In November 2020, voters in Virginia went to the polls to vote for US president, Congress, and numerous local officials. Also on the ballot was a state constitutional amendment (Amendment One) that would take redistricting of state legislative and US House districts out of the hands of the state legislature (known in Virginia as the General Assembly) and create a commission made up of eight legislators and eight citizens selected by a panel of retired circuit court judges. The commission would then create the district lines that, if approved by a supermajority of commission members, would be voted on by the full General Assembly. Amendment One passed, with two-thirds of Virginians voting in favor.Amendment One was endorsed by major newspapers in Virginia, while the state’s Democratic Party (which won full control of state government in 2019 for the first time in twenty-six years) urged voters to defeat Amendment One because it allowed, in their view, the minority party too much power to impede the redistricting process, while the chair of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus opposed the measure for fear that it could lead to the diminishment of African American voting strength and representation.Given the attempt to change how election lines are drawn, Brent Tarter’s 2019 book, Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, published by University of Virginia Press, is a welcome and timely contribution to the literature on the history of redistricting and representation in Virginia. In Gerrymanders, Tarter, who has published numerous works on Virginia’s political history, traces the history of Virginia politicians using the process of shaping electoral choices to their advantage over the past 350 years.Tarter’s main thesis is that, for as long as Virginia politicians have controlled the rules by which elections are held, they have shaped these rules to their and their supporters’ advantage. While this may not be a surprising conclusion, Tarter does a meticulous job of showing how this practice has been a constant in Virginia politics since the first “proto-gerrymander,” as he puts it—a 1670 attempt to influence an election to the colonial House of Burgesses.Tarter takes a chronological approach to outline how manipulation of Virginia’s electoral systems, including apportionment schemes, restriction and elimination of the franchise, election rules, and partisan and racial gerrymandering, has been accomplished over the past centuries to benefit those who controlled the rules to remain in power. Tarter emphasizes several different time periods in this process: from statehood to the Civil War, post-reconstruction through to the 1960s, and the post–Civil Rights and Reapportionment Revolution period through today.From statehood to the Civil War, voting and electoral systems rules were designed by the legislature to advantage slaveholders in the eastern part of Virginia at the expense of non-slave-holding whites, a growing share of the state’s population, in the western part of the state. As Tarter lays out, this was first done in the late 1700s by granting every county in the state two delegates to the House of Delegates. Counties in the eastern part of the state, where much of the state’s plantation agriculture and slave populations was located, were smaller than those in the western part of the state. As a result of this malapportionment, the slave-holding eastern part of the state could, and did, exert majority control in the legislature. While a slaveholder himself, Thomas Jefferson, as Tarter notes, complained about the malapportionment imbedded in this system, noting that “every man in Warwick [County, now part of the city of Newport News in southeastern Virginia,] has as much influence in the government as 17 men” in the northern county of Loudon (17). Control was further strengthened by the state’s enfranchisement laws: only white males holding property over a certain value (slaves being included in that calculation) could vote, once again favoring white males in eastern Virginia.While the district drawing system was overhauled in the 1830s and universal white male suffrage came to Virginia in the 1850s, the system by which seats in the legislature were apportioned and districts drawn preserved the power of white male slaveholders in eastern Virginia over that of the fast-growing white, predominantly non-slave-holding population in the west. Through what Tarter refers to as the “Great Gerrymander of 1830,” legislators divided the state into four regions for seats in the House of Delegates, and then allocated seats to these different regions. Once allocated, districts were created within these regions. For the Virginia Senate, the state was divided into two (eastern and western Virginia), with seats allocated to the two regions. While giving the western part of the state more power than before, the Great Gerrymander’s apportionment scheme meant that voters in the east could still elect majorities to the legislature even though the western part of state was fast becoming a (white, male) majority of the state’s population.In the post-Reconstruction period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whites retained political control over African Americans in Virginia, as elsewhere in the South, through the disenfranchisement of newly enfranchised African American citizens. In the late nineteenth century, through controlling who could register to vote and then controlling ballot access and rules, white political leaders sought to prevent African Americans from voting and having ballots counted. In 1902, a state Constitutional Convention constructed constitutional barriers to African American voting. Through a series of actions (including implementing a poll tax and giving local registrars the de facto power to deny voter registration applications and control over voting procedures), the convention achieved its goal, as the 1902 suffrage article author noted, of eliminating virtually all African Americans from the voting rolls through “discrimination within the letter of the law” (47). The measures also eliminated many poor white Virginians from voting, so that, as Tarter notes, “a smaller proportion of adult Virginians voted during the first half of the twentieth century than in any other state” (49).Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, rural and small-town interests maintained power in the General Assembly, as they did in many other states, through malapportionment. Failure to redistribute and redraw districts based on population changes led to large disparities in the size of districts between urban/suburban areas and rural/small-town areas. By refusing to redraw legislative districts based on population, faster-growing urban and suburban areas held disproportionately less power than rural areas. Indeed, by 1960, 37 percent of white Virginians could elect a majority of the state legislature. The combination of disenfranchisement and malapportionment greatly restricted the voting universe and allowed a small number of white elites, led by Harry Byrd and the Byrd organization, to control Virginia politics for decades.Starting in the 1960s, the Reapportionment Revolution and the Voting Rights Act led to changes in the ways through which political leaders in Virginia manipulated the electoral system. Over the past half century, gerrymandering, both partisan and racial, has been the main tool used to maintain political power. In addition, given that, starting in the 1960s, courts began to enter the “political thicket” of redistricting, numerous lawsuits have been filed and court decisions handed down concerning the legality of these plans. In terms of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats created Democratic-friendly maps when they controlled the legislature (through the redistricting of 1991), while Republicans partisan-gerrymandered the state in 2001 and 2011. And, throughout this time period, racial gerrymandering was used either to dilute African American voting strength within districts or to reduce the number of opportunities African Americans would have to elect candidates of their choice across Virginia. On the other hand, courts since the 1990s, post–Shaw v. Reno, have invalidated parts of plans in the state in cases where they ruled that race was a controlling factor in the redistricting process.Thus, in recent decades, with tools such as malapportionment and blatant discrimination in determining who could vote having been eliminated, gerrymandering has become the most prominent method by which electoral systems have been manipulated in Virginia to favor those in power. 2020’s Amendment One was designed to try to limit this avenue for manipulating elections as well.While Brent Tarter does a good job of laying out the history of redistricting in Virginia, there are several ways in which this book could have been improved. First, the title of the book, Gerrymanders, is a bit misleading. For three centuries or more, Virginia politicians have manipulated voting and election rules in the state. While gerrymandering has been one method, malapportionment and disenfranchisement have been more important in controlling elections in the state at certain points in Virginia’s history. Second, the book ends abruptly with the drive to place Amendment One on the 2020 election ballot. The addition of a concluding chapter that ties together and highlights the major themes and lessons of Virginia’s electoral history would have been helpful. Having said this, Gerrymanders provides the reader with useful insights into how those in power have (ab)used the electoral system rules in Virginia over time to maintain their power.