in the United States — has long been a global problem.

But Italy, with its proportional representation system, has not needed to engage in gerrymandering. In fact the only re-districting that has occurred seems tied to personal self-aggrandizement when Dictator Benito Mussolini, seeking to burnish his legend, famously altered a boundary line so that the source of the Tiber River would be in Romagna, his regional birthplace, instead of Tuscany.

Since the end of fascism, democratic Italy has enacted a number of complicated election laws. The most recent, passed in 2005, created so-called "bloc lists," which all but forced voters to back political parties and not individuals. Individual candidates gained a seat in parliament based on the number of votes their party received in their district and their position withinthe party hierarchy. The largest coalition received a "bonus" in both houses of parliament to ensure majority rule.

Critics labeled the law the porcellum, a pigsty, insisting it blatantly favored larger parties.

In January 2014, Italy's Constitutional Court definitively ruled that the bonus provision was unconstitutional, pushing the country back to a purely proportional election system until parliament can draft and pass a new law, which is proving difficult.

Although the old law (and the new impasse) has drawn considerable foreign criticism, American critics should not throw stones.

In some U.S. states — California, Arizona and Washington among them — redistricting has been taken out of the hands of politicians. But in 34 others, state legislatures still control the makeup of voting districts. In those states, ruling parties greedily redraw boundaries to