red areas were overpopulated and blue areas underpopulated. you can see how they kind of match up with the partisanship in the state. and so the strategic use of deviations in a plan, to over populate and underpopulate or specifically advantage some parts of the state at the expense of others would be a problem, even for noncongressional districts. now, the problem is, as i said in large versus cox, this was a partisan gerrymander that selectively used this to punish political adversary. right. but that doesn't mean partisan gerrymanders or partisanship in general is unconstitutional and is a factor in the redistricting process. instead, the supreme court has actually resigned itself to the fact that partisanship will often be an extremely important factor in the redistricting process. and in gaffney versus cummings, it upheld a bipartisan gerrymander. so the intense of the connecticut redistricting plan in that case was to create districts that were safe for democrats and republicans. and so the idea was, it was -- say 50% democratic state, 5

cases we get the rule that you cannot have districts that are substantially overpopulated or underpopulated. that you have to make districts that are as equal as is practicable. but as we discussed, that just tells you about the numbers that have to be sort of evened out between districts. it doesn't tell you who should be in those districts or what the denominator should be, and so the court has left open, at at least explit police sitly in burns versus richardson, explicitly and implicitly since then, has said that, well, you could draw districts base and equal numbers of registered voters. and as we discussed, the -- the fact that you have flexibility in the denominator, right, whether you can draw districts based on total numbers of people, voting age population, citizen voting age population. registered voters, eligible voters, actual voters. that the differences between each of those statistics is huge. and so, burns versus richardson is still on the books but for the most part, every jurisdiction uses the total population numbers that come from the census bureau. there is a bit of a