NBC News: Gerrymandering is alive and well. The coming battle will be bigger than ever.

The gerrymandering wars are heading South.

A number of Southern states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, are prime targets for partisan gerrymandering as the congressional redistricting process gets underway after next year’s statehouse elections, experts said. …

The Supreme Court has declined to outlaw partisan gerrymandering — saying only states can police that — but it also removed a key safeguard against the practice by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. That ruling means states with a history of racial discrimination, including Texas, Florida and North Carolina, no longer have to clear their redistricting maps with the Department of Justice before putting them in place.

That ruling, along with the growing populations, changing demographics and mostly single-party control, sets up Southern states as the most likely territory for partisan gerrymandering, experts said.

The South is “ground zero for this fight,” said Dan Vicuña, a redistricting expert at Common Cause.

Vicuña said the Supreme Court’s decision has put in place a “new legal playing field” for partisan gerrymandering and lawmakers can be expected to try to take advantage of that when they are drawing the House maps.

“You’ll see kind of more blatant partisanship,” he told NBC News.