Next month, the votes of New Yorkers may possibly decide which party controls the House of Representatives for the 119th United States Congress. The margin between the majority Republicans and the minority Democrats is just a handful of seats on Long Island and points north.

What that means is that the two parties and their candidates have to compete for votes, which is good for New Yorkers and New York. Two years ago, the GOP won most of these seats and the speaker’s gavel. Now, once again, New York is the battleground for the House.

We complain plenty that the presidential candidates skip New York (except coming in to collect fundraising checks) because the results are known in advance that the Democrat will win and the archaic Electoral College gives nothing to even a close runner up. But it’s just the opposite for the House, which has the full attention of the parties.

Why the closeness and why all the love? Because the district lines are fair. Borrowing the phrase from “Snow White,” they are “the fairest in the land.”

In the decade from 2012 to 2022, New York was also blessed with the most closely balanced and the most competitive House constituencies in the country. That was because the Albany powerbrokers deadlocked after the census numbers came back and a federal court handed the drawing task to law Prof. Nate Persily, then of Columbia, and now of Stanford.

In 2022, the new state bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission, established by the public with a 2014 amendment to the state Constitution, had the duty. But when the panel deadlocked, the Democrats in the Legislature hijacked the process, creating a grotesque gerrymander that almost whittled the Republicans into extinction. The state’s highest court threw that out and assigned Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon University.

Like the Persily map, the Cervas map favors the voters, not the politicians.

The most expensive House contest in the country is a swath of New York from the Massachusetts state line to Ithaca, a rematch between Republican Marc Molinaro and Democrat Josh Riley. In 2022, Molinaro squeaked in with 50.8%. More than $35 million has been spent by the two sides so far and there is still more than a month to go.

Another big fight is between freshman Republican Mike Lawler and former member, Democrat Mondaire Jones, for a Westchester/Rockland seat. Jones, who insulted Gov. Kathy Hochul with some unkind words in The New Yorker last week, also told the magazine of his contest’s closeness: “You know what this is, right? This is all a function of Republican gerrymandering of House seats in New York. This s-­-t is not normal.”

Wrong and right, Mr. Jones. He is wrong, as it is not “a Republican gerrymandering of House seats in New York,” but the product of fair maps. However, Jones is correct that it is not normal. Which is a shame. The norm are safe Democratic districts and safe Republican districts, with the public left out of the decision-making.

It is so much better for representative democracy that the mapmakers aren’t deciding who wins, but the voters are. These fair lines will be in place until 2030 and hopefully replaced with another equally balanced map.

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