These districts are real
Our gerrymandering explainer uses an invented 36-voter grid. These three shapes are not invented — they're actual U.S. congressional districts, drawn to their real boundaries.
Illinois 4th — "The Earmuffs"
Two separate arcs of Chicago — one largely Puerto Rican, one heavily Mexican-American — packed into a single district, connected only by a strip of Interstate 294: the highway is in the district; the neighborhoods around it are not.
Maryland 3rd
Rated the third-least-compact district in America in 2012; the Washington Post called it the nation's second-most gerrymandered. A Democratic gerrymander, redrawn into a normal shape only after 2020.
North Carolina 12th
Descendant of the infamous 1992 original that traced Interstate 85 so tightly a legislator joked that driving it "with both car doors open… you'd kill most of the people in the district." This version was struck down by the Supreme Court in Cooper v. Harris (2017) — the district's fifth trip to that Court.
The tell is always the shape. In our toy example, the rigged maps were the ones with snaking, contorted districts — and that's exactly what these look like. When a district's outline follows a highway median for miles or sprouts tendrils across half a state, someone drew it to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.
But here's the counterintuitive part: not all of these were drawn to steal seats. Illinois's 4th and North Carolina's 12th were majority-minority districts — drawn (under the Voting Rights Act) to guarantee Black and Hispanic communities representation they'd historically been denied. Same tool, opposite intents — packing voters can disenfranchise a community or empower one, and courts have spent thirty years drawing that line case by case.
Boundaries: official 113th-Congress district shapes (U.S. Census via the unitedstates/districts open-data project). Background: state boundaries, U.S. Census. Histories: congressional records via Wikipedia, Shaw v. Reno (1993), Cooper v. Harris (2017).