How cracking and packing lets mapmakers pick their voters

HostWe often think about how we head to the polls to pick our leaders, but there's a strange thing that happens behind the scenes where the people already in power get to decide who actually lives in their neck of the woods. It's like they're drawing a fence around the people they like and pushing everyone else out. How does someone even start to rig a whole state just by drawing lines on a map?

GuestIt mostly comes down to two moves with funny names. They call them cracking and packing. The goal is to make sure your side wins as many seats as possible, even if you don't have the most voters. To do that, you have to look at the map not as a piece of land, but as a big puzzle where you can move the pieces around to change the score. If you know how people are likely to vote, you can group them in ways that make their votes either super powerful or totally useless. It's less about who people want and more about where those people are forced to stand on the map. Most of us think that if a lot of people like one team, that team should get more seats, but these tricks make it so that's not always true.

HostSo how do you actually make a vote useless? That sounds like a big claim.

GuestWell, let’s look at packing first. Think of it like a sports tournament. If you put all the best players for the other team on just one single squad, that squad will definitely win their game. They might win it by fifty points. But they can only be in one game at a time. While they're busy winning that one game by a huge amount, your side is out there winning five or six other games by just two points. The group with the superstars ends up with one win, while your side walks away with the whole trophy. That's packing. You cram as many of the other side’s voters as you can into one single area. They win that one spot by a landslide, but they have almost no voters left in the neighboring five areas. All those extra people who voted for the winner in that one packed spot? Their votes were basically wasted because the winner only needed half the votes plus one to stay in power.

HostWait, if you win a voting area by a lot, people there are going to be happy. Why is that a bad thing for them?

GuestIt's bad because it robs them of power everywhere else. If you have a hundred voters and sixty of them like the blue team, they should probably win more than half the seats. But if you pack fifty-five of those blue voters into one single spot, they win that one seat easily. But now you only have five blue voters left to spread across the other four spots. They'll lose every single one of those other races. So even though most people in the whole area wanted the blue team, the red team ends up with four seats and the blue team only gets one. By letting them win big in one place, you have made sure they lose everywhere else. It's a way of tricking people into wasting their own strength.

HostOkay, that makes sense for packing. You stuff them all in one room. So is cracking just the opposite?

GuestExactly. Cracking is like taking a big, solid block of ice and smashing it into tiny cubes. You drop a few cubes into a bunch of different glasses of warm water. The ice is still there, but it melts away and doesn't cool anything down. You take a powerful group of voters and you break them apart. You spread them across several different areas so they're always a minority. Maybe they make up forty percent of the vote in five different spots. They're a huge group overall, but they never quite get past that fifty percent mark anywhere. They end up with zero seats even though they have a ton of people who all want the same thing. You have thinned them out until their voices don't matter anymore.

HostBut this feels like it would be obvious to anyone looking. If I see a map that looks like a crazy zig-zag or a snake, I know something is up. Why can we not just make the mapmakers draw simple squares?

GuestSquares sound fair, but people don't live in neat squares. People live along rivers or tucked into mountain valleys. If you just draw boxes, you might accidentally crack a neighborhood in half that really needs to stay together. Plus, mapmakers have become incredibly good at hiding what they're doing. It used to be a guy with a paper map and a hunch. Now, it's done by massive computers. They have data on everything, from what you buy at the store to what you watch on TV. They can predict how you'll vote with scary accuracy. They can run thousands of different maps through a computer in seconds to find the one version that looks kind of normal but still locks in a win for their side for the next ten years.

HostIt feels like a total cheat code. If they know exactly who lives in which house, they can just build a fortress around themselves and never lose.

GuestThat's the real danger. When the lines are drawn this way, the actual election day doesn't matter as much because the result was decided months or years ago in a dark room. You end up with these weird shapes on the map that look like a smashed bug on a windshield or a thin noodle. Those shapes are the fingerprints of someone trying to grab just enough of the right voters to win. They're not looking for a map that makes sense for the people living there. They're looking for a map that keeps them in their jobs.

HostThose strange snake shapes on the map are basically the fingerprints of politicians trying to pick their own bosses.

GuestThe real worry is that when we let the people in power draw the lines, they stop trying to win our votes and start trying to choose which voters they want to keep.

HostThe fences they draw around us end up mattering just as much as the ballots we drop in the box.