After every decade's census, the party in power in each state redraws legislative and congressional district boundaries to account for population shifts. The idea, ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court, is to create an arithmetically pure landscape for democracy: One person, one vote.
Once accomplished, the whole exercise seems arid and silly: The carefully balanced electorate doesn't show.
For four decades, American voters have been too lazy or too turned off to turn out. Some say their absence is a vote against a system they don't respect or trust. The fear is that many don't even bother with a reason for staying away.
The failure seems more than ironic as Americans observe the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Citizens put flag decals on their cars, but they seem more than willing to let others decide who will represent them in public office. Fewer than 10 percent of Democrats and Republicans have voted in a handful of party primaries this spring and summer.
According to the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, turnout in the statewide primaries held this spring and summer registered new lows for mid-presidential term elections.
Average turnout is now 50 percent lower than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Even at the high water mark in 1966, only about 33 percent of the electorate turned out. But this year, the total turnout achieved by both parties combined has been just over 16 percent - again, less than 10 percent for each of the major parties.
One of the nation's most passionate students of the electorate, Curtis Gans, makes no effort to conceal his bitter disappointment at the continuing abandonment of a citizen's most fundamental responsibility.
"In the real world, no one should have expected that the events of 9/11 would have increased political participation," says Gans, who is director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
"What the citizenry was asked to do was to return to normalcy, consume material goods and invest in the stock market, hardly clarion calls to civic involvement."
It is worth observing that President Bush, who might have included voting in his charge to patriotic Americans after 9/11, won the White House in an election decided, not by the popular vote or even by a recount of disputed Florida ballots, but by a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.
That crisis of vote-counting would not rank high on the list of events showing how every single vote counts. Indeed, that whole process looked like an exercise in canceling votes.
Gans fears that failure to vote will, in the long run, counter every bit of unifying stimulus, including such events as dramatic as 9/11. Without some effort at renewed civic education, he fears even deeper erosion of the voting impulse.
The current circumstance produces some curious conflict: Maryland legislators found themselves struggling over the voting rights of ex-offenders who apparently yearn to vote even as their law-abiding neighbors have no comparable interest. (The felons and their legislative backers prevailed. Many will be allowed to vote unless they have two or more convictions for violent crimes.)
The decline in voting can be seen in every demographic, racial, gender and income grouping. The most noticeable drops occurred among white males. Younger voters grow less and less interested in voting as they grow older.
Black Americans, since the 1964 Voting Rights Act, are the most reliable grouping sampled but only relatively: the number of blacks who turn out is going down, too, albeit less sharply.
The problem for a democracy, Gans points out, goes well beyond the discouraging spectacle of people squandering or stifled in the exercise of a precious right.
And it is likely that many have little understanding of how profoundly their inertia affects our system of government. The masses of voters are, in effect, transferring their power to whatever small interest group wishes to have an impact on a given election.
It is here that the labors of the redistricting teams seem to be mocked by the voters: The effort to make certain no voter has more power than another is sharply undercut when elections are left to those special interest groups that do care enough - are, in fact, eager - to claim for their interests or candidates. One person equals many votes, in a sense.
This year's election for comptroller in Maryland has become a textbook example of the dynamic. Secretary of State John T. Willis, a master organizer with many contacts in political and issue organizations, could defeat an icon of Maryland politics, incumbent William Donald Schaefer.
In a primary, a relatively unknown candidate with well-honed organizational skills and highly motivated partisans could score a stunning upset.
When participation falls so low, Gans says, the electorate literally invites relatively narrow and unrepresentative organizations and individuals to seize control of the process. What these opportunistic individuals and groups are doing, he suggests, is perfectly fair. It's all happening right in front of us.
Of course, competitive races such as the Willis-Schaefer match could actually boost turnout. Vigorous local, state and congressional races in Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George's counties similarly might result in turnout beyond the dismal totals posted in virtually every other state this year.
But, alas, competition does not guarantee brisk voting. In California, the race between former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, William Simon and Secretary of State Bill Jones produced another record low mid-term turnout.
Gans and various other students of voter behavior say Americans don't vote because they are the unengaged young, the hopelessly poor, the disaffected worker unhappy with nasty TV campaigns and others turned away by a failure by television to cover campaigns in any depth.
In Maryland, competition might yet suggest that democracy can be re-ignited. If so, it will have all the aforementioned obstacles to overcome plus one: redistricting.
That process by which we are all parceled out in equal numbers to achieve a sublime equality has become a hazard to voting.
Over time, politicians of both parties hijacked redistricting and bent it to strictly partisan purposes. Professor Nate Persilly, of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, says redistricting allows politicians in power (Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter) to pick their voters and not the other way around.
They can determine winners by drawing lines that concentrate their power while scattering their opponents'. This would seem to be the height of cynicism, but it is universally accepted as a legitimate part of the political spoils system.
Curtis Gans bemoans all manifestations of voter apathy - particularly the absence of elected leaders in a campaign to encourage voting. For many of them, low turnout is a good thing. They know they can get their partisans to the polls.
Meanwhile, voters have another reason to think going to the polls doesn't matter much. Why would they bother if the outcome has already been decided?
Says Gans, we are seeing "a virtual end to the religious impulse to civic duty which animated the nation's politics in previous generations and made possible some of its greatest civic accomplishments."