What is gerrymandering?

Gerrymandering is when people draw map boundaries to help their team win elections unfairly.

Imagine you and your friend are playing a game with marbles. You each get to pick where the lines between different marble groups go. If you draw the lines cleverly, you can make it so that even if you both have the same number of marbles, you end up winning more rounds, just by changing how the groups are shaped.

Think about a town where people vote for their favorite ice cream flavor. If there are 100 people and two teams, Team Chocolate and Team Vanilla, they want to pick who gets to be on the city council.

If the map is fair, both teams get about the same number of seats. But if someone draws the map so that most of Team Chocolate's voters are all in one area, and most of Team Vanilla’s voters are split up into smaller areas, then Team Chocolate can win more seats even if they have fewer total votes.

Gerrymandering is like making a fair game unfair. It helps the people who draw the maps win more often, just by changing where the lines go.