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Cervas also criticized both parties for revisiting maps for political gain in ways that could leave voters with fewer competitive districts in which to cast votes. "The people are losing. Every time we gerrymander for partisan gain, voters are worse off," he added. "A minus plus a minus is a bigger minus."

Incumbents also don’t like losing voters who have supported them or getting wholly new communities drawn into their districts, said Jonathan Cervas, who teaches redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new maps for courts.

Cervas said that’s why it was striking to watch Trump push Republicans to dive into mid-decade redistricting. “The idea they’d go along to get along is basically crazy,” he said.

Even without the Voting Rights Act, Cervas said, there is no way for Republicans to make that Memphis seat red. If they scattered the city's voters among neighboring GOP-heavy districts, they might make those competitive.

He said some other GOP-controlled states, such as Missouri and South Carolina, are in similar binds with their lone, heavily Democratic seats that were drawn to comply with the voting law. Others, like Georgia, are so politically competitive that it’s likely Republicans couldn't erase a Democratic seat in one part of the state without jeopardizing one of their own.

Still other GOP-controlled states, such as Mississippi, may have an easier time eliminating their lone Democratic, Voting Rights Act-mandated seat. And in larger states such as North Carolina and Florida, Republicans would have a freer hand to redraw the maps to favor their party without having to preserve majority-minority seats held by Democrats.

Jonathan Cervas, a redistricting expert at Carnegie Mellon University, ran data from past elections in Utah against the redrawn map and found that Democrats would lose every time. That indicates that the map is uncompetitive, he said.

“Although it’s not as competitive as I think the plaintiffs would want, I think it’s far better than the map that currently exists - a stark improvement,” Cervas said.

“There’s one special reason why there’s not going to be anything in Pennsylvania, and that’s because Pennsylvania is one of only, I think, two states in the country that has a divided government,” said Jonathan Cervas, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in redistricting and voting rights. “There’s been a stalemate on even passing the basic state budget. So the idea that we would have an agreement from both branches of the legislature and the governor on a new redistricting plan seems very unlikely – exceedingly unlikely.”

“You could imagine that maybe Republicans pick up a couple of seats in the House, and they're running a formidable candidate for governor, Stacy Garrity. She could win, and then they would have a united government,” Cervas said. He added that such a dynamic in Harrisburg could change the appetite for exploring the possibility of a new map in the middle of the decade. However, that scenario wouldn’t be feasible until after the 2026 midterms, and redrawing congressional districts before then would do little to help vulnerable incumbents.

“In addition to a potential violation of the Voting Rights Act, this might be viewed in federal court as an intentional act to decrease minority representation, which would be a violation of the 14th Amendment,” Cervas said.

Cervas described the new map as “perhaps the most biased map in modern American history.” … “Nearly 100% of the population growth in Texas has come from minority populations,” Cervas said…

“I am thrilled to assist the New York courts in delivering constitutional maps that will provide equal representation for all New York residents for the next decade,” Cervas said in a brief statement to The Post.

Justice McAllister has already appointed Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, as special master to draw the congressional and State Senate lines by late May.

“I am up late at night often, unable to sleep, pondering how bad or how aggressive some of those states might be in undoing the protections that were granted from Section 5 that no longer are in effect,” said Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who studies gerrymandering. “And I can imagine that a particularly aggressive legislature, where it benefits them, may not draw minority districts.”

While diluting the votes of minority communities remains illegal, Mr. Cervas said that without preclearance, such tactics could be used anyway, and that the resulting legal challenges were increasingly unlikely to be resolved in time to affect the 2022 elections.

"Some election experts argued that Republicans were so successful at drawing gerrymandered maps 10 years ago that it would be difficult for them to add to their advantage now.

“The Democrats were able to win the House in 2018 despite the fact that there were some very gerrymandered states,” said Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who studies gerrymandering."