I always have to start this with the disclaimer that gerrymandering sucks and it dilutes democracy to the lowest common denominator so I am NOT advocating it.
Congressional districts are assigned to states based on the 10 year census. They figure out how many people fit into 1/435th of the the total US population and distribute those number out to the states. You see states like Ohio lose districts and you see states like Az gain districts. Once a state has it's number of districts, in the case of Ohio with 16 congressional seats, they split up the population and put 1/16th of the population into each district. So in Ohio that puts about 725,000 people in each congressional district.
No matter what it looks like on the map, they're not voting by land mass. Some districts are small because the population is dense packed - like in Cincinnati or Cleveland. Some districts are big because the population is sparse. Historically, dense populations have tended to be democratic for a bazillion reasons. That's what makes the map look like physically big red areas and physically small blue areas.
The issue with gerrymandering is not about making any votes count more or less but about ideology and redistributing "excess majority". If you've got an existing district ( like, for example Boehner's in SW ohio) that votes 75%+ republican...in the eyes of republicans, anything over 51% is just plain wasted. Better to take some of that solid republican support and carve a little off to give to another district (like, for example Chabot, right next door in SW Ohio) who might only get 48-49% of the vote. Push a few of his democratic constituents into another district and trade them for some of Boehner's because - after all - he's got majority to spare.
What gerrymandering does is try to draw the lines so that the big excess majority districts redistribute some of that excess into districts that are much closer. In a 750,000 person district that's running about 52% democratic, shift 15,000 voters from democratic to republican reverses the outcome. You don't have to move the lines very much to move 15,000 voters.
Gerrymandering works both ways, it's not just a tool of the insane right. I believe MD-3, a democratic district in a democratically controlled state, is the most gerrymandered district in the country - the lines look like they were drawn by a chicken with its head cut off. There's a bunch out in california that look the same way.
So gerrymandering is about managing the ideology of the district, not the vote count. We howl when it moves the ideology against us but probably stay quiet in cases where it goes in our favor.
I'm sure the smart guys at MIT or CalTech could come up with some way to slice and dice the population of states into districts that was completely unbiased. I'm also sure the resistance from both left and right to such a plan would leave it DOA.
It's not that anyone's vote don't count - it's that their votes don't matter
Just my 2 cents on this.
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