The 2022 US House maps are set to be the least competitive in a century

Political science says a lack of competition will decrease accountability, sow polarization and hasten democratic decline

Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti reported for the New York Times this weekend that politicians are “Taking the Voters Out of the Equation” when drawing this decade’s new boundaries for Congressional maps. As a refresher, the US government takes a new nationwide Census every ten years, and states must redraw their maps to have equal shares of the population within states and meet various other criteria for compactness, contiguousness, racial representation, and (in some states) partisan balance.

Epstein and Corasaniti write:

In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump won by five percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.

By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.…