Should the federal government or states control gerrymandering? Two proposals: Stephanopoulos & McGhee's Efficiency Gap test to identify partisan maps at the federal level, versus Samuel L.P. Leroy's interstate compacts letting states cooperate to reduce manipulation.
On papers that focus on potential regulations on our current electoral system, there are also divides on whether it should be settled more by the state level or on the federal level. An example of a work promoting federal change in this category is Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap by Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGee, which advocates for a legal test that courts can use to define partisan gerrymander— gerrymandering through the efficiency gap. This is a percentage which captures the amounts of wasted votes in a districting plan through the draftsmen packing and cracking opposition voters by representing the difference between various parties wasted votes in an election, which is divided by the total number of votes after that. An example of a work that is a proponent of state-level change, however, is Mutually Assured Democracy: Cooperating Under the Compact Clause to Combat Partisan Gerrymandering by Samuel L.P. Leroy. In this paper, he advocates for mutual cooperation between states to collectively de-gerrymander the country through interstate compacts, as he argues that it would break the pressures that incentivize state governments to gerrymander to maximize party potential in their states.
