I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
Have you played the game? The board today has three parties and the winning solution is to make sure your party wins one district and the other parties tie in the other four.
Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.
Edit: Per a comment below, this does not seem like a regular feature of the game, just an oddity of today. It would still be worth figuring out a way to eliminate the tie issue or at least ensure it's less of a factor in future games, but the game is much more fun on average overall than today's game suggests
Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.
Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.
A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.
The goal of this puzzle appears to be to get more people to talk about the issue and push for change. In these things, you can have either popularity or nuance but not both. The average American can't even read, let alone understand the nuance or complexity in how gerrymandering "actually" works.
We did these sorts of exercises in my high school social studies class, in Ohio, back in 2002ish. I fear it may have been instructive to some of my classmates rather than warning them of the inherent evils.
> This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it.
Ties happen from time to time. Here's one I could find [1], and I recall one that I can't find maybe a decade ago in coastal northern california that they resolved by throwing dice.
I think it wasn't so much that ties aren't possible, but that ties don't mean "no one wins". If you make one district safe and three districts are a coin toss between your two rivals, one of them has much more power than you in the end.
We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82 copies of Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.
I picked up a copy on ebay a while after the Kickstarter!
Mapmaker is a great game for tabletop veterans and newbies alike, although the first playthrough can be a little opaque even to regular gamers (especially the first few moves when there are no established district boundaries yet). It definitely benefits from repeat play, goes quickly once you know the rules, and has you doing only one thing each turn.
Definitely a game that has earned a permanent place in my collection.
It's a major factor in today's puzzle, but it doesn't seem to come up as much in past puzzles. I think yesterday's is more fun and doesn't have the unrealism. https://gerrymandle.cc/game/2026-06-17
An interesting mathematical curiosity, but kinda seems to ignore the political realities that make gerrymandering happen in the first place. If you had the will to make this happen, why would you not just do proportional representation? The modern point of having districts is to gerrymander.
Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.
There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase "You have 2 voices/votes" ("Sie haben 2 Stimmen") on the top [1].
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
Some cantons in Switzerland use a system called biproportional apportionment. They say "okay, party A got 25% of the votes, so they must get 25% of the seats. And district 1 accounts for 30% of the population, so they must get 30% of the seats." And so on. Then they do some matrix math to determine who gets what seats in which districts. The method ensures each party gets the right total number of seats while each district gets its predetermined seat count. You could in principle extend the method to handle three or more dimensions.
This is a strong argument for a broken status quo. It’s essentially dismissing many possible, tangible, in other places implemented approaches to improve representation, by essentially declaring that fixing the system cannot be done, or must first involve some completely new solution.
I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep.
In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep.
At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
I'm also a fan of making it 30k:1. You wouldn't even need to send everyone to DC, it could be done nearly 100% remote these days.
As long as I'm waving my magic wand around, I'd also like to see it handled more like jury duty, the representative just gets picked at random from the pool of 30k. Or maybe randomly select 10 people, and that's who we get to vote for. Then after 2 years, they get to run for re-election one time, and if they fail to get a majority, we randomly pick another 10 candidates.
The House is a group of individuals that are so afraid to defy the president because the President can send a bunch of money to primary any one who disagrees with them. Big districts require a lot of money to run a campaign. Small districts mean you don't need a lot of money, and heck they might already know you. A larger house means more political independence from the bully-pulpit.
And the House is MEANT to be cacophonous and boisterous. Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House. Within a decade or two, it will be 1M citizens per House Rep. Adn everyone of them will bought, because you have to be bought to get elected.
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
Smaller districts, because of geographical sorting, or spatial covariance, or however you'd like to describe it, would be more homogeneous, and that is EXACTLY the point. What matters is that Representatives better reflect the opinions and beliefs of their constituents, not just the half that won the election, and that the people know their representative, and that the Representative does not need to depend on large donations in order to speak to those people.
What you implicitly describe as a strength, competitive districts, leads to winner take-all political dynamics and MORE extreme politicking, and leads to districts that are perpetually unhappy with their representation.
And in aggregate, the less the party and President can influence a Representative's re-election chances, the more independent that Representative can act, and the more that Representative can reflect their district's particular beliefs. This is a moderating dynamic. In fact, it threatens the two party system in the House allowing cross-party. They can try to be as disciplined as they want, but if they have little leverage over its members, then it will be a fruitless endeavor.
Re: govern-ability of a large House. This is repeated over and over, yet it seems more about opinions and reinforcing the status quo, which is not working, than evidence. And the larger point is that we need to start with the purpose of the House. First fulfill that: To Represent their Constituents faithfully. Without that, none of the other stuff matters. Working efficiently for the wrong ends is not winning.
In terms of the UK, while the ratio in the UK is 100,000 citizens per MP, for a citizen to be a candidate for MP, their Party must approve them, or at least, not veto them. That is not generally true in the U.S., and only true to the extent that the party can send ad money to someone else in the primaries. I think there is good reason to think that smaller districts in the U.S. would give weaker control to Parties, not stronger control.
You are correct that major local employers and NIMBY groups can dominate in small districts. Do they not now? Between begging for money from every monied power and hoping to avoid the ire of the Party and President, where does that leave the Representative in terms of representing their constituents?
In the end, I just don't find myself convinced by these objections, but I do thank you for your considered response.
I traced the two-party dynamic back to something underneath district size a while ago: how we vote. One person, one vote, actually encourages first past the post winners. Shrink the district, grow the district, doesn't matter, you're still forcing every voter into a single binary mark, and a binary mark always collapses into two stable attractors.
Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place simply fall out of the scores, nobody had to design a tournament bracket to make that happen. Give voters that same instrument: score every candidate on desirability. For a pooled multi-seat district, take however many winners the pool needs, ranked by score. Nothing stops someone from voting like they do now, give the candidate you despise a 0 and the one you want a 100, but most people think in preference, a first, second, third choice, not a single binary mark.
The numerology of district size and pop-per-rep will always be heuristic at best. If the goal is to improve representation, we should focus on the mechanism of selecting people and elevating them into office. That's the biggest bang for the buck.
Because the median voter doesn't realistically have that detailed a level of knowledge on legislators/their policies. This is tough for a lot of people to believe- especially the kind of high-information voters who propose these sorts of reforms to begin with. But there's an enormous, multi-decade literature on voter ignorance. They simply don't know much about who's running or what their policies are
1. I grew up in a small town, and occasionally ask my parents how mayoral/city council politics is going there. (Or, I check out the latest drama on Facebook about it). My good friend's uncle was our mayor for a long time, etc. People might know personalities, but they're still not following national policy positions. Not to mention that people would be voting purely for personalities/clan/ethnic affiliations, and again not policy- we have a term for that in poly sci, personalism
2. A country of 340 million people with an elected representative from every small town would have an unrealistic number of representatives. 1 for every 5k citizens would be 68,000 reps in the House
I get that you're fetishizing hyper-localism to the exclusion of all else, but it's just a bad basis to run a modern society. This is not a realistic vision
Was it hyper localism in the years between 1776-1930 to have 1 Representative per <=70k citizens. We do not need to go to 5k, and no one said that. But there are ways to aggregate and distribute processes for a larger House, and you have provided no reason for why the current fixed small number of 435 should be preferred, why that is workable, but not 870 (1:350k) or 1740 for 1:175k.
Practically, and with all due respect, you keep stating opinions why it is a "bad basis to run a modern society" but you never articulate why exactly. To my mind, the increased complexity of the world can use more Representatives to work and specialized in more specializes committees.
> It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own.
Every member should be able to bring some number of proposals to full vote and all members should be forced to make a vote. Make every GOPer put a No vote on the "release DJT rape transcripts" bill, instead of burying them in committee. Make every pretend liberal vote No on "Medicare 4 All".
It'd be interesting to run some numerical simulations to see at what number of Reps coordination becomes unfeasible or leads to perennial grid-lock. The Senate, on the other hand, is the "saucer" for the hot tea of the Lower House. Back in the day, people would pour tea from the tea cup straight into the saucer to cool it down, and sup from the saucer directly. Which means that the saucer "cooled down" the ferocity and fiery intensity of the "discussions" in the Lower House. Does this relationship still hold if the Lower House is significantly more populated? Probably. But that might also be worth investigating.
Larger house does impose some needs for restructuring business in the House. An expansion of the committee system, a reworking of important comittees into small Houses, where those houses have various committees,because clearly the current comittee system would concentrate important positions to too few (as a proportion) of Representatives. This could allow for greater specialization of comittees and people, which is probably a good thing given today's complexities.
I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!
I'm sorry you've found it a bit difficult to pick up! There is an introduction below the game, but it can still be a bit hard to follow since it's all text. I'll see about adding an additional, optional, interactive tutorial.
Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
It's interesting to think about how difficult it is to define "fair" with the current system. If a state's population is 60/40 and there are ten districts, do you want them each to be representative at 60/40, and thus 10-0? Or do you want six districts one way and four the other way? In other words, there's a real tension between "competitive districts" and "representative outcomes".
This is missing the forest for the trees. You'd want them represented accurately at a local level along reasonable district lines, rather than intentionally being misrepresented with district lines so tortured that the shapes they make are said to resemble a lizard. Maybe that's hard but I suspect it gets a lot easier once the bad-faith decision-makers are removed from their decision-making power. In the context you present, "competetive districts" means precisely the same thing as "representative outcomes".
I got a flawless victory in a landslide with 0 hints but the result screen is a bit confusing. There are players that used hints that are to the "right" of where it shows me. Makes me feel like those people did better than me... But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4. Fun little game.
How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
> But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4.
Hmm, that is interesting, I had not thought about that. I will see if it makes more sense to reverse the axis. Might just make it more confusing though
> How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
It's mostly manual, but I have some tools to quickly create map layouts and fill them with various distributions. Just to speed up testing out new levels.
From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
Interesting to see "neighbourhood" and "centre" in a game about gerrymandering, focused on the US. Anyone know where the creator is from? Is he/she a transplant to the US, or someone from another country who has taken an interest in the subject (perhaps realizing there might be market interest in such a big country)?
That helps a lot, thank you! A district is a connected group of hexes. With the other districts you have drawn, there is no way to create a connected group of hexes containing all remaining colored ones
Connected hexes meaning "connected _occupied_ hexes"? It certainly seems to let you select empty hexes. Is it that the "size" of a district is based on area, rather than population (as in the real world)?
No, that's not it. Is it that some empty hexes (not just outside the map, but inside as well) are mysteriously not allowed?
This reminds me of the plot some Libertarians had back in 2020 to win the U.S. presidential election by taking New Mexico or some other state. I can't remember how it was supposed to work mathematically, because NM doesn't have enough votes by itself to prevent either other candidate from getting a majority, but I remember having seen articles about it. (I tried searching to provide a link and can only find references to Texas, and I'm absolutely certain the articles I read were not about Texas.)
Personally I've been very surprised with the public support for the increase in political gerrymandering. I know that people think it is worth it for the short term gains, but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
I know your threw an "etc" in there; but, all fingers point to my home state: Texas. We need two legislative changes at the federal level: (1) uncap the house from 435 to at least cube-root or (better) max 500k; and, (2) you can't be sworn in unless your district was from an ICRC or statistically equivalent object.
very basic issue, its not clear to me how to start a new district, it just extends the old one. I managed to do it accidentally a couple times, but I don't know how
By default, you work on one district at a time. Clicking adds tiles to the current district until the current district is full, then clicking will create a new district. District size is determined per round, described at the top as eg. "draw 5 districts of 4 populated tiles".
You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new one.
I’m on mobile and that works for me sometimes but other times it just decides the district I’m working on is done and starts a new one. It’s not clear to me why or how to get that to not happen
Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Districts are connected regions that can contain at most 4 houses. If you click on a house that is too far away from your started district, it might not be possible to span the distance. In that case it creates a new region instead
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.
I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
Have you played the game? The board today has three parties and the winning solution is to make sure your party wins one district and the other parties tie in the other four.
Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.
Edit: Per a comment below, this does not seem like a regular feature of the game, just an oddity of today. It would still be worth figuring out a way to eliminate the tie issue or at least ensure it's less of a factor in future games, but the game is much more fun on average overall than today's game suggests
Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.
Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.
A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.
The goal of this puzzle appears to be to get more people to talk about the issue and push for change. In these things, you can have either popularity or nuance but not both. The average American can't even read, let alone understand the nuance or complexity in how gerrymandering "actually" works.
We did these sorts of exercises in my high school social studies class, in Ohio, back in 2002ish. I fear it may have been instructive to some of my classmates rather than warning them of the inherent evils.
> This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it.
Ties happen from time to time. Here's one I could find [1], and I recall one that I can't find maybe a decade ago in coastal northern california that they resolved by throwing dice.
[1] https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/dec/4/election-tie-blue-la...
I think it wasn't so much that ties aren't possible, but that ties don't mean "no one wins". If you make one district safe and three districts are a coin toss between your two rivals, one of them has much more power than you in the end.
Yes indeed, not super realistic, since it would never happen. but it does make for a more fun puzzle :)
There's a board game from a few years ago that I'd recommend for such a situation: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/252997/mapmaker-the-gerr... - it was a kickstarter and available beyond that for a few years: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
The designer diary: https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/111646/designer-di...
... and a review of it in context: https://civiceducator.org/review-mapmaker-gerrymandering/I picked up a copy on ebay a while after the Kickstarter!
Mapmaker is a great game for tabletop veterans and newbies alike, although the first playthrough can be a little opaque even to regular gamers (especially the first few moves when there are no established district boundaries yet). It definitely benefits from repeat play, goes quickly once you know the rules, and has you doing only one thing each turn.
Definitely a game that has earned a permanent place in my collection.
It's a major factor in today's puzzle, but it doesn't seem to come up as much in past puzzles. I think yesterday's is more fun and doesn't have the unrealism. https://gerrymandle.cc/game/2026-06-17
Some mathematicians worked out a way to fairly do districting, similar to having one kid cut the cake and the other kid gets first choice:
"A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes" by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781
An interesting mathematical curiosity, but kinda seems to ignore the political realities that make gerrymandering happen in the first place. If you had the will to make this happen, why would you not just do proportional representation? The modern point of having districts is to gerrymander.
Because local representation is important too?
Then run a hyperlocal party if you really have a constituency that cares deeply about their local issues and win enough votes to get a seat.
Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.
There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase "You have 2 voices/votes" ("Sie haben 2 Stimmen") on the top [1].
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
[1]: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/german-election-ballot-paper...
[2]: https://youtu.be/QT0I-sdoSXU?si=VInLvyvMlMJzIvoh
Some cantons in Switzerland use a system called biproportional apportionment. They say "okay, party A got 25% of the votes, so they must get 25% of the seats. And district 1 accounts for 30% of the population, so they must get 30% of the seats." And so on. Then they do some matrix math to determine who gets what seats in which districts. The method ensures each party gets the right total number of seats while each district gets its predetermined seat count. You could in principle extend the method to handle three or more dimensions.
This is a strong argument for a broken status quo. It’s essentially dismissing many possible, tangible, in other places implemented approaches to improve representation, by essentially declaring that fixing the system cannot be done, or must first involve some completely new solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_cake-cutting
I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep. In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep. At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
I'm also a fan of making it 30k:1. You wouldn't even need to send everyone to DC, it could be done nearly 100% remote these days.
As long as I'm waving my magic wand around, I'd also like to see it handled more like jury duty, the representative just gets picked at random from the pool of 30k. Or maybe randomly select 10 people, and that's who we get to vote for. Then after 2 years, they get to run for re-election one time, and if they fail to get a majority, we randomly pick another 10 candidates.
The problem with random, is that people just won't believe it was random.
The House of Representatives is already a cacophonous, boisterous coliseum.
The House is a group of individuals that are so afraid to defy the president because the President can send a bunch of money to primary any one who disagrees with them. Big districts require a lot of money to run a campaign. Small districts mean you don't need a lot of money, and heck they might already know you. A larger house means more political independence from the bully-pulpit.
And the House is MEANT to be cacophonous and boisterous. Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House. Within a decade or two, it will be 1M citizens per House Rep. Adn everyone of them will bought, because you have to be bought to get elected.
Grouchy old political scientist here:
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
Smaller districts, because of geographical sorting, or spatial covariance, or however you'd like to describe it, would be more homogeneous, and that is EXACTLY the point. What matters is that Representatives better reflect the opinions and beliefs of their constituents, not just the half that won the election, and that the people know their representative, and that the Representative does not need to depend on large donations in order to speak to those people.
What you implicitly describe as a strength, competitive districts, leads to winner take-all political dynamics and MORE extreme politicking, and leads to districts that are perpetually unhappy with their representation.
And in aggregate, the less the party and President can influence a Representative's re-election chances, the more independent that Representative can act, and the more that Representative can reflect their district's particular beliefs. This is a moderating dynamic. In fact, it threatens the two party system in the House allowing cross-party. They can try to be as disciplined as they want, but if they have little leverage over its members, then it will be a fruitless endeavor.
Re: govern-ability of a large House. This is repeated over and over, yet it seems more about opinions and reinforcing the status quo, which is not working, than evidence. And the larger point is that we need to start with the purpose of the House. First fulfill that: To Represent their Constituents faithfully. Without that, none of the other stuff matters. Working efficiently for the wrong ends is not winning.
In terms of the UK, while the ratio in the UK is 100,000 citizens per MP, for a citizen to be a candidate for MP, their Party must approve them, or at least, not veto them. That is not generally true in the U.S., and only true to the extent that the party can send ad money to someone else in the primaries. I think there is good reason to think that smaller districts in the U.S. would give weaker control to Parties, not stronger control.
You are correct that major local employers and NIMBY groups can dominate in small districts. Do they not now? Between begging for money from every monied power and hoping to avoid the ire of the Party and President, where does that leave the Representative in terms of representing their constituents?
In the end, I just don't find myself convinced by these objections, but I do thank you for your considered response.
I traced the two-party dynamic back to something underneath district size a while ago: how we vote. One person, one vote, actually encourages first past the post winners. Shrink the district, grow the district, doesn't matter, you're still forcing every voter into a single binary mark, and a binary mark always collapses into two stable attractors.
Consider the Olympics instead. Judges score, and 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place simply fall out of the scores, nobody had to design a tournament bracket to make that happen. Give voters that same instrument: score every candidate on desirability. For a pooled multi-seat district, take however many winners the pool needs, ranked by score. Nothing stops someone from voting like they do now, give the candidate you despise a 0 and the one you want a 100, but most people think in preference, a first, second, third choice, not a single binary mark.
The numerology of district size and pop-per-rep will always be heuristic at best. If the goal is to improve representation, we should focus on the mechanism of selecting people and elevating them into office. That's the biggest bang for the buck.
Because the median voter doesn't realistically have that detailed a level of knowledge on legislators/their policies. This is tough for a lot of people to believe- especially the kind of high-information voters who propose these sorts of reforms to begin with. But there's an enormous, multi-decade literature on voter ignorance. They simply don't know much about who's running or what their policies are
But if they came from your own small town and had a reputation in that small town based on years of living there?
1. I grew up in a small town, and occasionally ask my parents how mayoral/city council politics is going there. (Or, I check out the latest drama on Facebook about it). My good friend's uncle was our mayor for a long time, etc. People might know personalities, but they're still not following national policy positions. Not to mention that people would be voting purely for personalities/clan/ethnic affiliations, and again not policy- we have a term for that in poly sci, personalism
2. A country of 340 million people with an elected representative from every small town would have an unrealistic number of representatives. 1 for every 5k citizens would be 68,000 reps in the House
I get that you're fetishizing hyper-localism to the exclusion of all else, but it's just a bad basis to run a modern society. This is not a realistic vision
Was it hyper localism in the years between 1776-1930 to have 1 Representative per <=70k citizens. We do not need to go to 5k, and no one said that. But there are ways to aggregate and distribute processes for a larger House, and you have provided no reason for why the current fixed small number of 435 should be preferred, why that is workable, but not 870 (1:350k) or 1740 for 1:175k.
Practically, and with all due respect, you keep stating opinions why it is a "bad basis to run a modern society" but you never articulate why exactly. To my mind, the increased complexity of the world can use more Representatives to work and specialized in more specializes committees.
> It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own.
Every member should be able to bring some number of proposals to full vote and all members should be forced to make a vote. Make every GOPer put a No vote on the "release DJT rape transcripts" bill, instead of burying them in committee. Make every pretend liberal vote No on "Medicare 4 All".
It'd be interesting to run some numerical simulations to see at what number of Reps coordination becomes unfeasible or leads to perennial grid-lock. The Senate, on the other hand, is the "saucer" for the hot tea of the Lower House. Back in the day, people would pour tea from the tea cup straight into the saucer to cool it down, and sup from the saucer directly. Which means that the saucer "cooled down" the ferocity and fiery intensity of the "discussions" in the Lower House. Does this relationship still hold if the Lower House is significantly more populated? Probably. But that might also be worth investigating.
Larger house does impose some needs for restructuring business in the House. An expansion of the committee system, a reworking of important comittees into small Houses, where those houses have various committees,because clearly the current comittee system would concentrate important positions to too few (as a proportion) of Representatives. This could allow for greater specialization of comittees and people, which is probably a good thing given today's complexities.
I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I think I did not understand this game well. May I suggest adding a few introductory levels of increasing difficulty for beginners.
I'm sorry you've found it a bit difficult to pick up! There is an introduction below the game, but it can still be a bit hard to follow since it's all text. I'll see about adding an additional, optional, interactive tutorial.
I LOVE this game, but it took a little while to pick up, mostly because I didn't realize that ties were a part of the mix.
Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
https://www.tessellationgames.com/
This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
It's interesting to think about how difficult it is to define "fair" with the current system. If a state's population is 60/40 and there are ten districts, do you want them each to be representative at 60/40, and thus 10-0? Or do you want six districts one way and four the other way? In other words, there's a real tension between "competitive districts" and "representative outcomes".
This is missing the forest for the trees. You'd want them represented accurately at a local level along reasonable district lines, rather than intentionally being misrepresented with district lines so tortured that the shapes they make are said to resemble a lizard. Maybe that's hard but I suspect it gets a lot easier once the bad-faith decision-makers are removed from their decision-making power. In the context you present, "competetive districts" means precisely the same thing as "representative outcomes".
I love the idea! Took a while for my gf and I to get used to it, but it's so much fun now!
I got a flawless victory in a landslide with 0 hints but the result screen is a bit confusing. There are players that used hints that are to the "right" of where it shows me. Makes me feel like those people did better than me... But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4. Fun little game.
How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
> But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4.
Hmm, that is interesting, I had not thought about that. I will see if it makes more sense to reverse the axis. Might just make it more confusing though
> How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
It's mostly manual, but I have some tools to quickly create map layouts and fill them with various distributions. Just to speed up testing out new levels.
From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
Interesting to see "neighbourhood" and "centre" in a game about gerrymandering, focused on the US. Anyone know where the creator is from? Is he/she a transplant to the US, or someone from another country who has taken an interest in the subject (perhaps realizing there might be market interest in such a big country)?
I LOVE that people are creating things like this. The best way to complain is to make things. More power to you!
I won't let me complete the final district (YRBY+" "s) in today's puzzle. (firefox/linux) If I try to do it earlier it auto includes unwanted cells.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, would you mind sending over a screenshot or video of where you are stuck?
[spoilers] https://snipboard.io/NZ8sa7.jpg
That helps a lot, thank you! A district is a connected group of hexes. With the other districts you have drawn, there is no way to create a connected group of hexes containing all remaining colored ones
Connected hexes meaning "connected _occupied_ hexes"? It certainly seems to let you select empty hexes. Is it that the "size" of a district is based on area, rather than population (as in the real world)?
No, that's not it. Is it that some empty hexes (not just outside the map, but inside as well) are mysteriously not allowed?
The controls are really frustrating on mobile. Clicking a new tile sometimes adds it to my district. Other times it makes a new district?
If a tile can be added to your district, it is added. Otherwise it makes a new district.
Since todays puzzle heavily relies on empty space, it can be a bit confusing. I'll try to make this a bit more clear for new players
Love this! It would be amazing to see daily puzzles built from actual historical maps. Letting people redraw a real gerrymandered district.
> Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Can't view it at all.
This reminds me of the plot some Libertarians had back in 2020 to win the U.S. presidential election by taking New Mexico or some other state. I can't remember how it was supposed to work mathematically, because NM doesn't have enough votes by itself to prevent either other candidate from getting a majority, but I remember having seen articles about it. (I tried searching to provide a link and can only find references to Texas, and I'm absolutely certain the articles I read were not about Texas.)
Maybe you were thinking of Utah in 2016? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_McMullin_2016_presidentia...
Can I redraw the districts to look like a Gerrymandlebrot set?
Politics aside, this is a fun type of puzzle!
I'm getting SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on Firefox.
I get the same error, and chrome fails also.
great idea to make Gerrymandle! congrats on the alpha
US/California etc gerrymandering is dramatically illegal IMHO. I see the recent gerrymandering in the USA as a kind of political cancer actually....
Personally I've been very surprised with the public support for the increase in political gerrymandering. I know that people think it is worth it for the short term gains, but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
I know your threw an "etc" in there; but, all fingers point to my home state: Texas. We need two legislative changes at the federal level: (1) uncap the house from 435 to at least cube-root or (better) max 500k; and, (2) you can't be sworn in unless your district was from an ICRC or statistically equivalent object.
very basic issue, its not clear to me how to start a new district, it just extends the old one. I managed to do it accidentally a couple times, but I don't know how
By default, you work on one district at a time. Clicking adds tiles to the current district until the current district is full, then clicking will create a new district. District size is determined per round, described at the top as eg. "draw 5 districts of 4 populated tiles".
You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new one.
I’m on mobile and that works for me sometimes but other times it just decides the district I’m working on is done and starts a new one. It’s not clear to me why or how to get that to not happen
Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Districts are connected regions that can contain at most 4 houses. If you click on a house that is too far away from your started district, it might not be possible to span the distance. In that case it creates a new region instead
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things
The entire concept of democracy is flawed. There should be proportional representation based on IQ and paid taxes.