Politics is sometimes referred to as a “great game” — with incrementally more powerful politicians moving the lesser pieces around a board of boundaries, both physical and topical.

We would argue that there are few venues where this is more reflective of reality than gerrymandering.

Don’t believe us? What if we told you gerrymandering has literally been made into a board game?

It’s not like we are the only ones who see it this way, either. Recently, The Express had the privilege of talking to Carol Kuniholm, one of the co-founders of Fair Districts PA.

In an interview with her — which ran in yesterday’s edition of The Express — she was quoted as saying: “What is disheartening is that voters are being used as pawns in a really toxic partisan game. It’s all about power and nothing to do with representation.”

Here’s the thing: everyone deserves a fair vote, whatever your vote may be. This is one of those topics, like the Epstein files, where there are no gotchas — Democrats, Republicans and anyone in-between in those files? Lock ’em up.

Somewhere along the way, Americans lost the moral backbone to stand up straight and say, “this is wrong.”

There are a few hypotheseses for that, but our take is that few things have harmed our political process quite like the sheer spectacle of it all in the 21st century — the conversion of politics into sports.

Yes, politicians have always competed for the public eye, and in many cases quite crudely and aggressively.

But the absolute stratification of “your team vs my team” that we see today is toxic to our democracy.

There are so many examples of this, but gerrymandering is a perfect one. Let’s go back to Kuniholm:

“‘You can’t fix democracy by destroying democracy, which is what we’re seeing,’ she said.

Calling the president’s effort to gerrymander Texas “outright corruption,” Kuniholm also took aim at Democrats in blue states like California.

“Certainly Texas started it by saying, ‘We’re going to rig the map to get more Republican seats,’ but California is in effect dismantling an independent redistricting commission,” she said, cautioning that the plan jeopardizes the commission’s groundbreaking work and its influence as a model nationwide.”

There are no winners, here, except the politicians. Republicans in California lose their vote — their Constitutional right to representation — just as surely as Democrats in Texas.

This is wrong. If we were to hold up the Constitution as a paragon of American ideals, we could even go so far as to say that gerrymandering is anti-American.

The will of the people will eventually be heard. The only question is how much suffering and disenfranchisement will happen before our self-benefitting political class will listen to it.

It is vital to our identity as Americans and future cohesion as a nation that we be able to select the representatives that we feel best represent our communities. Allowing politicians to instead select their voters to ensure their own power base is a perversion of the democratic process around which our republic is built.

This twilight struggle — reminiscent of a budding cold war — between red and blue states only ends one way. Regardless of whether the red team wins or the blue team wins, in the end, we, the American people, are the ones who lose.

Both parties are made up of people who love this great nation. Democrats and Republicans alike have produced amazing Americans who have advanced our nation domestically and on the world stage.

However, in the computer age, the leadership of both parties are jointly implicated in seeking a zero-sum America: an ideological puritanism in which only their party is allowed to have good ideas or exercise power.

Gerrymandering is not their only weapon in this conflict, but it is one of the most effective.

So long as it remains a tool in the political arsenal, Americans of all stripes will never again know true representation.

It must end.