London. He is a spokesman for Republicans Overseas and a regular commentator seen on the BBC, CNN International, GB News, the Kansas City Star and the Wichita Eagle. He writes at The Plains Ledger.

— J.D.