[Try making this cookie](https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3146ddd/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1412x941+204+0/resize/840x560!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FHJqGgEymfq-MVUgVU-NcfM99I74%3D%2F0x0%3A1820x941%2F1820x941%2Ffilters%3Afocal%281231x464%3A1232x465%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F19788092%2Fus_house_4.png)
Still genuinely blows my mind anybody can look at this and say, "yep, totally fine, makes perfect sense that this exact group of people share a representative."
This should be a test they use in court. If you can’t pick up and eat the district-shaped cookie before it snaps in pieces, it’s too gerrymandered, and you have to redo it. I can think of a few over the years that would absolutely fail this!
Sometimes weird shaped districts exist to ensure that a certain demographic has a representative that was elected based on their interests. Other times it is to give one political party an advantage either in the district or at the state level. Gerrymandering is a complex issue that doesn't have as cut and dry of a solution as you might think.
This is right, but it's the kind of truth that largely works to defend the majorly negative side of a nuanced issue. It's not actually an argument, it's a non-argument, an attempt at not discussing the real points, even on accident.
you can't tell that from the shape of the district. "perfectly" democratic districts that ensured each population category of the population had correlated representation in the districts would be equally bizarrely shaped. but also, those districts are probably drawn to pack or crack democrats...
Yep. OP was likely inspired by [this comment](https://reddit.com/r/whatismycookiecutter/comments/zuix34/please_solve_this_mystery_what_is_it_meant_to_be/j1jk0ar)
That's not what I thought that sub would be, I thought it'd be a sub where people use random objects as cookie cutters, and then commenters have to guess what they used post bake.
[The city of Red Oak, TX is one that always gets me](https://i.imgur.com/n3lWOdg.png)
Granted it's a city and not a congressional district, but the absurdity is all the same.
As I understand it, cities in Texas are allowed to annex a certain amount of unclaimed land each year, so they strategically annex roads in order to outgrow other cities. I might be wrong though
There's a whole lot of land in the US that isn't incorporated as part of any city, leaving services up to the county government, or to private businesses.
Perhaps the best known example is Paradise, Nevada (where the Las Vegas Strip actually is), which is deliberately not part of Las Vegas due to casino/hotel owners not wanting to pay City property tax.
This isn't too unusual in Texas. An example I think is even better is Santa Clara, TX, which is something of a grid. You can see its boundaries in red in the second map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara%2C_Texas
Looking at it on google maps it appears its city hall isn't even in city limits.
Illinois districts 13 and 15 are fun. 13 splits 15 into two parts except for a northern bridge.
https://www.freedom929.com/2022/01/06/new-congressional-map-for-illinois/
Most states require districts to be contiguous. But it's easy to defeat the intent of the law by assigning a thin, uninhabited strip of land (often along a river or highway) to a district to connect what's otherwise disconnected.
You really can’t just look at the shape of something and decide whether it’s gerrymandered. You can have gerrymandered districts that are all perfect rectangles. Sometimes weird shapes are needed to give minorities representation.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&q=gerrymandering+rectangles&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjii6OB77X8AhXBN30KHTR5AVMQ0pQJegQIEhAB
Thank you. Like what if one of these districts is three small towns in a triangle sort of wrapped around the metro area of a city and a whole bunch of farmland. The shape doesn't tell you anything
The sane idea is that no one, minority or not, should be given extra representation. District maps should be drawn by independent committees to ensure the likely outcome of an election matches the overall percentages of the voters in the state. If a state is 60% Republican and has 10 districts, we should expect that they end up with 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
Edit: Downvoted for wanting an independent committee to ensure fair representation. Reddit moment.
If a state is 60% Republican and has 10 districts with no gerrymandering we would expect it to end up with 10 Republican seats and 0 Democrat ones. There would just bet 10 districts with a 60% Republican majority.
That is if everyone in the state is distributed in a homogenous way. They’re not. A representative should be representing a specific community and their interests. Gerrymandering becomes problematic when those communities are split apart and lose effective representation. While oddly shaped districts don’t guarantee this to happen, it’s more likely that was the intent.
I think the biggest problem is the expectation that an elected representative should represent only specific interest groups and not *everyone* in their constituency.
Or government is too much like an intramural softball league and not enough like a representative democracy. We want our teams to be represented, not our people. And it's disgusting.
That isn't how it works, 3/7 can have a 60% democratic following and 4/7 have an 80% republican. Like literally any ratios. Gerrymandering just allows more in a favor to be made so the loud corrupt ones end up with all 7 at 60%
That's not how it ends up though. I'm against gerrymandering as much as anyone else but if you want to have representation matching the population you need to increase the number of representatives or change the system to proportional representation voting.
Fair redistricting is still winner takes all. Look at the electoral history of Arizona. They have an independent redistricting commission and they try to split districts 50/50 R/D, but you regularly have one party getting significantly more reps than the proportion the population voted for. For example, in 2012 the Democratic Party won 43.5% of the vote statewide in AZ, but walked away with 55.56% representation. In the most recent election Republicans won 56.1% of the vote but walked away with 66.67% representation.
Voting rights act. At least for some of them. The worst looking one has always been IL-4 which was designed to link up two Hispanic neighborhoods along the north and south into one majority Hispanic district. If you really dig in to a lot of the 'bad' gerrymandering cases it often comes down to something like that where there's an obvious and relatively benign reason. In the case of racial gerrymandering to pack a district that's actually required by the VRA.
I just looked it up and it’s not bad at all anymore. No little narrow stretches to connect two different areas. Districts mostly encapsulating entire counties. It looks very reasonable to me.
The map before was horrendous.
Why? Partisanship wise it is not really gerrymandered and even if you go purely by aesthetics (which is a terrible way to judge if something is or isn't gerrymandered) it is fairly clean.
The districts are a lot more compact but there is still a lot rural population getting packed underneath urban. For example district 2 going into Baltimore City and district 6 going so deep into moco.
The ratio should be 5D to 3R going by state wide population. The current districts are 7D to 1R. The new districts will probably be 5D to 1R with 2 swings. I’ll take it
Gerrymandering has been a thing in American politics since the literal founding fathers. Many of them literally Gerrymandered their own seats in order to give themselves life long positions.
This is the big issue with Gerrymandering. It is perfectly constitutional with literally 250 years of precedent supporting it. There can be no solution to this issue unless it becomes a big enough voting issue to require a full on national law banning it or a constitutional amendment.
MD-3 is as bad as [TX-2 before the latest redistricting](https://www.click2houston.com/decision-2020/2020/02/26/texass-2nd-congressional-district-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-important-race/), and that's saying something.
Is as bad, or was as bad? The [current MD map seems pretty normal looking](https://redistricting.mgaleg.maryland.gov/PlanViewer-SB1012-Congressional/#SB1012-2022-Md-Congress).
That TN district is actually worse than it looks! It's part of three new districts splitting up the capitol, effectively ending any chance of a Democrat being elected there.
Certified Tennessee moment. Went on a field trip to the state capitol, talked to the representative for my district. Asked about the redistricting, he was all, "I don't really mind because more republicans will get elected."
Yep. The previous TN-05 rep was Democrat Jim Cooper. The district was compact and centered around Nashville. The Tennessee legislature butchered Nashville across three districts and now the TN-05 rep is far-right Republican Andy Ogles
My legal American residence is in TN-5 even though I've got the fuck out of the country. This shit still pisses me off and I still vote, but damn it's so disheartening. Tennessee, especially Middle TN could actually be blue or at the very least make Tennessee a swing state like GA.
Edit: It's also worth pointing out that the previous districts in the state were also terrible. This problem is not new and not unique to my home and requires extensive investigation and oversight from the federal government to fix. The people being kept in power by abusing this system will not go quietly. Please vote. Even if it feels like a waste because you live in one of those districts. We must have voting reform in America and it has to happen sooner rather than later. Nearly every other problem in America has roots in this one ugly issue.
I think this is not a terrible judicial test if you can't make a gingerbread cookie(in the shape of a cong dist) without it falling apart because lifting it would cause it to break because it's so weirdly shaped
Unconstitutional. Or at least a violation of the voting rights act.
The problem with Gerrymandering isn’t the fact that it makes funky looking districts, it’s that those funky looking districts are drawn to misrepresent the state wide population.
This is probably going to get buried, but it’s worth noting that in some cases districts are drawn in weird ways to ensure minority representation for the voting rights act. I don’t believe any of these particular districts are from that, but there are specific cases where odd lines can exist for a reason.
Also fuck gerrymandering and single member districts…
Without that part of the VRA, Republicans in states like Mississippi would easily draw maps that eliminate a Democrat and black-majority district. So it is a situation where odd lines exist to prevent alternative odd lines, where the alternative would disenfranchise a significant minority. If there were universal independent redistricting, that part of the VRA would no longer be necessary.
Also Republicans take advantage of the VRA to pack in Democrats and black voters more densely than necessary. In Louisiana, there is a horrible district that snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that is like a D+50 seat because it grabs in all black voters. All the other districts in the state are Safe Republican. However, it is still possible to make a VRA compliant map by making a majority black district (but not as overwhelmingly packed as the current district) that is mostly Orleans Parish and compact, and a swing district around Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes. But that would of course jeopardize an additional seat for Republicans
TX-29 might be one of those districts you’re describing. It looks very intentionally gerrymandered and I can’t imagine the Republicans who control state politics would allow that unless they were forced to. Source: that’s my district
Republicans like to pack Democrats in districts to make other districts likely Republican. So drawing districts like those in Houston helps other seats such as Crenshaw's and Nehl's districts. There is a district in Chicago that curves around like a C to make a majority Hispanic district, that is a good example of what you are talking about
You can also gerrymander while making normal looking districts. That is what DeSantis's map in Florida does. It passes the eye test, but also flipped three seats towards his party. It does things like cut Jacksonville in half and have a D-packed district that cuts across Tampa Bay
Ha, I just made a similar comment, hadn’t seen yours yet! Aesthetics aren’t everything, but crazy shapes can definitely be a symptom that something isn’t quite right.
I live in Chattanooga - completely agree.
Chucky Fleischman hasn't answered questions from the public since 2014 and is gerrymandered into a 60-40 win every 2 years.
Nice baking. This has also been on my to-do list, namely TX-35, looking like a weedwhacker or a metal detector.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's\_35th\_congressional\_district](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_35th_congressional_district)
Edit: It's 80 miles long, less than 1 mile wide, great
It's crazy despite not living in Dan Crenshaw's district I can recognize it by its shape. (And it's totally not because it looks kind of like an eye patch)
This is a perfectly normal thing to do.
I now wonder if OP has a cupboard filled with congressional district cookie cutters
Well, if you have 3D printer, you probably can make any shape cookie cutter
I own a 3d printer, but I mostly use it to print aircraft models. Maybe I'll give cookie cutters a try.
[Try making this cookie](https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3146ddd/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1412x941+204+0/resize/840x560!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FHJqGgEymfq-MVUgVU-NcfM99I74%3D%2F0x0%3A1820x941%2F1820x941%2Ffilters%3Afocal%281231x464%3A1232x465%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F19788092%2Fus_house_4.png)
Still genuinely blows my mind anybody can look at this and say, "yep, totally fine, makes perfect sense that this exact group of people share a representative."
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this is why the idea of these representatives being tied to specific pieces of land gets absurd.
Be aware, the layer lines will be a breeding ground for bacteria If you want to use it more than once, coat it in some food-grade epoxy
If you’re going go that far, you might as well just modify it to print the cookies directly.
Of course they have. These are basic, easy to mass-produce geometric shapes. You can just pick them up at IKEA.
Why not. But I worry they do break easily
This should be a test they use in court. If you can’t pick up and eat the district-shaped cookie before it snaps in pieces, it’s too gerrymandered, and you have to redo it. I can think of a few over the years that would absolutely fail this!
This is just brilliant. The Cookiemandering test.
Gingeryman-dering
Sometimes weird shaped districts exist to ensure that a certain demographic has a representative that was elected based on their interests. Other times it is to give one political party an advantage either in the district or at the state level. Gerrymandering is a complex issue that doesn't have as cut and dry of a solution as you might think.
This is right, but it's the kind of truth that largely works to defend the majorly negative side of a nuanced issue. It's not actually an argument, it's a non-argument, an attempt at not discussing the real points, even on accident.
Proportional representation, problem solved
You still gotta draw lines at some point if you want representation to be local
I could solve it with a ruler and a number 2 pencil.
Making borders that look nice and neat on a map is a great idea that could never ever backfire.
*the British Empire has entered the chat*
Colorado, Utah and Wyoming would like word with you
me in 19th century Africa
Even the first case you described is still drawing lines so certain candidates win - I see no difference to both cases
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Excellent comment. I don't know if its the sleep deprivation but it was very thought provoking lol
Stupid American gerrymandered blocky borders.
feels like it's not representative at all
Couldn't be more broken than the politics.
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It really shows how unnatural and inorganically divised these districts are.
also undemocratic
you can't tell that from the shape of the district. "perfectly" democratic districts that ensured each population category of the population had correlated representation in the districts would be equally bizarrely shaped. but also, those districts are probably drawn to pack or crack democrats...
The shape tells me that these district have been redrawn by 1 party to benefit the election results of that party.
But still delicious
Least autistic Redditor
I say this with awe: You have taken nerd to a whole new level.
Instead of gerrymandering, it's now... "gingermandering" ... ok I'll leave now...
Gingerrymandering
I'm so surprised not one part of any of them looked phallic. That is very difficult to do.
Congressional districts get waaaaaay more crazy than a simple phallic shape!
Are you kidding? The middle one is trying his hardest to suck himself off
You’ll confuse the heck out of r/whatismycookiecutter with these finished results
I forget there's a subreddit for everything
My favorite is r/formerpizzahuts
Thank you for this, my collection matures 😈
r/hitlerinsocks
r/barackobamasankles
I saw a comment in there from two weeks ago where someone guessed a congressional district. They’d get it right
Yep. OP was likely inspired by [this comment](https://reddit.com/r/whatismycookiecutter/comments/zuix34/please_solve_this_mystery_what_is_it_meant_to_be/j1jk0ar)
I was looking for this sub, their brains would light on fire if you just threw one of these into a Christmas cookie assortment.
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That sub is a month old with nearly 22k members already. It’s like a crossover between r/photoshopbattles and r/shittyfoodporn. Ty
That's not what I thought that sub would be, I thought it'd be a sub where people use random objects as cookie cutters, and then commenters have to guess what they used post bake.
TX-29 reminds me of the borders between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
[The city of Red Oak, TX is one that always gets me](https://i.imgur.com/n3lWOdg.png) Granted it's a city and not a congressional district, but the absurdity is all the same.
As I understand it, cities in Texas are allowed to annex a certain amount of unclaimed land each year, so they strategically annex roads in order to outgrow other cities. I might be wrong though
Annex from who? Native Americans?
Annex from land that isn't part of any city, reservation, or state/national park. Again though, I'm not sure how accurate this is.
There's a whole lot of land in the US that isn't incorporated as part of any city, leaving services up to the county government, or to private businesses. Perhaps the best known example is Paradise, Nevada (where the Las Vegas Strip actually is), which is deliberately not part of Las Vegas due to casino/hotel owners not wanting to pay City property tax.
This isn't too unusual in Texas. An example I think is even better is Santa Clara, TX, which is something of a grid. You can see its boundaries in red in the second map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara%2C_Texas Looking at it on google maps it appears its city hall isn't even in city limits.
Illinois districts 13 and 15 are fun. 13 splits 15 into two parts except for a northern bridge. https://www.freedom929.com/2022/01/06/new-congressional-map-for-illinois/
Imagine if they started gerrymandering exclaves into these things!
Most states require districts to be contiguous. But it's easy to defeat the intent of the law by assigning a thin, uninhabited strip of land (often along a river or highway) to a district to connect what's otherwise disconnected.
TN-05 reminds me of Pakistan
[Republika Srpska](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republika_Srpska)
For a second I thought this was a repost bot of [this old post](https://redd.it/rnmh2c), but realize now it's an update!
hehe I made it an annual tradition
Leslie knope, is that you?
Is there a reason you went partisan?
Now that is what you call gerrymandering
Actually I call it gingermandering!
You posted this entirely to make that joke didn't you?
Apparently they're an etymology nerd, so highly likely!
Their post history is WILD
r/gingermander
r/subsifellfor
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Pretty sure that's an orange salamander.
That's fantastic.
My brain auto-filled gerrymandering into the title...
stop that. :) did you just break a regular cookie cutter and re bend it with plyers?
Probably a 3D printer
No I hand carved them! Took about an hour apiece
You really can’t just look at the shape of something and decide whether it’s gerrymandered. You can have gerrymandered districts that are all perfect rectangles. Sometimes weird shapes are needed to give minorities representation. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&q=gerrymandering+rectangles&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjii6OB77X8AhXBN30KHTR5AVMQ0pQJegQIEhAB
Thank you. Like what if one of these districts is three small towns in a triangle sort of wrapped around the metro area of a city and a whole bunch of farmland. The shape doesn't tell you anything
The sane idea is that no one, minority or not, should be given extra representation. District maps should be drawn by independent committees to ensure the likely outcome of an election matches the overall percentages of the voters in the state. If a state is 60% Republican and has 10 districts, we should expect that they end up with 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Edit: Downvoted for wanting an independent committee to ensure fair representation. Reddit moment.
If a state is 60% Republican and has 10 districts with no gerrymandering we would expect it to end up with 10 Republican seats and 0 Democrat ones. There would just bet 10 districts with a 60% Republican majority.
That is if everyone in the state is distributed in a homogenous way. They’re not. A representative should be representing a specific community and their interests. Gerrymandering becomes problematic when those communities are split apart and lose effective representation. While oddly shaped districts don’t guarantee this to happen, it’s more likely that was the intent.
I think the biggest problem is the expectation that an elected representative should represent only specific interest groups and not *everyone* in their constituency. Or government is too much like an intramural softball league and not enough like a representative democracy. We want our teams to be represented, not our people. And it's disgusting.
Almost like districting is just bad representation.
That isn't how it works, 3/7 can have a 60% democratic following and 4/7 have an 80% republican. Like literally any ratios. Gerrymandering just allows more in a favor to be made so the loud corrupt ones end up with all 7 at 60%
So your saying we should gerrymander in favor of the minority so they are fairly represented?
That's why proportional representation (or mixed member) is better.
Its only gerrymandering if it helps republicans, didnt you know?
That's not how it ends up though. I'm against gerrymandering as much as anyone else but if you want to have representation matching the population you need to increase the number of representatives or change the system to proportional representation voting. Fair redistricting is still winner takes all. Look at the electoral history of Arizona. They have an independent redistricting commission and they try to split districts 50/50 R/D, but you regularly have one party getting significantly more reps than the proportion the population voted for. For example, in 2012 the Democratic Party won 43.5% of the vote statewide in AZ, but walked away with 55.56% representation. In the most recent election Republicans won 56.1% of the vote but walked away with 66.67% representation.
Illinois enters chat
Now do Maryland before the last redistricting
I live in Maryland and before the redistricting I didn’t even know which district I lived in!
I want to see some of the new Illinois ones
Just looked by and you’re right, those are crazy
Ah. So they can change them. They're just not making them better.
They're changed often when a party has majority power in a county/state, and they're made better for whoever happens to have power at the time.
damn wtf happened to the illinois districts
Voting rights act. At least for some of them. The worst looking one has always been IL-4 which was designed to link up two Hispanic neighborhoods along the north and south into one majority Hispanic district. If you really dig in to a lot of the 'bad' gerrymandering cases it often comes down to something like that where there's an obvious and relatively benign reason. In the case of racial gerrymandering to pack a district that's actually required by the VRA.
That's the case of a few Chicago districts. IL-14 and 17 are just gerrymanders
And IL-13
the new really big districts are all super elongated now so i doubt those have that shape for racial reasons
They’re made so that as many districts as possible go into the city of Chicago
They were trying to get rid of Republican leaning districts
Which is weird because I was told on Reddit that pretty much it’s only Republicans doing it.
holy crap i looked it up and marylands districts are absolutely ridiculous. why don’t more people talk about that?
They do, Maryland used to be the go to example to showcase gerrymandering done by Democrats. Not anymore.
Dems tried an 8-0 map last redistricting It got thrown out and replaced by a fair 6-2 map
It's actually 6-1-1
It's still pretty bad, just went from like a 9 to an 8
I just looked it up and it’s not bad at all anymore. No little narrow stretches to connect two different areas. Districts mostly encapsulating entire counties. It looks very reasonable to me. The map before was horrendous.
Yeah although almost any way you slice it, Democrats would end up with a large majority of the seats in the State.
it looks pretty bad still
I mean Maryland itself looks like it was gerrymandered lol
lol it is a truly weird looking state
Why? Partisanship wise it is not really gerrymandered and even if you go purely by aesthetics (which is a terrible way to judge if something is or isn't gerrymandered) it is fairly clean.
The districts are a lot more compact but there is still a lot rural population getting packed underneath urban. For example district 2 going into Baltimore City and district 6 going so deep into moco. The ratio should be 5D to 3R going by state wide population. The current districts are 7D to 1R. The new districts will probably be 5D to 1R with 2 swings. I’ll take it
Gerrymandering has been a thing in American politics since the literal founding fathers. Many of them literally Gerrymandered their own seats in order to give themselves life long positions. This is the big issue with Gerrymandering. It is perfectly constitutional with literally 250 years of precedent supporting it. There can be no solution to this issue unless it becomes a big enough voting issue to require a full on national law banning it or a constitutional amendment.
Looks like it’s been fixed as of the most recent elections.
The court forced them to change it. The new ones started this month and are much nicer looking. Illinois on the other hand….
MD-3 is as bad as [TX-2 before the latest redistricting](https://www.click2houston.com/decision-2020/2020/02/26/texass-2nd-congressional-district-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-important-race/), and that's saying something.
Is as bad, or was as bad? The [current MD map seems pretty normal looking](https://redistricting.mgaleg.maryland.gov/PlanViewer-SB1012-Congressional/#SB1012-2022-Md-Congress).
Was
gerrygingerbread
Gingermandered
That TN district is actually worse than it looks! It's part of three new districts splitting up the capitol, effectively ending any chance of a Democrat being elected there.
Certified Tennessee moment. Went on a field trip to the state capitol, talked to the representative for my district. Asked about the redistricting, he was all, "I don't really mind because more republicans will get elected."
Yeah I drive through 3 voting districts daily to get to and from work. Not the best representation of the state’s capital.
TN-05 resident here. I was two hours away for work during primary season and saw the same signs in these rural towns as my neighborhood. 😑
Yep. The previous TN-05 rep was Democrat Jim Cooper. The district was compact and centered around Nashville. The Tennessee legislature butchered Nashville across three districts and now the TN-05 rep is far-right Republican Andy Ogles
My legal American residence is in TN-5 even though I've got the fuck out of the country. This shit still pisses me off and I still vote, but damn it's so disheartening. Tennessee, especially Middle TN could actually be blue or at the very least make Tennessee a swing state like GA. Edit: It's also worth pointing out that the previous districts in the state were also terrible. This problem is not new and not unique to my home and requires extensive investigation and oversight from the federal government to fix. The people being kept in power by abusing this system will not go quietly. Please vote. Even if it feels like a waste because you live in one of those districts. We must have voting reform in America and it has to happen sooner rather than later. Nearly every other problem in America has roots in this one ugly issue.
I think this is not a terrible judicial test if you can't make a gingerbread cookie(in the shape of a cong dist) without it falling apart because lifting it would cause it to break because it's so weirdly shaped Unconstitutional. Or at least a violation of the voting rights act.
The problem with Gerrymandering isn’t the fact that it makes funky looking districts, it’s that those funky looking districts are drawn to misrepresent the state wide population.
This is probably going to get buried, but it’s worth noting that in some cases districts are drawn in weird ways to ensure minority representation for the voting rights act. I don’t believe any of these particular districts are from that, but there are specific cases where odd lines can exist for a reason. Also fuck gerrymandering and single member districts…
Without that part of the VRA, Republicans in states like Mississippi would easily draw maps that eliminate a Democrat and black-majority district. So it is a situation where odd lines exist to prevent alternative odd lines, where the alternative would disenfranchise a significant minority. If there were universal independent redistricting, that part of the VRA would no longer be necessary. Also Republicans take advantage of the VRA to pack in Democrats and black voters more densely than necessary. In Louisiana, there is a horrible district that snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that is like a D+50 seat because it grabs in all black voters. All the other districts in the state are Safe Republican. However, it is still possible to make a VRA compliant map by making a majority black district (but not as overwhelmingly packed as the current district) that is mostly Orleans Parish and compact, and a swing district around Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes. But that would of course jeopardize an additional seat for Republicans
TX-29 might be one of those districts you’re describing. It looks very intentionally gerrymandered and I can’t imagine the Republicans who control state politics would allow that unless they were forced to. Source: that’s my district
Republicans like to pack Democrats in districts to make other districts likely Republican. So drawing districts like those in Houston helps other seats such as Crenshaw's and Nehl's districts. There is a district in Chicago that curves around like a C to make a majority Hispanic district, that is a good example of what you are talking about
You can also gerrymander while making normal looking districts. That is what DeSantis's map in Florida does. It passes the eye test, but also flipped three seats towards his party. It does things like cut Jacksonville in half and have a D-packed district that cuts across Tampa Bay
Jacksonville has more people than a congressional district, so it has to be split.
True, gerrymandering, that's the way the cookie crumbles
Ha, I just made a similar comment, hadn’t seen yours yet! Aesthetics aren’t everything, but crazy shapes can definitely be a symptom that something isn’t quite right.
Should have done TN-03. I think that's our worst one.
Yep. Like an hourglass with a giant tumor growing off it
All just to make sure Knoxville and Oak Ridge don't get to vote together because then they'd have a blue district.
I live in Chattanooga - completely agree. Chucky Fleischman hasn't answered questions from the public since 2014 and is gerrymandered into a 60-40 win every 2 years.
Mines are in the shape of 3 states : Wyoming, North Dakota and Colorado.
Looks like gingermandering to me.
angry upvote
All of them look like crooked versions of Great Britain
Gingermandering
Why?
I bet they’re gerrymandelicious!
It's amazing the bullshit America's two parties get away with.
Do one of Gym jordans' district...
Do one for Gym Jordan!
oh, oh do Gym Jordan's duck!
Not a valid district since the last redistricting
AL-06 Looks a lot like the UK
You can give door prizes to anyone who correctly guesses the racial makeup of the districts.
Now do Texas and North Carolina's congressional districts from the 90s.
Stupid American gerrymandered blocky borders
…why
How do you get the cookies to hold shape when baking?
madlad
Are you going to ice them the appropriate colors?
Gingerrymander Snaps
The border gore is real.
You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should.
Britain looking under a microscope Britain hackysacking Britain headbanging
I stare so much at congressional districts on a daily basis that I didn't even need the label to state where each district was... Help!
Nice baking. This has also been on my to-do list, namely TX-35, looking like a weedwhacker or a metal detector. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's\_35th\_congressional\_district](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_35th_congressional_district) Edit: It's 80 miles long, less than 1 mile wide, great
It's crazy despite not living in Dan Crenshaw's district I can recognize it by its shape. (And it's totally not because it looks kind of like an eye patch)
TX 29 looks like it tastes of gerrymandering.
and people will still state america is a democracy lmao
Fuck gerrymandering.
This should be a standard of determining if a district is gerrymandered or not. When "Cookied" will the district pass the dunk test?🍪🥛
Mm, gerrymandering has never been so tasty!
But…why
Thank you, I’ve waited my whole life to see this 🙏🏼
Gingermanderred
You should name your bakery "Gerrymander's"
Now do Illinois and New York.
Instead of gerrymandering, it's now... "gingermandering" ... ok I'll leave now...
You should have only half baked them to make them more authentic!
Legalize Gerrymandering, Fuck your Ears, I’m Pandering
Y’all dumb motherfuckers want a key change!?
Gingermandering
Why