Norman Primus spent the last decades of his life trying to warn us about the mess we find ourselves in now. It’s a shame he’s not better remembered.

I met Primus in the late ‘80s at a conference on the upcoming census and reapportionment, the sort of gathering where he was a regular. He was a World War II vet who’d had a successful career as a CPA, one of those people you meet now and then who don’t find their true mission until midlife. His was that messy combination of politics and maps called redistricting.

Primus considered gerrymandering, the misuse of redistricting for political purposes, to be a grave threat to democracy, with a fairly straightforward remedy. He believed the people, not the politicians, should be drawing the maps.

First in association with Common Cause and then o

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