The biggest threat to our representative democracy is not poll taxes or other active suppression of voting rights, but sophisticated fiddling with district maps and other seemingly mundane mechanics to amplify some citizens' voices and squelch others. Fortunately, though the Supreme Court has largely thrown up its hands in the face of increasingly complicated gerrymandering schemes in which politicians choose their voters and not the other way around, especially egregious examples of the black art remain subject to judicial scrutiny and invalidation.