Ansley Skipper and Drew Penrose write about the obvious solution to gerrymandering: proportional representation.

Most modern democracies don’t have legislative districts represented by only one legislator — which is why most don’t struggle with gerrymandering like we do. Instead, a majority of democracies today use proportional multimember districts (we’ll get back to what this means in a bit), which makes gerrymandering “prohibitively difficult” in practice, in the words of that same study. Our decision to use single-member districts makes gerrymandering possible in the first place. . . .

But here’s one of the biggest problems: Even if we got rid of gerrymandering, biased outcomes — the thing we really care about when we talk about gerrymandering — will persist as long as we have single-member districts. . . .

But there is a solution. A system that would end boundary-drawing brawls and make our democracy more effective, inclusive, and representative. It’s called proportional representation. How it works is intuitive: Share of votes equals share of seats. . . .

Under proportional representation, we can have it all. The same map can be competitive and fair, representative and compact. Racial minorities can be represented even when they don’t live in the same area. District lines can much more easily follow existing political and real-world geography.

Plus, because it creates more competition and a more representative system, proportional representation opens the door for more politically viable parties, more coalition-building, and more cross-ideological allegiances. A more representative government with more incentives for compromise and moderation could also mean a more responsive, effective government. . . .

And proportional systems are much harder, if not impossible, to gerrymander — because voters’ representation is based on how they vote, not where they live. It’s easy to make the opposition a minority in any given district. It’s impossible to draw them out entirely.