protect incumbents and usher in favored newcomers.

A voter's new responsibility is not only to vote, but also to pay attention to geography.

The process is so successful that some congressional races — gerrymandered to suit the needs of the party in control — go uncontested. North Carolina's 12th Congressional District, in the central part of the state, and Maryland's 3rd near Baltimore, are egregious examples of a system that has gone terribly wrong.

These districts were drawn up by the party in power and packed with opposing party voters — in both cases Democrats. The redistricting process gave the majority party a leg up to continue running state government.

Combine gerrymandering with other ploys, including putting limits on hours and days in which polling stations are open and establishing discriminatory voterID laws, and the work of congress can seem little more than an exercise in protecting personal and party jobs. Along the way, votes are lost in an unbalanced and corrupted electoral process.

The Constitutional framers saw redistricting as a way of balancing electoral scales. As states grew in size, they would also grow in influence. Instead, this growth has been co-opted by ethically vacant power grabs, in which some politicians effectively choose their own voters.

The Internet may help by channeling voter resentment and giving citizens an opportunity to expose and boycott the powerful donors and political lobbies that encourage gerrymandering. But it's not an easy task, particularly in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision (McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission) striking down the concept of capping political