Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

[yholio]

In case it's not entirely clear, the font ridicules the practice of gerrymandering: toying with electoral district borders so that the results favor the incumbent while corralling the voters of the adversaries.

So extensive is this practice that the resulting shapes can approximate any letter of the alphabet. Quite readable too.

[labster]

Except that it uses non-gerrymandered districts from California, where elected officials are not allowed to draw the lines. So any statement is lost, but I guess it’s a fun art project.

[jypepin]

Thanks for clarifying! Was not aware of the practice and didn't even notice the states represented the alphabet! (Non US resident here).

[swebs]

There's currently a push to take it to the supreme court so it can be stopped once and for all.

Archive link because the Baltimore Sun doesn't like Europe:

http://archive.is/a3mMR

[taude]

How accurate are the rest of the districts? Or were there some tweaks to make it work out as the alphabet a little better?

Pretty amazing, though.

[AndrewHampton]

FiveThirtyEight did a great podcast series on gerrymandering in 2017 [1]. It turns out to be a much more complicated topic than I expected. Some gerrymandering is even legally required to ensure proper representation of minority groups even if they live in somewhat distributed communities.

1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/gerrymandering-podcast/

[jandrese]

Which is so hilariously misguided it might be taken as a form of racism. By lumping minorities into a single candidate they create a token representative who has a very safe seat but no power in the state senate and allow all other candidates to effectively ignore that minority entirely. They don't have to worry about angering 5% of their electorate and losing the next election by a 2% margin.

[runarberg]

State representation usually clusters around class issues not ethnicity. And even if it didn’t, why arbitrarily focus on ethnicity? Handicapped people need representation, yet we don’t draw districts that ensures they get one. And if we did, and started splitting votes by who we think need the most representation, we might as well do away with democracy and start arbitrarily arranging representatives.

[toddsiegel]

It says tweet your reps. To be clear, you should probably contact your state rep about this (and send an email, not a tweet). They have the power to do something about it.

This is very important, esp. in light the recent US Supreme Court decision on this subject[1]. Gerrymandering creates safe districts that make primaries hold increasingly more weight then general elections, which is leading, in a significant way, toward our increasingly hyper-partisan politics in the US.

In some states this also heavily tilts the balance of power to one party over the other.

The bottom line is this. Fairer redistricting will lead to more competitive races, which will lead to less partisan, saner politics with more compromise. (Oh dear god I hope!)

Related: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/voters-are-stripping...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court...

[tunesmith]

More competitive? Or more representative of the overall population? Because those two things are at odds.

Say you have a state that is split 55/44, and has nine districts. Do you want nine districts each at 55/44, meaning 9-0? That's more competitive, but less representative of the state. Or do you want five districts for one, and four for the other? That's more representative of the state, but less competitive. Redistricting is hard.

(I suspect my scenario is a false choice if you wrestle with the math enough, but I'm not sure. I prefer the Wisconsin test that we all thought Justice Kennedy would decide in favor of, but then he took the coward's way out, probably corrupt too.)

[pergadad]

Or you could drop the whole issue by turning to a representative democracy with proportional voting, where it's about policy not individuals raising money.

[ehsankia]

The more interesting part is that we now have pretty good computational models to measure gerrymandering. IIRC correctly, there was two different models developed by different teams and they both actually found very similar results.

One of the two basically ran a Monte Carlo simulation, exploring a subset of all possible configurations, and comparing the average results to that of the current configuration. The other one I believe used a more mathematical approach.

Here's one of the papers: http://cho.pol.illinois.edu/wendy/papers/talismanic.pdf

EDIT: Here's a Daily episode explaining it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/podcasts/the-daily/gerrym...

[jandrese]

Rep's response: Why would I want any of that?

[zw123456]

I think that a solution this problem as well as many others like undo influence, too much money needed and so on, could be solved by increasing the number of representatives. I believe that the only stipulations in the constitution is that each state must have at least one and that a representative cannot represent less than 30K citizens. The number was frozen 35 in 1911 by the house, but they could change that if they wanted to without changing the constitution.

The reason I think this would help on a number of levels is as follows 1) Gerrymandering becomes more difficult if there are a lot more districts. 2) influence peddling and lobbying is diluted if there are more representatives. 3) the voter can have more influence and contact with their representative if their congress person represents a smaller sized constituency.

I think arguments around the size of the building (the capital) are silly, who cares where they meet, it can be in a stadium, or even better why bother having them all in Washington DC. it can all be done with telepresence in todays world and then you as a citizen could go down to say the court house and sit in the audience as your representatives interact via telepresence.

I get it that perhaps all this seems crazy or whatever, but none of it would require any changes to the constitution. It could be done by the House itself with no consent from the Senate or President.

[undersuit]

Prior to the Civil War our Representatives voted and worked from the same desk, the one they had in the Capitol Building in the House Chambers.

Now they have offices and support staff. Why don't we just convert those ~5000 support staff( and their offices ) into a much more representative democracy?

[H8crilA]

It seems that across countries the size of the parlament is proportional to the square root of the population size:

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/364/is-there-an...

[Waterluvian]

Not saying Ontario's EDs are bias-free but the difference is just day and night when you've got an independent body delineating them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Centre_(provincial_ele...

[TomMckenny]

In Wisconsin, the now permanent ruling party won 60% of seats with only 48.6% of the vote.

The politicized SCOTUS' 5 to 4 decision to up hold that gerrymandering was hardly a surprise:

https://www.wpr.org/us-supreme-court-ruling-effectively-ends...

[moate]

NJ Resident here: I'd like to point out that the "V" shape is basically just the southern border of the state along the coast.

It could be considered a Gerrymander (I haven't invested the time to look at district representation) but I will say it could also just be a weird geographical feature.

Fun project none the less.

[bzbarsky]

For what it's worth, a bunch of the things in this font are weird-shaped because of coastlines...

[bcatanzaro]

Could we reduce the power of gerrymandering by increasing the number of districts? At the first census, there were 3.9M people and 65 districts. Now we have 327M people and 435 districts, so the number of people per district has increased by 12.5X. I would think this makes gerrymandering more lucrative, since gerrymandering works because of quantization error.

[padobson]

Let's do a 100x - 43,500 districts. This would probably fix Citizens United too, it'd be really expensive to buy 43,500 congress members.

[legitster]

If you want to play around with district mapping, 538 has a neat tool: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/

Their podcast series is a must if you are remotely interested in the topic.

[thih9]

Technically 'A', 'B', 'R', 'Y', 'Z' letters consist of two districts. Still, even with fewer single-district letters, the project proves a point.

[aaronbrethorst]

The call to action on the site is to “tweet at your rep.” This isn’t going to do anything.

Donate to groups that are fighting for unrigging the system, vote for candidates in off year elections that will help create fairer maps (VA residents: your vote this November will determine who creates your district maps).

[jascii]

We are discussing it right now, so I would say its already doing something.. Nothing wrong with creating awareness, though other avenues will certainly be needed before meaningful change will happen.

[cj]

How often is this font redrawn? Where's the changelog?

[uptown]

That's a paid upgrade. Please consult with your local Super PAC.

[dabernathy89]

A funny looking district != a gerrymandered district.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gerrymandering-strange-maps_n...

I mean, just imagine if every district were a simple polygon. How could that possibly work with population density variations, minority voter distribution, physical barriers like mountains and rivers, etc?

[TomK32]

This needs to be coloured in shades of Blue and Red.

[Lewton]

I don't think that would give you the information you think it would.

Gerrymandering includes packing opposition votes into one district.

So whether a district is red or blue tells you nothing about whether it has been gerrymandered by a republican or a democrat

[munk-a]

Both parties are equally terrible when it comes to gerrymandering, I, thankfully, vote in a state that is one of seven that has absolutely solved gerrymandering for all time... Vermont - it's hard to creatively draw districts when everyone is in the same one.

[mLuby]

Nah, both parties are complicit; no need to trigger tribalism here, just stop gerrymandering.

[vkou]

No, it doesn't. Because what the district votes for isn't necessarily the party that drew the lines. The goal of gerrymandering is to create safe districts for yourself, and your opponents (But more safe districts for yourself).

Just because a district that looks like a dragon riding a spaceship votes blue doesn't mean that it was created by a Democrat. It could have been a Republican, who attached all the areas that were likely to vote D to that district. (And ended up turning the neighbouring 3 districts, which look a little less insane into solid R blocks.) Or vice versa.

[jandrese]

According to the cook political report[1]:

California 3 - D+5

Texas 35 - D+15

Ohio 12 - R+7

Ohio 7 - R+12

Connecticut 1 - D+12

Missouri 8 - R+24

Missouri 6 - R+16

Oregon 5 - EVEN

Ohio 4 - R+14

North Carolina 6 - R+9

Texas 15 - D+7

Illinois 18 - R+15

Alabama 1 - R+15

New York 7 - D+38

New York 8 - D+36

Illinois 11 - D+9

Arizona 6 - R+9

Florida 25 - R+4

Texas 12 - R+18

Ohio 10 - R+4

Michigan 13 - D+32

Tennessee 4 - R+20

California 43 - D+29

Illinois 4 - D+33

New Jersey 5 - R+3

New York 8 - D+36 (yes they used it twice)

California 8 - R+9

California 14 - D+27

Illinois 12 - R+5

Indiana 8 - R+15

Ohio 8 - R+17

What you are looking for is states where you see a lot of one party with +5-9 districts and then a handful of districts that are +20 or more for the other party.

https://cookpolitical.com/pvi-map-and-district-list

[roland35]

I am not surprised to see Ohio is well represented here! We have a particularly egregious gerrymandered map with 75% Republican representatives in a state that leans slightly Republican.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio%27s_congressional_distric...

[bzbarsky]

Sure, but note Illinois is also well-represented in the font, this time with significant Democratic party over-reprentation (13 out of 18, for a state that is not nearly that skewed in presidential elections, say).

Turns out, gerrymandering gets done by whoever happens to be in power. :(

[doc_gunthrop]

Some time ago I wrote a coding challenge based on the concept of gerrymandering[0].

[0]: https://www.codewars.com/kata/5a70285ab17101627a000024

[Billybobbbonnet]

That's fun, I just started & enjoyed the katas from cw and planned to do yours after skyscraper 6x6

[hammock]

Reminds me of the butterfly alphabet: https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/archive/Vm4Dpv...

Sad there are no examples of the font in a sentence though. Is it readable? If it was the point would be stronger.

[schoen]

You can download the OTF font file from the bottom of the page and try rendering text in it yourself.

I made a sample for you at https://imgur.com/TjqUYQt

[noonespecial]

Here's a good explanation with a graphic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-...

[jlv2]

Massachusetts created Gerrymandering yet we are not represented by a single glyph. Rewrite them!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-term-gerrym...

[benatkin]

Massachusetts also has an unusual shape that makes sense on closer inspection, like I'm guessing some of the glyphs do.

[dfeojm-zlib]

Here's a sample

https://is.gd/KAduzx (.jpg)

[balthasar]

Pointing out the obvious injustice and loss of adjacency imposed on voters in these districts is the obvious reason for this project but leave it to Hacker News readers to fixate on the technical aspects of redistricting while ignoring the political and social reasons which led to this issue.

[jonnycomputer]

The obvious thing to do with this is to print out letters using this font to send to your representatives.

[realYitzi]

Tweet all the reps... https://theunitedstates.io/congress-legislators/legislators-...

[drummyfish]

No Rights Reserved -- this is great, all fonts should be public domain, but I would love to see actual CC0 attached, otherwise I can't trust it really being public domain legally, which discourages me from using it.

[artur_makly]

I just love it when deft minimal art...spurs such comprehensive critical conversation. We need more of this on HN ;-)

[aarongray]

While humorous, a high percentage of these districts look this way due to rivers and lakes.

[Ambele]

I just looked at Florida's districts and the districts all include the rivers and lakes. Key examples are the Everglades and the St. Johns rivers.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Senators/Districts

[JimmaDaRustla]

Can I get a monospaced version for my IDE?

[tictoc]

This is fun!

[Endy]

This looks cute. Does the author expect to actually bring about any result by creating it? I see a Twitter link for various reps, but there's no link to any funded campaign to overturn recent legislation which has enshrined gerrymandering as the standard practice for districting. Perhaps if there was a donation link there it might be of more benefit.

On the other hand, a political statement in a font is a very interesting idea. I hope it helps drive a campaign to normalize legal districting in the future.

[jascii]

I see it as a playful way to bring attention to an issue, and refreshing to see any attempts at keeping money out of politics. If you are looking for a more funded, formalized campaign, those exist as well, for instance: https://www.fairvote.org/

[headcanon]

Does every political statement need to include all of these things? If I espouse a political opinion on an online forum like this:

"Gerrymandering is bad and has negative effects on our democracy"

Am I expected to include donation links and organize a Call Your Rep campaign every time I say something like that? Thats effectively what OP is doing, making a statement, not trying to singlehandledly solve the issue in question.