- Let's say you're a voter.

You make the decision to vote, you register, cast your ballot, and your vote counts as much as anyone else's, right?

Well, what if your vote counted, but politicians found a way to make it countless, because they chose their voters before their voters had the chance to choose them.

And what if I told you that in most of the United States, this is perfectly legal?

Welcome to the fascinating, disturbing, occasionally mythical world of partisan gerrymandering.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and this is Civics Made Easy.

Let's start with some dots.

Meet old Hampshire.

To be clear, not a real state.

Each of these dots represents 100,000 people.

25 dots is two and a half million old Hampshireans or Hampshirites.

And old Hampshire gets five members in the House of Representatives, so we need five districts, one for each of those members to represent.

They should have relatively an equal number of people in them so old Hampshirites are evenly represented.

Makes sense?

Maybe.

Now let's see if this part does.

Let's say 60% of old Hampshirites usually vote for the Teal Party and 40% for the Pink Party.

So if we're fairly representing everyone, Teal should win three seats and pink two.

The districts could look like this or like this.

Different lines, same result.

Three teal members, two pink ones.

Old Hampshirites are proportionally represented in their government based on how they vote.

It's a concept crazy enough to work.

But what if I want Pink to have those house seats even though old Hampshirites prefer teal?

Same voters, different lines.

Now, Pink wins.

Or maybe I want Teal to win every seat because I'm in the Teal Party and Teal evokes sophistication according to a Google search I did.

Again, same voters, different lines now, Teal wins them all.

This is partisan gerrymandering, drawing political districts to give one party an advantage over another.

It doesn't change anyone's vote, it just changes how the votes are grouped, and that is enough to change the outcome.

Partisan gerrymandering isn't limited to the House of Representatives.

It can happen in elections for state house, state senate, county commission, city council, school board, anywhere that a single representative is elected from a single district.

And to be super clear, a district is an area of land on which people live, or for these purposes, a shape on a map.

So depending on who draws the districts, that can determine who holds power in your government for years, which can result in policies that last a lifetime.

So how is this legal?

We'll get there.

But first, we should know how we got here.

A history of gerrymandering.

Let's start where excitement always starts, the census.

The Constitution says we have to count the whole US population every decade.

- [Narrator] Every home must be visited.

Every person must be counted.

- The idea was to use that count to determine how many House members each state gets for the next 10 years.

This is called apportionment, but then no more directions.

The Constitution doesn't say how to elect those members.

It leaves it up to each state, although Congress has some ability to override the state's decisions.

So at first, states experimented.

Some divided themselves into districts, and the voters in each district elect one House member.

Other states drew larger districts where voters could elect multiple House members, and others used a statewide popular vote.

Whichever candidates got the most votes, they represent that state in the House.

Essentially, the founders said, "Georgia, Delaware, Connecticut, you figure it out."

But in 1842, Congress decided that every state must use single member districts to elect the House, except some states just ignored Congress and kept doing it their own way.

So in 1967, 125 years later, Congress finally got tough and made single member districts the permanent rule.

This laid the path for modern partisan gerrymandering, because as technology improved, the process of drawing districts, which is called redistricting, got more precise, to the point where today partisan politicians can draw districts down to a specific home address.

They match the census data to lists of registered voters and use past election results and other data points to create highly sophisticated winning gerrymandered maps.

And who actually draws these districts?

In most states, it's the legislature, the members of your state house and senate.

Again, partisan politicians who draw, not only their state's US House districts, but also their own state legislative districts, like, for their own seats.

It's like letting the New England Patriots draw the field, position the goalposts, choose the ref, and act surprised when they win.

You know a team that's famously always played fair.

And speaking of New England, that's where the term gerrymandering was coined.

Back in 1812, the Massachusetts legislature controlled by Democratic Republicans, a real party back then, drew the state legislative districts to help that party win.

The state's governor, Elbridge Gerry, knew the maps were rigged to help his party, but signed them anyway.

One of the state Senate districts near Boston was so oddly shaped it resembled a salamander.

So a newspaper cartoonist took that district, added wings, fangs, and claws, I promised we were going to get mythical, and printed it in the Boston Weekly above the caption, "The Gerry-Mander".

And more than two centuries later, a governor who was also a congressman, a vice president, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence is mainly remembered for this.

Oh, and he died two years after signing that rigged map, or three days, depending how you draw calendar lines.

I realize this might be bumming you out, so let's call a friend.

Sam Wang is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton.

He has a PhD from Stanford and is an expert on the brain, but he also loves data, so he started the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which evaluates each state's level of fairness in its redistricting.

I guess I should start by asking, why do you care?

You're a neuroscientist, you could be studying memory, decision-making, the mysteries of consciousness, but here you are looking at shapes.

- Well, that's a great question.

I will say that I'm also a citizen of the United States.

I love our democracy.

And ever since I started analyzing elections back in 2004, I noticed that some people have more power than others, whether it's the electoral college or whether the way we draw districts.

And then in 2013, this incredible thing happened where one side got several million more votes and the other side gained control of the House of Representatives.

And I though, "Well, that seems unfair."

And I got really interested in the fact that we don't just vote for our representatives, we actually draw districts, and then those districts are used to elect people.

So it's not direct democracy.

And this bothered me.

It offended my sense of fairness.

- So what are currently the most common ways to gerrymander?

- Gerrymandering is full of tricks.

The United States is really unusual among democracies.

It's the only major democracy where the kind of trickery that can happen with drawing districts is in the hands of politicians themselves in so many states.

So you can either take your opponents and stick them all into one district, that's packing.

You can take your opponents and split them up so they get no representation at all, and that's cracking.

And then you can do things that have gone all the way back to things like what James Madison tried to do to Patrick Henry, which is jam together people in the wrong district.

That's kidnapping.

All these things are basically shenanigans that politicians use when they are left in charge of drawing their own districts.

And it just leads to this really crazy game that the United States plays that a lot of democracies have decided not to do.

- When you look at a district map, what specifically tells you it was drawn for partisan advantage?

I love that you give each state's redistricting process a grade.

So since you started tracking this, has any state in a good or bad way surprised you?

- The goodness or badness of a map really depends not just on the shape of one district, but the shape of lots of districts put together.

We can ask the question of whether the overall pattern of districts is such that if the two parties traded sides and they traded vote shares, would they also trade how many seats they had?

Because that seems kind of fair, right?

I cut, you choose.

I mean, it should be that, that if I switch places with you, then the number of seats I win should also switch places.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has built a grading system that does as good a job as we can, as neutral a job as we can, of deciding whether a map is fairly drawn not only at the single district level, but also the entire map at once.

And so we can judge partisan gerrymanders, we can detect racial packing, and we take all of that, we put it into a single grading system.

We even measure competitiveness because the fundamental principle of gerrymandering is to reduce competition.

- It's hard to discuss this without mentioning the Supreme Court.

It's heard many gerrymandering cases and there are really three kinds of gerrymandering harm.

There's unequal districts population-wise, districts drawn with racist intent, districts drawn to help or hurt a party.

The Supreme Court has ruled the first two are illegal and unconstitutional, but in 2019, they said federal courts can no longer hear partisan gerrymandering cases.

They said it's a political question that's not in the Constitution, so it's out of federal court's hands.

How has that ruling changed things?

- What they said was, "Partisan gerrymandering is bad, but we're not going to go there.

We're just not going to intervene."

And they used a $20 word, justiciable, and they said it's not justiciable.

And not justiciable in the Rucho versus Common Cause decision basically means it's wrong, but we're not going to do anything about it.

And that unleashed a free for all, and what's left, well, Congress or the states themselves.

Those are the options that we have at this point.

- So there's clearly a conflict of interest here.

Politicians want to get reelected.

They also, in most states, draw the district maps, so they sometimes draw those maps to help themselves and their friends get elected.

But if we want to adjust this process, we should look at how states actually do it.

As I mentioned, in most states, the lines are drawn by the members of your state legislature.

In a smaller number of states, these legislators share that responsibility with the commission.

And in a handful of states, to draw the maps, they use independent political commissions or independent citizen commissions.

Yeah, in seven states, politicians are not involved.

Instead, a bipartisan balanced group of ordinary voters, like you or me, draws the lines, and these commissions hold public meetings.

They receive input, apply written criteria, and must negotiate with others who may not share their political views.

Does that guarantee a perfect map?

No, because a perfect map doesn't exist.

But according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, these citizen commissions are producing maps, and that's as good as you can hope to get.

So I wanted to talk to someone who not only likes these commissions, but created one.

In 2016, Katie Fahey was frustrated and independent.

She didn't like partisan gerrymandering, so she did what lots of young people did then, and mostly old people do now, post on Facebook.

"I'd like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan, "she wrote.

"If you're interested in doing this as well, please let me know."

People started commenting that they were down with the mission and her post went viral.

This led her and others to form a group called Voters Not Politicians.

It ended up organizing and getting a measure on the ballot in Michigan in 2018.

That measure would amend the state's constitution to ban partisan gerrymandering by creating an independent bipartisan commission of citizens, not state legislators or other politicians, to draw Michigan's congressional and state legislative districts.

And two years after that Facebook post, the measure passed.

Since then, Michigan has had fair districts for its state senate, state house, and US House seats.

Even the Princeton guys agree.

Katie, did you have any idea of how to create a ballot measure before you made that post?

How did you learn what to do?

And how does it feel to have made the only good post in the history of Facebook?

- Oh, it's hilarious.

I really had no idea.

I didn't... The only thing political I had really done was like do research and then vote, but had no idea what was even possible.

So I made this post, it got like minimal traction, but for me, because I'm not an influencer or anything, I was like, "Oh my gosh, like, a hundred comments.

This is exciting."

But even though I had no idea what I was doing, the part that gave me hope was the fact that there was actually a pathway that an everyday citizen could take to try to actually fundamentally change something in the Constitution.

That, like, blew my mind around not having to settle for the legislature, which I kept feeling wasn't really listening to everyday people anyways.

And I was like, "Ooh, if we didn't have to compromise on a solution that's only going to partially work and we could actually just focus on something that will, like, that sounds exciting, and, like, even though it sounds really hard, we should try."

- So I'd love to hear a little bit more about how the commission works.

It's a group of 13 people, four Democrats, four Republicans, five independents, and how do they actually sit down and draw the maps?

- That was the question we had.

It was like, "What do we want representation to look like?"

Like we know that we don't like politicians getting to handpick who their voters will be, but if we could do it, what would that look like?

And what we heard from the people of Michigan over and over again, no matter whether we were in, like, very rural Northern Michigan or in downtown Metro Detroit, was people really wanted a group of commissioners who actually looked like them.

When they looked at the Michigan legislature, they felt like those folks don't know who I am or what I'm talking about.

So there's a random lottery essentially that chooses those four Democrats, four Republicans, and five independents that has weighed to take into account the demographics of the state.

So trying to make sure that this randomly selected group of people looks like the people of Michigan, which is pretty exciting.

And then the next thing we talked about was what does a fair district line look like?

And people really said that they really just wanted the will of the people reflected.

They wanted to make gerrymandering illegal, so the commission, we've added to our constitution now that they can't draw the lines based on trying to help one party over another or help any individual politician over another, and that they really need to look at past voting history, anticipated future voting history, and they need to listen to the community to hear about representation.

- So normally redistricting happens once a decade after the census, but in the past few years, politicians in at least nine states have redrawn their districts mid-decade.

That has never happened on that scale in US history, and they're doing it for openly partisan reasons, with control of Congress at stake.

So does mid-decade redistricting concern you, and is there ever a practical reason to do it?

- I think not only myself, but I think there are a lot of people who are very concerned by the mid-decade redistricting.

When you think about redistricting, it is one of the building blocks of our democracy.

We have purposely chosen here in America to have a representative democracy where we decide that this area of land is going to be represented together by one person, one person we can hold accountable.

And when you start fiddling with that to solely be looking at how can Democrats or Republicans be represented and the other side be screwed, you're losing the whole purpose, I think, of why we designed it that way in the first place, so that your community actually could have a say in our state houses and in Washington DC.

And it just feeds more into, oh, it's always Democrat versus Republican instead of the reality that like a lot of us tend to agree and just want our representatives actually trying to solve problems rather than, like, screw over the other side every day.

- That's very well said.

So there are different ways to address gerrymandering, right?

Independent citizen commissions like you created, though ballot measures aren't available in every state, Congress could also establish redistricting standards for the House in every state, like requiring those commissions.

In your opinion, what is the best method, but also the most achievable?

- You know, I really do think that part of this mid-decade redistricting is tied into like, "Oh, well, if the other side is doing it, then we need to do it too," which I think just will continue to remain until we just fix the problem nationally.

I do believe that every state is allowed and should be like an experiment of democracy and have its little quirks on like what feel most important to them and how they want representation to look, how they want their districts to be drawn, what criteria.

- I'm an optimist, but I've noticed a concerning trend.

A lot of the problems created by politicians end up having to be solved, not by politicians, but by us, voters.

Now, not every state allows for ballot measures.

For those that don't, you have to rely on electing state lawmakers who will draw fair maps.

And you should know that most of those state lawmakers across the country are on the ballot every two years, and the highest number of them are on the ballot in midterm elections.

So you might want to start paying attention to those.

And if you do live in a state that allows for ballot measures, which is about half, you could pull a Katie Fahey and get the ball rolling by posting online.

But allow me to make one last point on this issue.

A gerrymandered map can make an election less competitive.

It can give one party a major structural advantage, but it can't fully control human behavior.

The election still has to happen.

And when a ton of citizens show up to vote, especially those who don't normally get involved, truly anything can happen.

I warned you about my optimism.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and I hope you learned something.