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Draw the Districts

Same voters. Same votes. Draw the lines and change who wins.

Skill this builds
Draw equal-population contiguous districts, predict the seat outcome from a map, and identify packing and cracking in a district plan you did not draw.
About
About 10 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline

Every square is a group of voters — Circles or Squares. Paint them into districts of exactly equal size. Districts must be contiguous: every square must touch another square in the same district. Whichever group has more squares inside a district wins that district. Do what the round asks, then look at what you just did.

There are no parties in this game. There are Circles and Squares, because the point is arithmetic that works identically whoever it is done to and by. Every rule you have to obey — equal population, contiguity — is a real legal requirement, and each one is named with its source.

Playing as

Your Beacon

Change

Round 1 of 3

Make it proportional

Circles are 56% of this board and Squares are 44%. Draw four equal districts so each side wins two — closer to proportional than a sweep, and harder to draw than it sounds.

Row 1, column 1. Square voter, not in a district yet. Drawing district 1, 0 of 16 filled. Districts are not equal yet.

District you are drawing

  • District 10○ 0▪ tie
  • District 20○ 0▪ tie
  • District 30○ 0▪ tie
  • District 40○ 0▪ tie

Circles 0 · Squares 0Districts are not equal yet.

Mouse: pick a district, then drag across the board. Keyboard: tab to the board, arrow keys to move, space to paint, backspace to clear a cell, 1–4 to switch district.

The rules you are working inside, and where they come from
  • Equal populationEvery district must contain the same number of voter squares. This is not a convention; it is constitutional.Reynolds v. Sims (1964) — one person, one vote
  • ContiguityA district has to be one connected piece. You cannot collect scattered squares from across the map into one district.Congressional Research Service — congressional redistricting criteria
  • Winner takes the districtWhoever has more squares in a district takes that district outright. The losing voters in it get nothing — that is what single-member districts mean, and it is the property everything else in this game follows from.U.S. Code — single-member districts required for the House (2 U.S.C. §2c)
  • PackingCram as many of one group as possible into as few districts as possible. They win those districts overwhelmingly and waste enormous numbers of votes doing it.
  • CrackingSplit a group across many districts so they are a minority in each and win none of them.
  • Wasted votesEvery vote for a loser, plus every vote for a winner beyond the number needed to win. Comparing the two sides' wasted votes is one way people measure whether a map is fair.

The point

You just produced three different results from one unchanged set of voters, without a single person changing their mind. That is the part almost nobody is taught: in a system of single-member districts, the map is a policy instrument, and whoever draws it has made a decision before anybody votes. Whether that person should be a legislature, a commission, or a court is one of the live arguments in American government — and it is a different argument once you have done it with your own hands.