Every 10 years, state legislatures redraw congressional district boundaries. Whoever controls the legislature controls the map. And the map controls who wins. In REDISTRICT, you draw the lines. Group blocks into districts. Majority wins each seat. Can you make the result contradict what the voters actually wanted?
The voter registration maps below are majority purple, but the district lines distort the outcome in orange's favor by wasting or dispersing purple votes.
Concentrate your opponent's voters into one district. They win big there, but those votes are wasted, and orange wins the other two.
Split purple voters across all three districts so they're never a majority anywhere. Orange wins every seat.
In 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a map with one district that snaked 40 miles from Chelsea to Amesbury, carefully cherry-picking towns. The Boston Gazette drew it as a salamander. The word stuck.
Gerrymandering can be used to disenfranchise a targetted population. By gaming the system, strategic district lines can distort the popular vote and misrepresent a democratic consensus.
Click and drag to paint blocks into districts. Switch districts in the sidebar. Fill every active block, then run the election.
Campaign: play as the orange party through five
levels. Win a majority of seats despite the purple lean.
Free Play: play for a high-score of maximum voter
distortion.
Competitive: players take turns drawing one
district at a time.
Over five levels, you drew district maps that handed your party a legislative majority in a state where you were consistently outvoted. You didn't change a single voter's mind. You changed where the lines went.
You used two techniques that real mapmakers use:
Used together, packing and cracking can turn a popular majority into a legislative minority. Systematically. Reliably. Legally.
The patterns you practiced in this game have been applied to real legislative maps across the United States.
These aren't accidents or statistical flukes. They are the product of deliberate map-drawing, the same strategies you just applied across five levels.
Gerrymandering doesn't just affect who wins a single election. Maps drawn today lock in political power for a decade. Representatives choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.
The effects compound: safe seats produce more extreme candidates. Legislators in uncompetitive districts have little incentive to compromise. Voters in packed or cracked districts learn that their votes don't change outcomes, because they don't.
And unlike most democratic distortions, this one is largely legal. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering. The lines are drawn by the same legislators who benefit from them.