“Gerrymandering is bad enough once a decade,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University. “But if we open the door to continual efforts throughout the decade to squeeze out every additional seat based on changing calculations to the parties, it’s very bad for voters who have enough trouble developing connections with their representatives and it’s very bad for democracy more generally because it promotes cynicism about the process.” . . .
“It presumably increases the potency for gerrymandering because you can do the gerrymandering based on very recent data and the map doesn’t have to endure for as long,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard. “The worst case isn’t just a one-off mid-decade re-redistricting it’s a continuous re-redistricting. Before every election, you check out which of your side’s incumbents had a closer call than you wanted last time and you make their district three or five or seven points more Democratic or Republican.” . . .
Stephanopoulos said the current congressional map was essentially balanced between Democrats and Republicans in the aggregate. “I’d rather have fair maps in every state aggregate into a fair US House. If we can’t get that because the Congress won’t require fair maps and neither will the supreme court, then the worst case, I think, is one side gerrymanders and the other side doesn’t, and we get a highly distorted US House.
“That then means that the majority of Americans aren’t represented by a majority of legislators, and Congress passes laws that don’t reflect what the majority of Americans want and so offsetting gerrymanders at least prevents that worst-case outcome.”