- Gerrymandering is a major structural problem in American democracy
- Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing voting districts to create unfair advantages for a particular party
- Republicans have used gerrymandering to gain an edge in the House of Representatives
- Gerrymandering is a precise science that allows districts to be drawn with scientific precision
- Politicians engage in gerrymandering for various reasons, including disadvantaging voters based on race or political party
- Lines are redrawn every 10 years after the census, but in most states, politicians control the redistricting process
- Techniques like packing and cracking are used to dilute the impact of opposition voters
- Racial gerrymandering is illegal, but partisan gerrymandering is generally allowed
- Republicans have been particularly brazen in their gerrymandering efforts, openly admitting to drawing maps to gain partisan advantage
- Republicans' Red Map project poured millions of dollars into state-level races to gain control of redistricting and ensure their advantage in elections
- Gerrymandering has led to a blatant disregard for what voters want, with Republicans winning a majority of seats despite receiving fewer votes overall.

- Democrats received 1.1 million more votes nationwide, but Republicans gained 33 more seats in the House due to gerrymandering.
- Both Democrats and Republicans have engaged in gerrymandering in states like Maryland and Illinois.
- Odd-shaped districts are not always bad, as they can represent diverse communities.
- Democrats tend to live in cities, which makes it harder for them to have a winning coalition.
- The Supreme Court may issue a ruling on partisan gerrymandering, but many experts argue for independent commissions to handle redistricting.
- The current system allows lawmakers to dilute votes and pick their own voters, which goes against the principle of equal representation.
- The foundations of democracy are based on the idea that everyone's vote should count equally, regardless of their choices or affiliations.

Lawmakers often reshape voting districts to shift the balance of political power. That's unfair to voters, even those of us with questionable judgment.

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Undeniably, the best Greek export that doesn't have fruit at the bottom.

Now, there is understandable concern at the moment about the personalities harming our democracy, but tonight, Let's talk about 1 of the major structural problems, and it's something that Democrats in particular love to complain about.

We have seen Republicans rig the system with their gerrymandering, often illegal gerrymandering.

There is gerrymandering to a fair thee well in states controlled by the Republicans.

Listen, political gerrymandering is probably 1 of the greatest threats to our democracy right now.

The greatest threat to our democracy right now is clearly whatever tweet the president has planned for Cinco de Mayo this year.

We don't know which Spanish words will be misspelled, but we can assume it will be horrifying.

It's the practice of drawing voting districts in a way that creates unfair advantages for whoever happens to be drawing the lines.

Which does sound mundane, but the results can be significant.

Gerrymandering is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives.

Because take a look at what happened in some states where they drew the district lines.

In Pennsylvania, 44% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in 2014.

But 13 of the 18 districts, more than two-thirds, are represented by Republicans.

In Ohio, about 40% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives, but 12 out of 16 seats, three-quarters of them, are represented by Republicans.

Those numbers are way out of proportion to what people should expect.

You wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice cream that was 75 percent strawberry.

So whoever draws the districts has a lot of power, and thanks to technological advances, it's possible to use that power in very precise ways.

In the age of computers, you can gerrymander with scientific precision.

You can run in and out of alleys and up and down streets and carefully include and exclude whichever voters you want in 1 district and not in another.

Gerrymandering has become a very precise science.

And interestingly, it's 1 of the few remaining types of science in which the Republican Party currently believes.

Now, there are different reasons politicians engage in gerrymandering.

It's done to disadvantage voters based on race, or on political party, or to shore up seats for incumbents, sometimes even within a party.

In 2000, he ran a strong challenge in a Democratic primary for the New York State Assembly, and he planned to run again in 2002.

But the Democrats had done something interesting to the map.

The map that was drawn was absolutely fascinating.

They drew a map that literally carved out the block on which Hakeem Jeffries lived from Assembly District 57.

There were a lot of people hoping to vote for me, but were surprised to find that they no longer lived in the Assembly District that they had been living in for years, if not decades.

Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough, but that move was gangster.

And remember, the threshold for gangster in Brooklyn is the notorious B.I.G., whose debut album begins with songs that are respectively about armed robbery, gun violence, armed robbery and gun violence, and being prepared to die by gun violence while committing armed robbery.

Even the term gerrymandering goes back centuries.

It gets its name from a 19th century politician named Eldridge Gerrick.

As governor of Massachusetts, he helped shape a congressional district so blatantly one-sided that 1 critic said it looked like a salamander.

-...back when your entertainment options were sunsets, Washington Irving novels, and getting kicked by a horse.

And quick side note, you are not wrong to notice that the Jerry in gerrymander refers to a guy whose name was actually pronounced Gary because literally everything about gerrymandering is stupid and wrong.

And look, there is nothing inherently wrong with redrawing a voting district.

They need to have around the same number of people in them, and populations shift over time as people move or die, or emigrate to America because their stand-up careers have endured what might be best characterized as a pogrom of indifference.

-...every 10 years, we have a census, after which lines are redrawn for both the U.S.

The problem is, in most states, the lines are drawn by politicians.

In fact, In 37 states, the drawing of state legislative districts is primarily controlled by the legislators themselves.

And they have a pretty clear vested interest there.

And if you think that seems crazy, you're not alone.

Every fall, I speak to 5 or 6 members of the British Parliament that come over to shadow members of Congress.

And 1 of the things I have to explain to them is, here's how you get elected to the House.

I-I have, you know, I see these shocked looks on these British faces, and 1 time, 1 stood up and said, well, That's terrible.

That's not the voters choosing their representatives, that's the representatives choosing their voters.

And second, second, even I find it difficult hearing advice on map drawing in a British accent that once said, I don't see why 1 scrap of dust is any different from another, so I ended the border here because that's where my pen ran out of ink.

But it is true that if your party holds the redistricting pen, it wields substantial power.

And there are multiple techniques at its disposal.

There are a couple of ways that you can reapportion people and put them into districts.

And there's a thing called packing, and there's a thing called cracking.

Not to be confused with the teen drug trend of cracking and packing, which is when the teens hollow out a cucumber, fill it with crack, and put it in their anus to absorb it faster.

I saw it on the local news, which means it's real, and every teenager is doing it right now.

-...but in this context, packing means cramming as many opposition voters as possible into just a few districts, and cracking means spreading them out thinly over a bunch of districts so they can't gain a majority in any 1 of them.

Try and think of it as table assignments at a wedding.

You can either break up your 8 awful relatives and spread them out over different tables, Or you can pack them all together in 1 insufferable table of the damned.

-♪ ♪ -♪ The Washington Post showed how this can work.

And it needs to be carved up into 5 districts.

Now, proportionally, you would want 3 blue and 2 red districts.

But if you draw the lines like this, you can get 3 red majorities and 2 blues.

And if you draw it like this, you can get 5 blue majorities and no red.

And if you draw lines like this, it looks like a dick, which is irrelevant to this discussion, but it is objectively very funny.

And if you are thinking, shouldn't all of this be illegal?

Well, that's complicated, because If you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged minorities, yes, that is illegal under the Voting Rights Act.

But if you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged voters of an opposing party, that has generally been allowed.

Partisan gerrymandering, that's kind of okay.

And it's led politicians to be pretty brazen in their behavior, like in North Carolina last year.

Their congressional map was thrown out in federal courts for racial gerrymandering, which is wrong, so they had to redraw.

And while doing it, state rep David Lewis went out of his way to explain that the new map would not illegally fuck over minorities, it would just legally fuck over Democrats.

We, to the extent, are going to use political data in drawing this map, it is to gain partisan advantage on the map.

I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood.

I need you to understand, this is not a race thing because it can't be.

We just want a map that churns out Republicans like it's Anne Romney.

In 2016, despite Republicans winning just over half the votes in House races, they wound up controlling 77% of the state's seats.

That is a more blatant disregard for what people want than the asshole who gives out Bazooka Joe on Halloween.

Oh, great, gun from the Roosevelt administration wrapped in a comic from the other Roosevelt administration.

At least the guy handing out Snickers stuffed with razor blades actually gives you a Snickers.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And Republicans elevated this technique to an art form with a plan called Red Map, or the Redistricting Majority Project.

They poured more than 30 million dollars into state-level races ahead of the last redistricting, gaining huge numbers of seats, and that paid massive dividends.

When Republicans won the majority of state houses in 2010, it ensured they'd be redrawing the maps in those states.

Nationwide, Democrats running for Congress got 1.1 million more votes.

But Republicans sent 33 more members to the House.

So the maps they drew put Democrats at a significant disadvantage.

It's like if, instead of Tim Duncan, the San Antonio Spurs had had to use Tim Burton.

It's not technically impossible to win, but it's going to be much, much harder.

And look, to some extent, Republicans got lucky because 2010 was a wave election for their party.

And I'm not saying Democrats are angels here.

When they have had control, they have gerrymandered the shit out of districts in states like Maryland.

In 2001, the Democrats won the right to redistrict there after, and this is for reasons too complicated and too stupid to explain.

A name was pulled out of a replica of Abraham Lincoln's stuff by Pat.

But just watch as 1 Democratic lawmaker made the least convincing promise ever.

Well, we'll sit down and draw a very fair map.

That's an inherently suspicious look on his face.

That's the exact expression of someone who just urinated in a public pool.

So, how do you know if your district has been drawn with nefarious intent?

Well, that's tricky, because too often, people will just lazily point to districts that have a weird shape.

North Carolina's 12th district looks like spilled coffee.

Pennsylvania's 16th is flexing its muscles.

And 1 commentator compared Maryland's third to a broken-winged pterodactyl.

Not to be confused with THE earmuff district, which is a one-block area of Manhattan where sketchy men sell accessories made from the fur of endangered species.

But while it is tempting to see something suspicious in an odd-shaped district, there is a pretty good argument against prioritizing tidy lines above all else.

It seems like if you could just draw a grid, like a Tron, that you could put people into districts and there wouldn't be any sort of manipulation in the process.

But Americans don't live, with the exception of Montana and, you know, a few other square places.

Our communities are irregular and random.

They're free-form, free-flowing, and they contain a troubling amount of opioids.

And there is no 1 right way to draw a district.

Some might prioritize a district being politically competitive.

Others want to keep so-called communities of interest together.

The problem is, it may be physically impossible to do all 3 of those things in 1 place.

The thin line connecting the 2 halves is just a single road, and people love to make fun of that.

In Chicago, squeezed between 2 freeways, this narrow strip is needed to connect 2 halves of a gerrymandered district to keep it contiguous as is required.

The contiguous rule, because there's obviously nobody living here.

I mean, unless they're homeless people, I guess.

Now, you may laugh, but a few seconds later, an entire ghost baseball team from the early 1900s walked out of the tall grass and beat him to death with their ghost bats.

It is drawn like earmuffs for good reasons.

Because the northern and southern parts are 2 Latino communities, and the district in the middle is predominantly African-American.

Now, both are Democratic, so it's not about partisan advantage, it's about ensuring that both communities have representatives serving their interests.

And it's criticized a lot, but redistricting experts absolutely love it.

In fact, 2 of them actually put it on their wedding cake.

And I'm guessing that the bachelorette party cake was something like, 1 more night of packing and cracking.

--CROWD LAUGHS, APPLAUDS, CHEERS --So, so to break it down, not all weird-shaped districts are bad, and not all normal-shaped districts are good.

Gerrymandering is not the sole reason for the mismatch between our popular vote percentages and our representation.

Some of that is due to where Democrats choose to live.

Democrats live in the wrong places, basically.

They've decided to cram themselves in cities, and that just makes it really hard to have a winning coalition when your people do that.

If you're college educated, if you want to work in the creative economy, you move to a city, and those places have enough Democrats already.

Democrats need to make places like Des Moines, or Columbus, or Raleigh, North Carolina, cool, so that those young people move there, but that's kind of outside the typical realm of political strategy.

They've already got the Des Moines Heritage Carousel, the most badass, balls-to-the-wall carousel in the whole Midwest.

And yes, according to their website, it is closed for the season of spring, which is Not a good time for carousels, but when May 28th rolls around, it's gonna be an all-out carousel fuckstravaganza...

Democrats are basically packing themselves into districts, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

But there is a broader, non-partisan point here, and that is that in a democracy, the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does.

Now, there is actually a Supreme Court case coming up involving a redistricting in Wisconsin that was so partisan, a lower court struck their maps down, and the Supreme Court may, for the first time, actually issue a clear ruling putting limits on partisan gerrymandering.

So, all of our hopes are now in the delicious claws of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

But even without a ruling, many experts argue we should simply be taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians and give the task to independent commissions.

In fact, a handful of states already do some version of that.

It is tough to completely remove partisan biases, a fact that 1 state lawmaker brought up to shoot the idea down.

If I felt there were any way in the world that I could stand before my constituents and say, I believe that it's possible to come up with a group of people who have no political bias whatsoever, who will simply sit down in a room and magically create districts, I'd be behind it.

Now, if you recognize that guy, it's because you saw him about 10 minutes ago reassuring everyone that his intent in Droid Districts was to gain partisan advantage for Republicans.

So, he's essentially arguing, Nobody's unbiased, so let's use me, the most brazenly biased man in the universe.

Which is pretty much arguing no babysitter is perfect, so let's just use Slender Man.

But while independent commissions might not be perfect, they would definitely be better.

And the truth is, it is hard to come up with a worse system than the 1 most states currently have.

And there is something very important at stake here.

Lawmakers should not be allowed to dilute our votes by drawing their own lines and essentially picking their own voters.

The foundations of democracy are built on the idea that everybody's vote should count equally.

That everyone, every 1 of us, should get an equal chance to make a bad decision which fucks things up for everybody else.

Whoever we are, however poor our decisions, whether you are a juggalo...

...Or someone who bought that stupid $6,000 jacket I wore on the show last week.

Our voices should be fully heard, even if we're Scientologists, or parrot heads, or guys who ride unicycles as their primary mode of transportation.

In this 1 context, we should all be relevant, regardless of our questionable life choices.

Whether you're an EDM bro, or a guy jamming a knife into a toaster, or a Washington Redskins fan, or even a Jill Stein supporter.

The point is, her voice should count as much as anyone else's.

As much as a guy in a fedora, or a baker of erotic pastries, or a SantaCon attendee, or everyone's racist grandma.

Because at the end of the day, that is the point of this country.

Because think about it, election results should not be the fault of lawmakers' crazy lines.

They should be the result of our own crazy decisions.


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Democracy. Undeniably, the best Greek export that doesn't have fruit at the bottom. Now, there is understandable concern at the moment about the personalities harming our democracy, but tonight, Let's talk about 1 of the major structural problems, and it's something that Democrats in particular love to complain about.

Speaker 1: We have seen Republicans rig the system with their gerrymandering, often illegal gerrymandering.

Speaker 2: There is gerrymandering to a fair thee well in states controlled by the Republicans.

Speaker 3: Listen, political gerrymandering is probably 1 of the greatest threats to our democracy right now.

Speaker 0: Well, slow down, that is a bit much. The greatest threat to our democracy right now is clearly whatever tweet the president has planned for Cinco de Mayo this year. We don't know yet what it'll be. We don't know which Spanish words will be misspelled, but we can assume it will be horrifying. But gerrymandering is a real problem.

It's the practice of drawing voting districts in a way that creates unfair advantages for whoever happens to be drawing the lines. Which does sound mundane, but the results can be significant. Gerrymandering is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives. Because take a look at what happened in some states where they drew the district lines.

Speaker 4: In Pennsylvania, 44% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in 2014. But 13 of the 18 districts, more than two-thirds, are represented by Republicans. In Ohio, about 40% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives, but 12 out of 16 seats, three-quarters of them, are represented by Republicans.

Speaker 0: Those numbers are way out of proportion to what people should expect. You wouldn't accept Neapolitan ice cream that was 75 percent strawberry. How is that okay? What perverts voted for this? So whoever draws the districts has a lot of power, and thanks to technological advances, it's possible to use that power in very precise ways.

Speaker 5: In the age of computers, you can gerrymander with scientific precision. You can run in and out of alleys and up and down streets and carefully include and exclude whichever voters you want in 1 district and not in another. So it's become a very precise science.

Speaker 0: He's right about that. Gerrymandering has become a very precise science. And interestingly, it's 1 of the few remaining types of science in which the Republican Party currently believes. Now, there are different reasons politicians engage in gerrymandering. It's done to disadvantage voters based on race, or on political party, or to shore up seats for incumbents, sometimes even within a party.

Take Hakeem Jeffries. In 2000, he ran a strong challenge in a Democratic primary for the New York State Assembly, and he planned to run again in 2002. But the Democrats had done something interesting to the map.

Speaker 1: The map that was drawn was absolutely fascinating. They drew a map that literally carved out the block on which Hakeem Jeffries lived from Assembly District 57.

Speaker 6: I remember shaking my head in disbelief. There were a lot of people hoping to vote for me, but were surprised to find that they no longer lived in the Assembly District that they had been living in for years, if not decades. Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough, but that move was gangster.

Speaker 0: Yeah. It was gangster. And remember, the threshold for gangster in Brooklyn is the notorious B.I.G., whose debut album begins with songs that are respectively about armed robbery, gun violence, armed robbery and gun violence, and being prepared to die by gun violence while committing armed robbery. And this is by no means a new problem. Even the term gerrymandering goes back centuries.

Speaker 4: It gets its name from a 19th century politician named Eldridge Gerrick. As governor of Massachusetts, he helped shape a congressional district so blatantly one-sided that 1 critic said it looked like a salamander. No, another replied, a gerrymander.

Speaker 0: Now, that counted as a joke in 1810... -...back when your entertainment options were sunsets, Washington Irving novels, and getting kicked by a horse. And quick side note, you are not wrong to notice that the Jerry in gerrymander refers to a guy whose name was actually pronounced Gary because literally everything about gerrymandering is stupid and wrong. And look, there is nothing inherently wrong with redrawing a voting district. It's actually necessary.

They need to have around the same number of people in them, and populations shift over time as people move or die, or emigrate to America because their stand-up careers have endured what might be best characterized as a pogrom of indifference. -...and that is why... -...every 10 years, we have a census, after which lines are redrawn for both the U.S. House and state legislatures. The problem is, in most states, the lines are drawn by politicians.

In fact, In 37 states, the drawing of state legislative districts is primarily controlled by the legislators themselves. And they have a pretty clear vested interest there. And if you think that seems crazy, you're not alone.

Speaker 7: Every fall, I speak to 5 or 6 members of the British Parliament that come over to shadow members of Congress. And 1 of the things I have to explain to them is, here's how you get elected to the House. I-I have, you know, I see these shocked looks on these British faces, and 1 time, 1 stood up and said, well, That's terrible. That's not the voters choosing their representatives, that's the representatives choosing their voters.

Speaker 0: First, that's racist. And... And second, second, even I find it difficult hearing advice on map drawing in a British accent that once said, I don't see why 1 scrap of dust is any different from another, so I ended the border here because that's where my pen ran out of ink. They'll learn to like it. What's the worst that can happen?

But it is true that if your party holds the redistricting pen, it wields substantial power. And there are multiple techniques at its disposal.

Speaker 2: There are a couple of ways that you can reapportion people and put them into districts. And there's a thing called packing, and there's a thing called cracking.

Speaker 0: Yes, packing and cracking. Not to be confused with the teen drug trend of cracking and packing, which is when the teens hollow out a cucumber, fill it with crack, and put it in their anus to absorb it faster. I saw it on the local news, which means it's real, and every teenager is doing it right now. -...but in this context, packing means cramming as many opposition voters as possible into just a few districts, and cracking means spreading them out thinly over a bunch of districts so they can't gain a majority in any 1 of them. Either way, it dilutes their impact.

Try and think of it as table assignments at a wedding. You can either break up your 8 awful relatives and spread them out over different tables, Or you can pack them all together in 1 insufferable table of the damned. -♪ ♪ -♪ The Washington Post showed how this can work. Look at this hypothetical state. It's 60% blue voters, 40% red.

And it needs to be carved up into 5 districts. Now, proportionally, you would want 3 blue and 2 red districts. But if you draw the lines like this, you can get 3 red majorities and 2 blues. And if you draw it like this, you can get 5 blue majorities and no red. And if you draw lines like this, it looks like a dick, which is irrelevant to this discussion, but it is objectively very funny.

And if you are thinking, shouldn't all of this be illegal? Well, that's complicated, because If you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged minorities, yes, that is illegal under the Voting Rights Act. But if you're gerrymandering to disadvantaged voters of an opposing party, that has generally been allowed. So, racial gerrymandering, no. Partisan gerrymandering, that's kind of okay.

And it's led politicians to be pretty brazen in their behavior, like in North Carolina last year. Their congressional map was thrown out in federal courts for racial gerrymandering, which is wrong, so they had to redraw. And while doing it, state rep David Lewis went out of his way to explain that the new map would not illegally fuck over minorities, it would just legally fuck over Democrats.

Speaker 3: We want to make clear that... We, to the extent, are going to use political data in drawing this map, it is to gain partisan advantage on the map. I want that criteria to be clearly stated and understood.

Speaker 0: I need you to understand, this is not a race thing because it can't be. We just want a map that churns out Republicans like it's Anne Romney. That is all we're saying. That is all we are saying here. Please let me understand.

-... And that map worked. In 2016, despite Republicans winning just over half the votes in House races, they wound up controlling 77% of the state's seats. That is a more blatant disregard for what people want than the asshole who gives out Bazooka Joe on Halloween. Oh, great, gun from the Roosevelt administration wrapped in a comic from the other Roosevelt administration.

At least the guy handing out Snickers stuffed with razor blades actually gives you a Snickers. -♪ ♪ -♪ And Republicans elevated this technique to an art form with a plan called Red Map, or the Redistricting Majority Project. They poured more than 30 million dollars into state-level races ahead of the last redistricting, gaining huge numbers of seats, and that paid massive dividends.

Speaker 8: When Republicans won the majority of state houses in 2010, it ensured they'd be redrawing the maps in those states. And lo and behold, it paid off in 2012. Nationwide, Democrats running for Congress got 1.1 million more votes. But Republicans sent 33 more members to the House.

Speaker 0: Exactly. So the maps they drew put Democrats at a significant disadvantage. It's like if, instead of Tim Duncan, the San Antonio Spurs had had to use Tim Burton. It's not technically impossible to win, but it's going to be much, much harder. And look, to some extent, Republicans got lucky because 2010 was a wave election for their party.

And I'm not saying Democrats are angels here. By no means. When they have had control, they have gerrymandered the shit out of districts in states like Maryland. And they've been pretty brazen too. Take Illinois.

In 2001, the Democrats won the right to redistrict there after, and this is for reasons too complicated and too stupid to explain. A name was pulled out of a replica of Abraham Lincoln's stuff by Pat. But just watch as 1 Democratic lawmaker made the least convincing promise ever.

Speaker 2: Well, we'll sit down and draw a very fair map.

Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ -♪ Come on. Come on. Come on. That's an inherently suspicious look on his face. That's the exact expression of someone who just urinated in a public pool.

Huh. Water's warm today, huh? --HUH? --ENJOY YOUR SWIM. --HUH?

--ENJOY YOUR SWIM. So, how do you know if your district has been drawn with nefarious intent? Well, that's tricky, because too often, people will just lazily point to districts that have a weird shape.

Speaker 8: North Carolina's 12th district looks like spilled coffee. Pennsylvania's 16th is flexing its muscles. And 1 commentator compared Maryland's third to a broken-winged pterodactyl. And then there's this. They call it the earmuffs.

Speaker 0: Ah, yes. An earmuff district. Not to be confused with THE earmuff district, which is a one-block area of Manhattan where sketchy men sell accessories made from the fur of endangered species. You should go. You should visit.

But while it is tempting to see something suspicious in an odd-shaped district, there is a pretty good argument against prioritizing tidy lines above all else.

Speaker 9: Dropping a bunch of squares seems fair. It seems like if you could just draw a grid, like a Tron, that you could put people into districts and there wouldn't be any sort of manipulation in the process. But Americans don't live, with the exception of Montana and, you know, a few other square places. Americans don't live in squares. Our communities are irregular and random.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that's true. American communities are not square. They're like jazz music. They're free-form, free-flowing, and they contain a troubling amount of opioids. And there is no 1 right way to draw a district.

Reasonable people will disagree. Some might prioritize a district being politically competitive. Others might favor compactness. Others want to keep so-called communities of interest together. The problem is, it may be physically impossible to do all 3 of those things in 1 place.

In fact, take that earmuff district. The thin line connecting the 2 halves is just a single road, and people love to make fun of that.

Speaker 10: In Chicago, squeezed between 2 freeways, this narrow strip is needed to connect 2 halves of a gerrymandered district to keep it contiguous as is required.

Speaker 9: This is the way Congress gets around... The contiguous rule, because there's obviously nobody living here. I mean, unless they're homeless people, I guess. -$1,000,000. -$1,000,000.

Anybody here? $1,000,000. Any congressional voters out there?

Speaker 0: -$1,000,000. -$1,000,000. Now, you may laugh, but a few seconds later, an entire ghost baseball team from the early 1900s walked out of the tall grass and beat him to death with their ghost bats. And he kind of deserved it. But here is the thing, though.

It is drawn like earmuffs for good reasons. Because the northern and southern parts are 2 Latino communities, and the district in the middle is predominantly African-American. Now, both are Democratic, so it's not about partisan advantage, it's about ensuring that both communities have representatives serving their interests. And it's criticized a lot, but redistricting experts absolutely love it. In fact, 2 of them actually put it on their wedding cake.

That is a real wedding cake. And I'm guessing that the bachelorette party cake was something like, 1 more night of packing and cracking. --CROWD LAUGHS, APPLAUDS, CHEERS --So, so to break it down, not all weird-shaped districts are bad, and not all normal-shaped districts are good. And there is 1 more thing. Gerrymandering is not the sole reason for the mismatch between our popular vote percentages and our representation.

Some of that is due to where Democrats choose to live.

Speaker 11: Democrats live in the wrong places, basically. They've decided to cram themselves in cities, and that just makes it really hard to have a winning coalition when your people do that. If you're college educated, if you want to work in the creative economy, you move to a city, and those places have enough Democrats already. Democrats need to make places like Des Moines, or Columbus, or Raleigh, North Carolina, cool, so that those young people move there, but that's kind of outside the typical realm of political strategy.

Speaker 0: Wait. What do you mean, make Des Moines cool? They've already got the Des Moines Heritage Carousel, the most badass, balls-to-the-wall carousel in the whole Midwest. And yes, according to their website, it is closed for the season of spring, which is Not a good time for carousels, but when May 28th rolls around, it's gonna be an all-out carousel fuckstravaganza... -...until 8 p.m.

-... -...until 8 p.m. -... But it is true. Democrats are basically packing themselves into districts, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

But there is a broader, non-partisan point here, and that is that in a democracy, the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does. Now, there is actually a Supreme Court case coming up involving a redistricting in Wisconsin that was so partisan, a lower court struck their maps down, and the Supreme Court may, for the first time, actually issue a clear ruling putting limits on partisan gerrymandering. So, all of our hopes are now in the delicious claws of Justice Neil Gorsuch. But even without a ruling, many experts argue we should simply be taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians and give the task to independent commissions. And that's a pretty good idea.

In fact, a handful of states already do some version of that. And it's not perfect. It is tough to completely remove partisan biases, a fact that 1 state lawmaker brought up to shoot the idea down.

Speaker 3: If I felt there were any way in the world that I could stand before my constituents and say, I believe that it's possible to come up with a group of people who have no political bias whatsoever, who will simply sit down in a room and magically create districts, I'd be behind it. I'd be behind it 100 percent. But those people don't exist.

Speaker 0: Now, if you recognize that guy, it's because you saw him about 10 minutes ago reassuring everyone that his intent in Droid Districts was to gain partisan advantage for Republicans. So, he's essentially arguing, Nobody's unbiased, so let's use me, the most brazenly biased man in the universe. Which is pretty much arguing no babysitter is perfect, so let's just use Slender Man. But while independent commissions might not be perfect, they would definitely be better. And the truth is, it is hard to come up with a worse system than the 1 most states currently have.

And there is something very important at stake here. Lawmakers should not be allowed to dilute our votes by drawing their own lines and essentially picking their own voters. You know what? I will tell you why. The foundations of democracy are built on the idea that everybody's vote should count equally.

Everybody's. That is what America is all about. That everyone, every 1 of us, should get an equal chance to make a bad decision which fucks things up for everybody else. Whoever we are, however poor our decisions, whether you are a juggalo... Stop it.

...Or a 47-year-old Quidditch player... It's a sport! ...Or someone who bought that stupid $6,000 jacket I wore on the show last week. It's horrible. Our voices should be fully heard, even if we're Scientologists, or parrot heads, or guys who ride unicycles as their primary mode of transportation.

In this 1 context, we should all be relevant, regardless of our questionable life choices. Whether you're an EDM bro, or a guy jamming a knife into a toaster, or a Washington Redskins fan, or even a Jill Stein supporter. She would have won. How would she have won? What process could she have used to...

The point is, her voice should count as much as anyone else's. As much as a guy in a fedora, or a baker of erotic pastries, or a SantaCon attendee, or everyone's racist grandma. Don't say anything. Because at the end of the day, that is the point of this country. That's what made America great.

Because think about it, election results should not be the fault of lawmakers' crazy lines. They should be the result of our own crazy decisions. Am I right? Am I right? Yeah!

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Gerrymandering: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)