Gerrymandering Is Fair Game For These Texas Teens

there really are two most crucial things to know about Josh Lafair and his older siblings, Becca and Louis: They love board games, and so they hate gerrymandering.


“We grew up in a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas and we wanted to begin conversations around the nation about a distribute that isn't just really isn't talked enough,” Lafair, 18, told MTV News. So, Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game, was born.


Gerrymandering is a practice used by both political parties to shape a district so that the voters that make up that district will be more likely to vote in line with their party. Critics mention it’s a legalized form of voter suppression, not least of all as the people doing the gerrymandering tend to lump voters of any one demographic together to concentrate their vote. While Democrats and Republicans both take advantage of gerrymandering, Republicans might have more overtly gamed the system in recent years: According to an analysis by Christopher Ingraham, an information reporter for the Washington Post, in 2012, gerrymandering may have contributed to a under-representation of Democratic congresspeople compared to the popular vote, by about 18 seats nationwide.


Congressional districts are drawn every 10 years, and if you’ve ever wondered why your district doesn’t follow the logical rules of geometry, it’s likely gerrymandering came into the scene. For instance, there really are six funky-looking congressional districts that make up Austin, Texas: Only one of these districts is represented by a Democrat, despite the whole city being reliably liberal. Lafair grew up in district 10, which carries a little sliver of Austin, an enormous area of countryside, and narrows out in the suburbs of Houston. And that surrounding countryside is largely conservative, a stark contrast from the cities it touches.


“Gerrymandering is extraordinarily essential because it sort of dilutes the deepest roots of our own politics,” Lafair mentioned. “One vote, one individual. Because of gerrymandering, politicians are fully distorting that idea by growing district that cooperates with the themselves in their party. And we wanted to make this board game across America. Gerrymandering really isn't spoke enough.”


To spark that conversation, the Lafairs started working on Mapmaker in 2017. In the game, one to four players each act as a politician with a party affiliation: Red, blue, yellow, or green. Players begin with the same quantity of total voters, and their color-coded chips — which define voters — are spread out randomly across the board. They take turns creating districts, with the aspiration of capturing the highest assortment of voters.


It’s basically a play on one of the rallying sobs of anti-gerrymandering activists, who believe that, under the current system, politicians get to pick their voters as an alternative opposed to voters choosing their politicians. One of the staunchest activists against gerrymandering is former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has made fighting gerrymandering across the nation one of his chief causes and, well, loves the Mapmaker game.


To make sure the game’s accuracy, the Lafairs worked with Jonathan Mattingly, chair of the mathematics department at Duke University who has investigated gerrymandering and challenged district maps in North Carolina and Wisconsin.


“They clearly thought a lot about it, and so they clearly had been touched by it,” Mattingly told NBC News about the project in 2018. “Leaving their partisan biases beyond and just getting into the game and playing it, you could realize how it's a very nonpartisan topic and why it really affects the integrity of our democracy."


It’s also a nationwide issue; the majority of states are house to at least one overwhelmingly gerrymandered district. However in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, June 27, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts can’t be limited by federal courts. Despite the court's decision, which would basically permit partisan gerrymandering to continue, activists and politicians like Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are still fighting to stop it, and other forms of voter suppression, at the source.


“SCOTUS abdicated a fundamental obligation: to protect citizens and our democratic selection of leaders,” Abrams tweeted right following the Supreme Court ruling was announced. “By allowing partisan gerrymandering without judicial review, they’ve told voters their voices don’t matter and their choices will be made without the consent of the governed.”


“Now more than ever, it's up to all of us, state by state, to help form independent commissions through ballot initiatives and to elect state legislators in 2020 who will draw fair maps,” Lafair told MTV News.


And he, Becca, and Louis have a plan to prepare themselves heard. If they launched the game in 2018, they  celebrated by shipping it to both the Supreme Court and politicians across the U.S., With a note that said: “Gerrymandering isn't a game... Except any time it is.”