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Pennsylvania sends too many Republicans to Washington.

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Thats not a partisan attack. Its just math.

Of the 18 Pennsylvanian members of the House of Representatives, 13 are Republicans and 5 are Democrats. That split should be more like 11 to 7 or even 10 to 8 if the districts were drawn without attempts at favoring Republicans, according to recent expert analyses.

Its all about the map: Several lawsuits are attempting to get various state legislative and congressional maps declared unconstitutional on the basis of partisan gerrymandering, the idea that one political party drew the lines in a way that benefited them unfairly.

The lawsuits rely on a set of tools that for the first time could convincingly identify skewed maps and persuade the courts that a states map goes too far in favoring one party. A federal court has ruled Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional, the first victory in a partisan gerrymandering case in three decades.

That decision used one of several new mathematical tests to help measure the maps Republican skew, and the Supreme Court will hear the case in the fall; if it upholds the decision, it could create a legal standard, potentially including some of these tests for measuring map bias.

That could spell trouble for Pennsylvania, which fails those analyses.

People have made these claims before, but proof has been elusive. The Supreme Court had said too much gerrymandering could be unconstitutional, but the justices couldnt agree on how much is too much in part for lack of measurement standards.

Anthony Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote in the 2004 Pennsylvania case, laid down a gauntlet: A convincing test hadnt been found, but that didnt make it an impossibility. That opinion and how close the court came to declaring partisan gerrymandering a political issue off-limits to the courts spurred academics and lawyers to put forward a host of mathematical methods to precisely identify skewed maps.

No matter what concept you care about in partisan gerrymandering, Pennsylvania is going to be an outlier, said Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who helped develop the efficiency gap test.

Unlike in many other states, Pennsylvanias congressional district map is drawn by the state legislature, passed as a bill, and signed by the governor. The current map was drawn in 2011 by Republicans, who controlled both houses of the legislature and the governors mansion. New Jersey, which uses a commission of political appointees, has a bipartisan split and tiebreaker vote; its map is generally not flagged as a problem by these tests.

The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divvied up after the census every 10 years, based on population. As populations shift across the country, so, too, does political power Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat every 10 years, while states in the Southwest have grown. Once the state is given its number of representatives, it redraws its map.

Those mapping decisions ultimately can shape government policies that affect millions of Americans.

Pennsylvania is clearly quite extreme. This is not random, said Michael Li, a redistricting and voting rights expert who is senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

According to tests run by Li and others, the 2011 redrawing of Pennsylvanias congressional districts skewed the districts in Republicans favor, giving two or even three seats to Republicans over what would occur with a politically neutral map.

Here is a summary of how Pennsylvania fares in three of the tests that experts believe best capture evidence of gerrymandering.

The primary gerrymandering methods are packing and cracking.

In packing, a rival partys voters are concentrated in a district it usually wins easily. While that districts race is conceded, the rivals voters cant cast ballots in elections that would be more contested. Cracking involves dispersing a partys voters into multiple districts in such ways that they are deprived of majorities.

In the parlance of what analysts call the efficiency gap, certain votes are wasted, defined as ballots cast either for sure losers, or for the victors above and beyond the winning margins.

Using 2016 election results, Pennsylvania has fared poorly in several efficiency gap analyses, including those by the Associated Press, the Brennan Center, and Philadelphia-based mapping firm Azavea.

By their measures, the Keystone State should be sending 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats to the House not 13 and 5.

Princeton University researchers use very well-known and very well-tested, battle-tested statistical tests to measure ways that mapping can affect elections, said Brian Remlinger, the statistical research assistant who serves as the main analyst at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Cracking and packing would result in one partys winning districts with wide margins, while the other party wins more districts, but with slimmer margins. That effect was evident in Pennsylvania in 2016, when winning Democrats on average took 75 percent of the vote, compared with 64 for Republicans. The odds of that happening would have been less than 0.03 percent with a politically neutral map, Remlinger said.

Historically, what percentage of votes did a party receive in Pennsylvania, how many seats did it win, and how does that compare to recent elections?

Pennsylvanias map is the most heavily skewed in the country on this measure, a Brennan Center analysis found. In 2016, Republicans had about a four-seat advantage, compared with the outcomes in a neutral mapping, and about five seats in 2012.

There isnt necessarily a need to pick one test, you can have multiple tests and the fact that multiple tests point in the same direction, as in Pennsylvania, suggest this isnt random, Li said.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this fall in Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin case in which a three-judge panel relied on the efficiency gap, in part, to declare Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court upholds that decision, using the efficiency gap or other measures, that in effect would green-light the use of these measures in gerrymandering case law, experts said, and open the door for other maps to get challenged using these tests.

All of these things tend to point in the same direction, so we think that presenting any of these pieces of evidence could be useful for a court, said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which is bringing the Whitford case before the Supreme Court.

Pennsylvanias map is already facing a direct challenge: The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania in June sued the state, using the efficiency gap as part of its legal argument that partisan gerrymandering had occurred.

An election system in which one party, whatever party happens to be in control of the election system, can rig it so it can win and keep a majority thereafter, is almost by definition the antithesis of self-government, said Michael Churchill, an attorney at Philadelphia-based Public Interest Law Center, which is representing the League in the case.

It defeats the very purpose of having elections.

Gerrymandering is an age-old process of dividing congressional and legislative districts in such a way as to give one party an advantage.

On Feb. 11, 1812, Gov. Elbridge Gerry, then the governor of Massachusetts, signed into law a redistricting plan aimed at keep his party in power.

The Boston Gazette printed mock map in the shape of a salamander under the headline The Gerry-mander.

The rest is history.

Could Pa. courts do what lawmakers won't? Jun 25 - 11:19 PM

Groups sue Pa. over congressional district gerrymandering Jun 15 - 8:39 PM

Supreme Court to hear potentially landmark case on partisan gerrymandering Jun 20 - 1:07 AM

GOP quietly carved key districts in its favor Oct 23 - 1:08 AM

Published: August 14, 2017 8:00 AM EDT | Updated: August 14, 2017 8:37 AM EDT

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Why Pa. sends too many Republicans to Congress - and why that could change - Philly.com