Redistricting in the New Millenium. Edited by Peter F. Galderisi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 368p. $90.00 cloth.

Gatekeepers to the Franchise: Shaping Election Administration in New York. By Ronald Hayduk. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 282p. $35.00.

“The first instinct of power is the retention of power.” The words are Justice Antonin Scalia's, but the core insight is one long acknowledged by commentators and advocates across the ideological spectrum. These two books examine the manifestations of this instinct, one on the drawing of district lines and the other on the running of elections. If neither book furnishes a definitive answer to the question of how power's first instinct can be harnessed to promote a better democracy, that is mainly a function of the intransigence and complexity of the problems they so successfully illuminate.